LOCATION: Chicago. IL
PRICE: $16,750,000
SIZE: 12,000 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4 full and 4 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Everyone who pays even a speck of guilty-pleasured attention to the celebrity real estate scene already knows by now that People's Choice and Teen Choice award-winning actor Vince Vaughn quietly (and allegedly) had his titanic, 12,000(ish) square foot Chicago, IL triplex penthouse shopped around last year with a sky-high $24,700,000 asking price and that in June (2012) the 19-room perch atop the Palmolive Building on swanky Michigan Avenue popped up on the open market with a substantially lower $18,400,000 asking price.
Well, dontcha know little darlings, just like the earlier (and alleged) $24,700,000 price tag, the $18,400,000 price tag also appears to be a little more rose-tinted than the upper end Windy City real estate market will currently bear and the price tag has been reset for less at $16,750,000.
A few quick clickety-clacks on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus indicates that amounts to almost eight million clams less than Mister Vaughn originally (and allegedly) wanted for his Lindbergh Beacon-topped behemoth and just about nine percent less than its first official, open-market asking price.
The three-floor aerie, acquired by Mister Vaughn in September 2006 for $12,000,000, devotes the entire middle floor to formal entertaining (with 28-foot long living and dining rooms and eat-in kitchen), the lower floors to intimate family quarters, and the uppermost floor to the pursuit of millionaire-style home-based amusements and diversions, according to listing information.
In addition to a gorgeously-restored, paneled office once occupied by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner back in the day when the publication's corporate offices were in the building, the top level entertainment spaces allows Mister Vaughn and his guests to watch movies in the screening room; play pool and put puzzles together (or whatever) in the games room; fix a snack (or whatever) in a seven-foot by seven-foot second kitchen; grab a beer or mix a cocktail in the separate bar; laze and lounge around in a den/family room; crash in the penthouse's fifth bedroom, step out for a smoke or toke on the good-sized terrace surrounded by city and lake views and the perfect spot, as per marketing materials, for taking in Chicago's annual Air & Water Show.
Mister Vaughn currently owns a much more modest but still pretty big by middle-class standards 4,008 square foot townhouse just north of The Loop in Chicago acquired in summer 2005 for $1,425,500 and currently used as a rental, according to top-notch property gossip Bob Goldsborough at the Chicago Tribune.
The children can make what they will of this snippet of (previously leaked) rumor and gossip but no fewer than two of Your Mama's Platinum Triangle inside operators recently snitched that Mister Vaughn might be willing to shell out eight figures for the right, movie star-style residence in Los Angeles. Regardless of whether that particular celebrity property gossip nugget is fact or fiction, Mister Vaughn has already, at least once before rode the bull at the Tinseltown real estate rodeo. From 1999 until 2005, when he unloaded it for $4,050,000, Mister Vaughn owned a gated and privately situated, 1930s Mediterranean mini-estate in in L.A.'s celeb-friendly Los Feliz area that's now owned, as per the public property records we peeped, by Emmy-nominated sci-fi television writer/producer René Echevarria (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dark Angel, Medium, Castle, Terra Nova).
exterior photo: City of Chicago via American Architecture