LOCATION: London, U.K.
SIZE: 7,000 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms
PRICE: On Application
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Deep in the night Your Mama received a covert communique from an eagle-eyed informant we'll call Ozzy Anglophile who let us know that 11-time Grammy winning veteran rock star Sting and his producer/actress/philanthropist wife Trudy Styler hoisted their super-luxe central London townhouse on the open market with an undisclosed asking price.
We're not exactly sure when the music world mandarins acquired the extra-wide, 17th century townhouse that backs up to the tree-lined Birdcage Walk along St. James Park but we do know they had the place worked over and expanded Lee F. Mindel at the high-toned New York City-based Shelton Mindel & Associates before they had the people in from Architectural Digest (A.D.) to fawn, photograph and document the extensive and expensive renovation for their May 2010 issue.
Current digital marketing materials show the five-plus floor urban mansion spans 790.9 square meters—that's just over 8,500 square feet for all us non-metric Americans—and is currently configured with seven bedrooms and six bathrooms. (The A.D. article clocked it at 7,000 square feet but what's a 1,500 square foot discrepancy when big is big? Anyhoodles, poodles...)
In addition to a marble-floored and pine-paneled stair hall with an elegant, corkscrew spindled staircase that will surely stop visitor dead in their tracks with it's, listing details describe a handful of amply proportioned reception rooms, including a fully paneled living room that spans the full width of the house with wood floors, a wood-burning fireplace and a delicious quartet of over-sized, six-over-six sash windows that peer into the tree tops of the rear garden. The couple, as per the A.D. article, furnished the room with a pair of Yves Klein coffee tables—each nowadays go for well upwards of $20,000, a Diego Giacometti side table—we can't even fathom the cost, a colorful clutch of Matisse prints and, over the fireplace, a cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso.
A sinuously graphic rug and a wood-burning fireplace anchor an upper floor music/media room that also stretches the full width of the house and—again as per the A.D. article—was outfitted with faux-pine paneling interspersed with sound baffling fabric panels. Four more, although slightly smaller, six-over-six sash windows overlook the tree tops towards Birdcage Walk and St. James Park.
Like is being done with vast engineering derring do and great expense in the finer neighborhood all over London, Mister and Missus Sting's extensive renovation included a generous expansion of the (somewhat subterranean) ground floor into previously unused space under the house's rear garden. The newly created area includes numerous storage and mechanical rooms, a home office accessible from a separate below grade street entrance. Smack in the center of the plan is a sleek, if windowless, all-white center island kitchen fitted and kitted with some of the best appliances and fixtures money can buy.
The kitchen links through to a capacious dining area that's flooded with natural light by a massive sky-light. Open to but two steps down from the dining room is a cozy and low-key, if still buttoned up, family room space. The architect's tucked A discrete half bathroom tucked up into one corner and installed a tightly spiraled staircase that leads up to we don't know where. Four, 15-pane glass doors that open to a lower level of the rear garden.
The couple's upper level bedroom—Let's keep the Tantric sex jokes to a bare minimum, shall we?—also has fabric paneled walls and an attached, wood floored and fully paneled bathroom that includes a soaking tub for two and a separate shower. (We'd have preferred the crapper be enclosed in a well ventilated cubicle of it's own but, alas, nobody asked Your Mama what we thought.)
There's direct access to the grand, tree-lined Birdcage Walk from the rear garden that includes a shaded dining terrace. Listing details also call out a roof terrace that Your Mama imagines provides a stellar view over St. James Park and, maybe, a glimpse of the roof tops of Buckingham Palace just half a mile up the road.
In addition to the London townhouse and an 800-acre country estate with a late 16th century Elizabethan manor house near Andover in Wiltshire—featured in Architectural Digest in 2007—Mister and Missus Sting keep a swanky place in New York City and an ocean front getaway in Malibu, CA.
In New York they sold an exceptionally roomy, low-floor duplex at The Brentmore building at 88 Central Park West in July 2010 for $17,750,000 to San Francisco-based businessman Michael Naify. The duplex had previously been owned by Billy Joel and, as it turns out, the 6,000 square foot duplex back up for sale at $19.8 million, reduced from it's original $21.5 million asking price. The couple downsized (a bit) and decamped just a few blocks to the south where, in March 2008, they shelled out $26.983,625 million for a mid-floor duplex with just over 5,400 square feet at the lordly and surpremely pricey 15 Central Park West.
On the Left Coast, in Malibu they own a spacious, quasi-pueblo style residence with 5,549 square feet inside the guarded gates of The Colony enclave that they bought in 1997 for $5,375,000 from the late actor Larry Hagman. (They previously owned another ocean front abode in The Colony that they sold in April 1999 for $4.45 million to semi-retired sitcom actor Paul Reiser.)
listing photos: Knight Frank
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