LOCATION: New Canaan, CT
PRICE: $4,750,000
SIZE: 8,063 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 3 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Looks like well-built and increasingly in-demand 50-something year old actor Chris Meloni and his former set designer turned occasional decorator wife Sherman Williams Meloni have caught a classic case of The Celebrity Real Estate Fickle.
It was only last August (2012), the children will recall, that Mister and Missus Meloni shelled out $4,381,000 for a four acre country estate in affluent and bucolic New Canaan, CT with what Your Mama previously described as "an unquestionably luxurious but perfectly ordinary two-story proto-suburban mansion with 8,063 square feet of expensively but blandly finished interior space."
Thanks to Phatlady Sings, a sassy and well-informed Connecticut-based real estate canary we've learned that Mister and Missus Meloni flipped their five bedroom and five full and three half bathroom spread in New Canaan on the market in early April (2013) with an asking price of $4,750,000. Miz Sings has no idea why Mister and Missus Meloni have decided to up and sell their New Canaan crib just eight months after buying it or where they might be going. She did, howevuh, cattily snitch to Your Mama that Mister Meloni is well known around town for staring other well-welled but not famous residents down at the supermarket—or wherever—until they acknowledge his celebrity eminence. Oh, dear. Ouch! Your Mama really hopes that's not true because that sort of behavior would be, well, vulgar and depressing. Anyhoo...
Current listing details show the spacious but architecturally vague residence was originally built—no surprise—in 1987 and has recently "undergone a complete interior transformation" with all new interior paint, newly refinished and stained hardwood floors throughout, the installation of a hard-wired generator for when the power goes out.
A privately situated home office, according to listing information, was re-vamped—one imagines—to the specifications of Missus Sherman Meloni who floated a long and narrow desk in front of a bay window, placed a Jacobson Egg Chair covered in beautifully worn brown leather in the corner and set a manly antique ship model mounted in a wood-framed vitrine on the floor in front of a towering, 26-pane arched window. Despite the ill-chosen teal paint on the walls—we know teal is decoratively hot right now but Your Mama is not feeling it—would it help any of the children to like this room more if they knew it has a private half bathroom and a wet bar?
We can't be certain but appears to Your Mama that a wall was removed between the wood-panelled billiards room with its fully stocked wet bar and the adjacent wood-panelled library with fireplace and direct access to the backyard through a room-wide bank of French doors. Based on a comparison of current listing photos and those included with online listings at the time of Mister and Missus Meloni's purchase we can, however, surmise that, short of paint, few alterations to have been made in the master bathroom or the open-concept kitchen and family room where Your Mama notes there are a few new light fixtures over the center island snack bar but, sadly, the seller's same ol' ho-hum plaid window shades.
Upstairs there are three guest/family bedrooms, each with private three-quarter en suite facility, plus a smaller fourth bedroom that makes use of a large double-sink three-quarter bathroom across the hall. The master suite occupies its own wing of the upper level and encompasses a bedroom with fireplace, a large marble-floored bathroom, and spacious windowed walk-in closet/dressing room and, finally, a private loggia with a corkscrew staircase the descends to a lower level veranda with swimming pool access and ascends to a roof terrace with wrap around views.
Other notable features include an attached three car side-facing garage with convenient direct entry, a total of four fireplaces, two mud rooms that both connect through to the kitchen/family room, butler's pantry, walk-in pantry and walk-in wine room off the kitchen, a fully finished basement and front and back stairs.
The tree-ringed grounds include a long driveway off a semi-private lane, a super-sized circular driveway, vast swathes of lawn, deep flagstone terraces bordered by lush foliage, a free-form swimming pool and spa set into a cluster of boulders and a charming red barn large enough to park six cars and a second floor convertible to an art studio, home office, yoga retreat, party room or whatever.
Mister and Missus Meloni also own an almost 3,000 square foot aerie on the 60th floor of the Park Imperial building on Manhattan's Upper West Side that they had photographed for the March 2008 issue of Architectural Digest and heaved on the open market in March 2012 with a $12 million price tag. The price has since plummeted to $9,950,000 and is currently in contract to be sold to an unknown buyer for an unknown sum of dinero.
Property records also reveal that Mister and Missus Meloni also maintain a 4,600-plus square foot lake front getaway in Candlewood Springs, CT, near New Milford, that they scooped up in November 2003 for $1,325,000. As far as we can tell, the property is not currently on the market.
listing photos: Prudential Connecticut Realty