LOCATION: Nashville, TN
PRICE: $1,599,000
SIZE: 8,554 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This morning Your Mama prattled on for spell about the very professionally decorated Brentwood, TN residence that Rascal Flats guitarist Joe Don Rooney and his former beauty queen wife recently pushed on the open market with a $1,679,900 price tag. This afternoon we've decided to stay in the same country music lane and discuss the Nashville area country estate that Mister Rooney' band mate Jay DeMarcus and his former beauty queen (turned occasional boob-toob hostess) wife Allison* have up for sale with a $1,599,000 asking price.
Property records and other online databases including Celebrity Address Aerial show that Mister and Missus DeMarcus purchased the 5.56 acre semi-rural/semi-suburban spread in August 2005 for $1,950,000 and they put it back on the open market way back in late 2008 with an asking price of $2,950,000. Over the intervening 4.5 years—an absolute ice age in real estate time—their increasingly albatross-y white elephant has been de- and re-listed a solid handful of times at a variety of ever-shrinking asking prices. It hardly takes an arithmetic expert—or Your Mama's bejeweled abacus—to quickly calculate that even if Mister and Missus DeMarcus' team of real estate representatives manage to scare up a full price offer the country music superstar is still looking at a $351,000 gut punch to his pocketbook, not counting any renovation expenses or carrying costs.
Current listing information indicates the 8,854 square foot mansion—a 1.5 story red brick pile with more than a passing resemblance to Thomas Jefferson's neo-Palladian Monticello in Charlottesville, VA—has five bedrooms with five all new en suite bathrooms plus two additional powder rooms.
The long, gated driveway sweeps up to the front of the house and on around to a side motor court with an attached three car garage. Wide steps climbs and a deep front porch makes for a genteel transition into an unexpectedly spacious foyer with thin-strip chevron-pattern hardwood floors, weighty and complicated ceiling moldings and a curved staircase with a wood and wrought iron banister.
There are formal living and dining rooms—the former with over-sized nine-over-nine sash windows and a fireplace, the latter with arched doorways, a shallow apse for the buffet and an inset gold-leafed ceiling—and less formal family spaces that include a sun room off the dining room and a roomy den with coffered ceiling, a second fireplace and a long wall of custom built cabinetry with wet bar area.
The kitchen has a milk chocolate colored wood cabinetry, thin strip hardwood floors laid at a 45-degree angle to the room—better would have been to continue the chevron pattern from the foyer, a boxcar-sized center island, dark gray flecked granite counter tops and the customary complement of sleek Euro-style stainless steel appliances. One wall of the kitchen has inset appliances that include a built-in coffee maker, three ovens, a warming drawer and a strange grid of black rectangles that we imagine are cubbies for cook books and other kitchen-related tchotchke. The kitchen joins to a breakfast area/family room with bulky brick fireplace, more built-in cabinets and shelve and a wide bay window with French doors.
The main floor master suite, just off the foyer, is entered through a privacy enhancing vestibule and encompasses a bedroom large enough to accommodate a sitting area in front of yet another fireplace, a large and luxurious but perfectly ordinary bathroom with spa tub and steam shower and a custom-fitted bedroom-sized dressing room with dramatic charcoal-colored walls and a fireplace—by Your Mama's boozy count, the house's fifth.
In all honesty we really can't say if all or any of the other four guest/family bedrooms are located on the second floor but listing photographs do suggest the upper level includes one idiosyncratic six- (or more) sided room ringed by ocular and semi-circular windows. Also located on the second floor, over the attached garage, is a media lounge, an adjacent and adjoining recording studio and a petite, sky-lit second kitchen(ette) with snack counter.
Although the grounds are extensive and include several covered and uncovered terraces and acres of rolling lawns dotted with mature shade trees there does not appear to be a tennis court or a swimming pool. Pity that. A house of this caliber on an expansive piece of property like this really ought to have both or, at the very least, a damn swimming pool.
Mister and Missus DeMarcus long ago decamped this house for a sprawling U-shaped mansion of nearly 11,000 square feet that property records show they acquired in August 2007 for $2,725,000.
Some of the nearby homes are owned by NashVegas A-listers like young country music queen Taylor Swift who recently coughed up $2.5 million for an historic Greek Revival style residence and country-pop crooner Keith Urban and Aussie actress Nicole Kidman who maintain an historic, celebrity-style mansion they snapped up back in 2008 for $3,470,000.
*Before hitching her wagon to Mister DeMarcus, Missus DeMarcus née Alderson was crowned Miss Tennessee Teen USA (1994) Miss Tennessee (1999) and Miss Tennessee USA (2002). She currently hosts People Magazine on CMT, whatever that is.
listing photos: Donna Yancy for French King Fine Properties