Singer-songwriter Norah Jones has made her historic townhouse in Brooklyn’s leafy, historic Cobble Hill neighborhood available at exactly $8 million. The famously private torch singer, whose 2002 debut album “Come Away With Me” sold more than 10 million copies and earned her five Grammy Awards, and whose most recent album, “Begin Again,” dropped earlier this year, has owned the handsome, 25-foot-wide townhouse since 2009 when tax records indicate she picked it up for $4.9 million.
In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, the first to catch wind of the listing, the nine-time Grammy winner and avid swimmer says, “My hunt for a house with a yard began when I got my dog, Ralph…. It always felt like an escape from city life. I started my family, made a lot of music and had some truly magical times there.” The listing is jointly held by Sonia Brown and “Million Dollar Listing New York” star Ryan Serhant at Nestseekers.
Standing four stories with three exposures and a dignified, Greek Revival-style facade, the exhaustively and expensively updated townhouse dates to the late 1800s and, per the floor plan included with marketing materials, is configured with three and potentially five bedrooms and two full and two half bathrooms in roughly 4,500 square feet. Carefully preserved and authentically re-created architectural details blend harmoniously with a jazzy, comfortably sophisticated decorative scheme and a multitude of modern-day creature comforts that include radiant heated floors, central air conditioning, a comprehensive home automation system and an array of solar panels on the roof.
The classic, raised stoop entrance leads to a slender entrance hall and powder room, the latter sheathed in reclaimed barn wood. Double parlor-style formal living and dining rooms are both anchored by a working, black marble fireplace and flooded with natural light through enormous, double-glazed four-pane sash windows that extend nearly floor-to-ceiling. Beyond the dining room, what listing descriptions call “an artisan-crafted cocktail room” peers out over the backyard through full-height windows and, in one corner, features an delicate, eye-catching assemblage of multi-colored glass lanterns of varying sizes and shapes hung over a section of floor that’s been replaced with glass.
The master suite, which includes a small, adjoining office/library, privately spreads out over the entire second floor and offers another black marble fireplace and cedar-lined walk-in closet. The unexpectedly spacious master bathroom has yet another fireplace, plus a steam shower, laundry equipment and glossy, turquoise floor tiles that extend out through three sets of French doors to a 300-square-foot terrace overlooking the leafy backyards of the surrounding townhouses. Two more guest and family bedrooms and a shared bathroom are joined on the top floor by a loft-like lounge with kitchenette under an 11.5-foot high, wood-beamed ceiling.
Nipped down on the garden level, a tile-floored farmhouse-style kitchen is fitted with high-end commercial-style appliances and thick, butcher block countertops on rustic, custom-crafted wood cabinets. A comfortably furnished adjacent family room features inlaid parquet floors, a fireplace and hand-hewn wood beams across the ceiling, while a glass-walled breakfast room behind the kitchen has a built-in banquette and a vintage, 1940s piano. The room spills out to a nearly 1,500-square-foot, fully-fenced backyard where a thick canopy of heritage Wisteria shades a huge, bluestone-paved terrace, part of which slides back at the touch of a button to reveal a New York City rarity: a heated lap pool with resistance jets and an eight-person spa.
Jones, daughter of late and internationally legendary Indian sitar master and composer Ravi Shankar, owns another, somewhat smaller but no less historic or idiosyncratic home just around the corner, a former firehouse that dates to the 1840s, was used to film scenes in the 2010 Julia Roberts film “Eat Pray Love” and was scooped up by in 2015 for $6.25 million.
Popular on Variety
Source: Read Full Article
