Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Boy Bander Harry Styles Buys London Bachelor Pad

BUYER: Harry Styles
LOCATION: London, UK
PRICE: £3,000,000
SIZE: 2,300 square feet (approx.), 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Word on the international celebrity real estate street is that shaggy-haired and baby-faced 18-year old Harry Styles of the epically successful and au courant English boy band One Direction has splashed out somewhere in the neighborhood of £3,000,000 for a free-standing house in North London's semi-urban and partly pastoral Hampstead Heath area. A few quick clickety-clacks on Your Mama's currency conversion contraption shows that's a very grown up 4,816,740 U.S. dollars, at today's rates.

Celebrity real estate watchers—and shrieking tweenage girls and gays around the globe—may recall that 18 year old Mister Styles was spotted by the paps peeping property over the summer after, it would seem, he decided it was high time to move out of Princess Park Manor*, an elaborately ornamented Italianate-style complex in suburban North London originally built in the mid-19th century by Queen Victoria as a lunatic asylum and converted recently to luxury apartments. Mister Styles and his barely post-pubescent band mates were recently reported by no-less than The Wall Street Journal to have once shared a architecturally dramatic five floor unit in the vast apartment complex with a private elevator and a high-domed octagonal living room with 360-degree views. They later moved to their own pieds-à-terre in the complex, according to The WSJ.*

Anyhoo, listing information we located on the interweb shows the approximately 2,300 square foot white stucco house Mister Styles is rumored and reported to have recently acquired sits hard up on the street and stands three stories high with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms.

The house, well situated on a high point with verdant views of Hamptead Heath from the upper levels, has no street-side ground floor windows and is high-walled and gated for maximum privacy and security. Your Mama imagines Mister Styles will have exterior security cameras installed razor sharp shards of glass affixed to the wall's top to ensure that any brainless fanatic who thinks it might be cute to roll buy and hop the wall will be video-taped as their hands are ripped to bloody shreds.

A gated opening that looks just barely wide and tall enough for a mid-sized vehicle opens to a compact motor court that's decadently and expensively equipped with a double car lift that makes it possible to park four cars behind gates and off-the street.

Floor plans included with still-accessible online marketing materials for the modestly-sized but hardly inexpensive residence show French doors open from the motor court directly into a spacious dining room/lounge with blond wood floors and a titanic, shed-roof sky light. The adjacent sitting room—we in America call it a living room—also has blond wood floors as well as a fireplace flanked by glass doors that connect directly to a terraced and fully landscaped, geometrically-minded rear garden. A small, oddly configured room just off the sitting room—it's marked as a family room on the floor plan—also opens through French-style doors to the backyard.

The ground floor also includes a very contemporary but unfortunately windowless eat-in kitchen with hardwood floors, specked slab stone counter tops, sleek and lustrous snow-white cabinetry, over-sized rectangular glass-tile back splashes and top-grade integrated appliances.

Tucked back behind the kitchen and stair hall there's a convenient and well-placed but claustrophobic powder pooper and what the floor plan shows as a sky-lit home gym and neighboring utility room that Your Mama hopes and presumes has laundering capabilities.

Two small bedrooms with built-in wardrobes on the second floor share a large hall bathroom and a third, considerably larger bedroom is a small, private and window-free loo. The stairs continue to corkscrew up to an almost non-existent third floor landing that opens to an approximately 14-foot square roof terrace and the far-from-huge master suite that's comprised of bedroom, dressing hall and spacious en suite with soaking tub, separate shower stall and two windows for proper (and necessary) ventilation.

The fully landscaped back garden, which may or may not be at least partially visible from the upper level of the historic pub next door, has a petite, pie-shaped patch of grass, a sm`ller pie-shaped water feature and a multi-level terrace for grillin' and chillin' with his boy band homies between the exhaustive tour dates, umpteen photo shoots and numerous publicity junkets that make up the hectic—and extraordinarily lucrative—lives of the teenaged superstars.

*There have been various reports in the celebrity-based blogs and gossip glossies that state Mister Styles lives—or lived— in a "swanky East London flat" and not in North London but since Your Mama lost Mister Style's private mobile phone number last week we're unable to dial him up and ask him directly. 

listing photos and floor plan: Bargets via Zoopla

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