Mariska Hargitay Orders Up Townhouse

BUYER: Mariska Hargitay and Peter Hermann
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $10,700,000
SIZE: Big with 6 bedrooms and 5 full and 4 half bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Mariska Hargitay—Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning She-Ra of the interminably long-running police procedural Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (L&O:SVU)—and her handsome, 6-foot-five-actor husband Peter Hermann (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Our Idiot Brother, A Gifted Man) have plunked down $10,700,000 on a fully updated and recently renovated townhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Miz Hargitay, the fetching and chastely smoldering daughter of busty pin-up babe Jayne Mansfield and former Mister Universe Micky Hargitay, was crowned Miss Beverly Hills in 1982, speaks five languages, will reportedly earn around half a million smackers for each episode of the 14th season of L&O:SVU and has three young children with Mister Hermann, one she birthed in 2006 and two more they adopted last year. German-born Mister Hermann matriculated at Yale, speaks four languages and before he was an actor he taught ESL and was a fact checker at Vanity Fair magazine. Don't they just kinda make you feel sick with inadequacy? No? That's just Your Mama? Anyhoo...

Listing information and other marketing materials we snake-charmed out of the interweb does not state the square footage of the of  townhouse—we guesstimate it at around 5,000—but does show it was built in 1900, is conveniently well-situated between Central Park West and commercial Columbus Avenue, stands a fairly narrow 18-feet wide, and rises six floors above ground with an additional, elevator-accessible and fully-finished basement with several storage rooms and half bathroom. Listing information also states the townhouse has six bedrooms and nine bathrooms but a quick perusal of the floor plan and Your Mama counts five actual bedrooms and five full and four half bathrooms.

The traditional brownstone exterior belies the completely contemporized interior spaces worked over by the real estate investor sellers who paid $4,400,000 for the house in the last days of 2009.

The parlor floor entry at the top of the delicious stoop—we do love us a good God damn New York City stoop—opens directly into a slim but spacious and decidedly spare open-plan entry/living room/library that stretches approximately 50 feet long front to back. The street-facing entry/living room area has a gas fireplace with a broad, minimal-minded chimney breast; there's a powder pooper tucked semi-discreetly near the stairs that descend to the lower level; and a barely-there glass railing at the library end of the room allows for an unobstructed view of the surrounding townhouses out the double height windows that stretch up from the kitchen-dining-lounge one floor below.

A second, under-the-stoop entrance on the garden level opens a bit clunkily directly into the formal dining room separated from the kitchen only by a short and wide corridor flanked by the elevator, powder pooper and storage closets.

Radiant heated floors warm the tootsies on cold winter mornings in the sleek, eat-in Euro-style kitchen fitted and finished with dark chocolate-colored cabinetry, white counter tops of unknown but no doubt high-grade material, and top-quality stainless steel appliances that include two dishwashers and integrated, side-by-side fridge and freezer.

The center island kitchen (with extra-long snack and booze counter that easily accommodates four) opens to a small sitting and dining area with soaring double-height ceilings and massive glass windows and doors that connect out to an ipe wood-walled garden with built-in barbecue station.

The celebrity-style master suite takes up the entire third floor with sizable, street-facing bedroom, separate (but connected) office/dressing room with terrace access, two walk-in closets (plus a small dressing area), and a blindingly white and windowed marble bathroom with double sinks, make-up vanity, and separate soaking tub and glass-enclosed steam shower.

Each of the four spacious guest/family bedrooms on the upper levels has direct access to an un-shared and attached bathroom. One has three slender floor to ceiling windows that open to a street-side Juliet balcony and another has direct access to a private, garden-side terrace. A small but convenient laundry room sits between the bedrooms on the fourth floor and a narrow study/playroom sits between the two others bedrooms on the fifth.

The sixth floor, penthouse level sun room—the only floor of the townhouse not accessible, the lazy and infirm will want to know, via the elevator—has a crisp clean-lined entertainment kitchen, a compact walk-in closet perfect for board game storage, a handy-dandy half bathroom, and two wide banks of mahogany-trimmed windows and French doors that connect to north- and south-facing terraces. The smaller north terrace overlooks the back gardens and rear façades of the neighboring townhouses and the larger, street-side south-facing terrace is girdled by a tall and privacy ensuring, horizontally installed ipe wood fence.

This is hardly the first time Mister and Missus Hargitay-Hermann have popped up in property gossip columns and Your Mama has discussed their real estate activities on numerous occasions over the years. At one point the Hargitay-Hermanns maintained multi-million dollar residences on both coasts. In April 2007 they took in $2,650,000 when they sold a nearly 3,000 square foot house in the so-called Bird Streets area above the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles (CA) and in October of the same year they unloaded a 2,700-plus square foot, Jeffrey Bilhuber-decorated duplex penthouse on Beach Street in TriBeCa home, sold for $5,100,000 to a couple of financial industry fat cats.

They moved from their TriBeCa duplex penthouse to a substantially larger duplex penthouse atop the cast iron-constructed O'Neill Building located on busy, wide and quite loud Sixth Avenue. Property records and previous reports suggest they paid $7,000,000 for the 4,167 square foot penthouse in October 2007. They quickly caught a severe case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle and flipped the cupola-sporting penthouse almost exactly one year later for $8,150,000.

Most recently we discussed the Hermann-Hargitay's real estate doings in June 2010 when they upgraded their real estate circumstances in the Hamptons by coughing up well over seven million smackers for a 7,000-ish square foot cedar-shingled mansion in East Hampton (NY).

listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Douglas Elliman

Post Title : Mariska Hargitay Orders Up Townhouse

Mariska Hargitay Orders Up Townhouse,