Wednesday, 15 January 2014

UPDATE: Oprah Winfrey

All ups property gossips went hog wild yesterday with (not entirely unexpected) news that Chicago's former Queen Bee, Oprah Winfrey, hoisted her mansion-sized, duplex condo on the 56th and 57 floors of Water Tower Place on the open market with a $7,750,000 price tag.

While we found no photos of the interior(s) the floor plan was released last night and, children, is it ever a ding-dong doozy of curvaceous stairways—there are two, walk-in closets and storage rooms—there are at least ten, and clusters of vestibules linked by long corridors—one that (Your Mama estimated) zig-zags more than 75 feet.

Listing details show the 9,625 square foot high-floor sprawler has four bedrooms and five full and two half bathrooms plus multiple living and dining areas, two kitchens, deeded garage parking for three cars, estimated taxed of $71,526 per annum and maintenance fees of $9,004 per month.

 The lower level foyer provides direct access to the 475+ square foot corner living room, the nearly 30-foot long formal dining room, and the super-sized center island kitchen. (The children will note Miz Winfrey's retinue of hired servers were required to inelegantly traverse the entirety the living room or¸—equally inelegantly—pass through the foyer in order to get food and beverages from the kitchen to the dining room.) Less formal living spaces on the lower level include a 30-foot long family room and an adjacent office, and a 450 square foot exercise room because—beetches, pleeze!—La Oprah does not use the Ritz Carlton's state-of-the-art health club where she might have to interact with the hotel guests and others of the hoi polloi. Anyways...

Substantial additional entertaining spaces are located on the second floor and include a ballroom-sized second living room that stretches a spectacular (if hardly homey) 45 feet plus an adjoining sitting room/library with what appears on the floor plan to be built-in book cases.

Listing details show there are two guest bedrooms with private bathrooms plus a studio-style guest/in-law/staff suite complete with private bathroom, small kitchen, and direct access to the laundry room. The master suite occupies its own sprawling wing on the second floor with a large entry vestibule, a 30+ foot long bedroom, a healthy handful of walk-in closets plus a fitted dressing room, and two bathrooms, a large compartmentalized one with soaking tub and bidet for her and a smaller one with stall shower (presumably) for Miz Winfrey's mustachioed long-time lover-mate Stedman Graham.

Your Mama's research indicates that Miz Winfrey's other Chicago holdings included no fewer than eight loft condos at the Acorn Lofts building (near her former studio‚ pr—presumably purchased for use by family, staff, visiting business associates, and/or friends. Property records suggest all eight of the unit were quietly sold in April 2013 to the same buyer.

Miz Winfrey's property portfolio still includes (but isn't necessarily limited to) a number of homes in and around Nashville (presumably for family), a house in Indiana (also, we presume, for family), a vast farm in Hawaii and, of course, The Promised Land, a fully landscaped 42 acre estate with a 23,000 square foot Neo-Georgian mansion in Montecito. We've repeatedly been told by several snitches that last year Miz Winfrey dropped a good-sized wad on an house-sized condo at The Montage in downtown Beverly Hills—where Judge Judy Sheindlin owns a pied-a-terre—but, honestly, we're not so sure and so far we don't have any hard evidence to prove it. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?

floor plan: Baird & Warner