sarah jessica parker

From the Wall Street Journal:
--Ron Zeff, founder of real-estate investment company Carmel Partners, listed his San Francisco home for $32 million. The property website for the lavish seven-bedroom home is here.
Jeff Moorad, vice chairman and chief executive of baseball's San Diego Padres, and his wife, Jan, have officially listed their eight-bedroom, nine-bathroom vacation home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., for $17.9 million.
--A Weston, Massachusetts home that we covered in September of last year, belongs to Jim Benson, the former chief executive of John Hancock Life Insurance, and his wife, Marlene. The Bensons spent four years building the 21,000-square-foot, Georgian Colonial-style home.


From the NY Post:
--Sarah Jessica Parker is still on the hunt for a new home. She recently toured the $20 million triplex penthouse at 419 Broome St.
--Model/Madonna boy toy Jesus Luz has been spotted looking for an apartment at the Beatrice rental building, on 29th Street and Sixth Avenue. Rates start around $3,000 per month for a studio.
--A six-story limestone residence is quietly listed at $2.5 million in annual rent. The Gold Coast mansion was sold in 1995 for just $6 million. The mansion was commissioned by Frank Woolworth and built by C.P.H. Gilbert nearly 100 years ago.
--Actor Sean Hayes' former Theater District penthouse rental is back on the market for $8,000 a month. The listing is here.

From the Real Estalker:
--Ben Savage has listed his three-bedroom West Hollywood, California home for $1.599 million.
--Dancer Derek Hough has paid $650,000 for a two-bedroom condo in West Hollywood.
--Kate Hudson and Muse frontman Matt Bellamy have reportedly been searching for a new house in Los Angeles.
--Corey Feldman recently leased a five-bedroom home in West Encino which was last available at $5,700 per month.
--Kaley Cuoco has picked up a five-bedroom home in Sherman Oaks, California for $2.4 million.
--Cirque du Soleil ringleader Guy Laliberté has listed a five-bedroom home in Las Vegas for $1,899,999.

From the WSJ:
--Paramount Chairman and CEO Brad Grey has bought a hacienda-style home in Los Angeles for $18.5 million. The six-bedroom home, which was lived in by Frank Sinatra's ex-wife Nancy Barbato was listed at $22.5 million when we first checked it out back in September. Grey, a Sinatra fan, recently sold his Pacific Palisades home for $21.5 million. His new home needs a bit of updating.

--The Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade has bought a Miami Beach home for $10.6 million. The six-bedroom Mediterranean-style house has 150-plus feet of bay frontage and a tennis court that he's planning to convert to a basketball court.
--The former Beverly Hills home of late television sidekick Ed McMahon was foreclosed on by Dan Schryer, of DCI Technology Holdings, the investor who purchased Mr. McMahon's underlying loan from Countrywide Financial. It had been listed earlier this year for $4.6 million. Schryer bought the home's mortgage in 2009, allowing Mr.McMahon and his wife to remain in the home. Hee decided to foreclose on the home now so he could put it on the market again early next year.


From the NY Post:
--Halle Berry has shown interest in a three-bedroom unit at the Park Imperial building at 230 W. 56th St., the Sean "Diddy" Combs, Deepak Chopra and Christopher Meloni of "Law & Order" all call home.
--Two Trees Farm in Bridgehampton has had a major price cut. The 115-acre property was once $95 million but is now listed for $55 million, which includes development rights. Or you can buy 73 acres without development rights for $20 million.
--A home used in the movie "The Godfather," is up for sale for $2.9 million.
--Chef Marc Murphy has been spotted checking out apartments in the new 535 West End Ave. condo building.
--The buyer of Elie and Rory Tahari's 141 Prince St. triplex is Ted Waitt, the billionaire founder of computer maker Gateway who paid $27.5 million.
-- Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have settled in at 88 Central Park West in an apartment with a 32-foot living room and eight bedrooms. It was most recently listed at $21.5 million.

From CNBC:
--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former rental home in Palo Alto, California is listed for $7,850 a month.

From Newsday:
--Former tennis player Ruta Gerulaitis has sold her Centre Island home for $1.965 million.
--Ogden Phipps II and wife, Ashley, have sold their Glen Cove home for $2.25 million, $100,000 less than they paid for the home in 2007. Phipps is the great-great grandson of Henry Phipps, who made his fortune as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's business partner.


From the LA Times:
--Lisa Marie Presley has sold a ranch-style house in gated Hidden Hills for $5 million.
--Advertising pro Lee Clow, co-creator of Apple's "Think Different" campaign, has purchased a vacation home at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes for $2.2 million.
--Television host and singer Mark McGrath has sold his home in the Hollywood Hills for above its asking price of $1.25 million.
--The personal residence and studio of the late photographer Julius Shulman has sold for $2.25 million in the Hollywood Hills.

From the NY Times:
--A "double-height artist studio" with many original Charles Platt touches has recently gone on the market in the building, at 131 East 66th Street, known as the Studio Building. The listing is here.

It's last call on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit "American Women: Fashioning an American Identity", which closes August 15th. The exhibit was sponsored in part by Conde Nast (and also the Gap, although the only t-shirts on display are those that are for sale in the gift shop) and Vogue presided over the opening festivities back in May.

The exhibit breaks down American fashion history into ideals -- Gibson Girls, Bohemians, Screen Sirens. It covers 1890-1940, with a final room entirely devoid of fabric devoted to 1950-2010. I was entirely enjoying the exhibit (and even would have bought this 1895 sweater with gigot sleeves to wear this Fall, had it been available for purchase) if I hadn't gotten entirely annoyed by the wall text.

Writing about Marrakech, the celebrated writer Elias Canetti said this: "in order to feel at home in a strange city, you need to have a secluded room, to which you have a certain title, and in which you can be alone when the tumult of new and incomprehensible voices becomes too great."

La Mamounia, the recently renovated historic luxury hotel of the Red City, makes for an excellent refuge. It achieves sanctuary, from sights and smells and other sensory assaults in a city where everything seems heightened.

But while some hotels in overwhelming destinations achieve this effect by essentially encasing guests in a blank box of international luxury blandness, the redesigned La Mamounia remains firmly planted in its location: you never forget you're in Morocco. You're inside the city walls and quite near to the Koutoubia mosque. You hear the muezzin issuing the call-to-prayer, but the rooms are equipped with sound canceling blinds allow you to more or less skip the 5 a.m. edition.
During the extensive three-year renovation which updated the hotel from what I heard described as "eighties-tastic", as many as 1,500 craftsman labored in a single day to create the intricate plasterwork, hand-tiling, painted ceilings and leather-tooling that tastefully embellish the property. It looks as if the Moorish details had always been there, but that's just a trick of the eye -- it's all brand new. The rather boxy shape of the hotel's exterior is a good reminder of this.

There's terrific people watching here-- the hotel has been and remains celeb magnet, hosting Winston Churchill in the way back when, and Sarah Jessica Parker more recently. (And that is perhaps the only reason those two will ever appear together in a sentence.) Its mostly European guests do tend to be those who think of themselves as celebrities, for instance, one gentleman who looked just a great deal like the guy from the Old Spice commercials, but wasn't, repeatedly doused himself with baby oil and induced the pool staff to take his photo, while a bikini'd woman did push-ups in the shallow end of the pool.

Presumably the real celebrities decamp to the hotels newly opened and totally private three bedroom riads, which have their own private pools.

From the Real Estalker:
--The ex-wife of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, Jo Wood, has listed their home in Kingston on Thames, shown above, for £13,000,000. The listing is here.
--Actress Peri Gilpin of Fraser fame and her artist husband Christian Vincent were the buyers of Shabby Chic creator Rachel Aswell's Malibu home.

From the LA Times Hot Properties:
--The Beverly Hills home of the late Ed McMahon is back on the market for $4.6 million. This is the same price it was listed at in 2008. The listing is here.
--Actor Ving Rhames and his wife, Deborah have sold a Brentwood house that had been listed as a short sale. The five-bedroom house sold for $1.95 million. It had been listed on and off for three years and was at $2.699 million when we checked it out in 2008. It had been purchased five years ago for $2.5 million. The couple also sold a larger Brentwood home in late June for $5,520,786 that had been purchased in 2005 for $6.5 million.

--Olympic medal winner Carl Lewis has sold his Pacific Palisades home for $2.5 million.
Rapper and "Pimp My Ride" host Alvin " Xzibit" Joiner has lowered the price of his Woodland Hills, California home to $650,000. He bought the home in 2003 for $670,000. The listing is here.
--Filmmaker, commercial director and restaurateur Joe Pytka has sold Castillo del Lago in the Hollywood Hills for $7 million. He bought the home from Madonna in 1996 for $5.3 million. The home was first listed at $14.95 million in April of last year.

Actress and real estate agent Dana Sparks has listed her Lake Sherwood contemporary at $2.555 million. The listing is here.

From the NY Post:
--Lady Gaga is still apartment hunting in New York City most recently checking out a four-bedroom One Morton Square rental.
--Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have been looking at a $29.8 million penthouse duplex at the Mayfair building at 610 Park Ave.
--A a Tribeca home once rented by Leonardo DiCaprio and Gwen Stefani is on the market at $6.995 million.
--Pet-food tycoon Leonard Stern and his wife, Allison, are purchasing a SoHo penthouse to live in while their 110-year-old Fifth Avenue mansion is being renovated uptown. They are in contract to buy a penthouse duplex at 25 W. Houston St. for about $8 million.

From the NY Times:
--Donald J. Trump Jr. sold his condominium at 220 Riverside Boulevard at Trump Place this month for $1.845 million.

From Chicago Breaking Business:
--Nicholas Pritzker, the chief executive and chairman of the Hyatt Development Corp. and a member of the Pritzker family, has placed his contemporary-style mansion on 45 acres on Lake Michigan in Covert, Michigan on the market for $4.95 million.

Should you be interested in seeing Sex and the City 2 we won't spoil it for you by telling you when the five-carat diamond ring shown above in the movie appears, but let's just say the ring has a starring role. The five-carat stone by designer Itay Malkin is set in 18 karat white gold with 80 round natural white pave diamonds equaling 0.35 carats. Malkin worked in collaboration with Sarah Jessica Parker and costume designer Patricia Field on the final design of the ring. The Itay Malkin ring is the only piece of jewelry from the movie that has been held to secrecy due to its importance in the plot, debuting for the first time on the big screen. Itay Malkin will produce the ring in a limited edition series for $10,000, each ring stamped with the limited edition serial number and certificate. It is available for sale online at patriciafield.com or through private sale by contacting Itay Malkin Designs at itaymalkin.com or 888-429-4884.

New York fashion week, which ends here today, will unfortunately be remembered as 1) the week during which Alexander McQueen committed suicide and 2) the last time Bryant Park hosted the shows.

As tragic as the loss of McQueen was, in particular, life went on as did the designers in the tents and elsewhere in the city. Here, a few highlights from the week:

Rodarte, shown above, looked as if heavy salvaged pieces of fabric had been caught up by a stiff fall wind and wrapped its wearer in bohemian luxe. Ironically, the Mulleavy sister design duo chose fall to lighten up with bright colors and florals, a stark contrast to the black goth-like collection they presented for spring.

Boyfriends and husbands, beware of closet raids. Preen set the tone for the new blazer silhouette -- a masculine and longer-body -- worn with a belt or not. After seasons of tight and short blazers, this roomier style looks just right.

Michael Quintanilla, a journalist friend of mine I bumped into after Donna Karan, made the comment that only the work of a master can transform basic black pieces into a phenomenal collection. Karan is such a master. Black off-the-shoulder gowns, black cocoon coats and black blazers accented with leather patches were simply gorgeous. The designer carefully punctuated the show with fuchsia coats and teal cocktail dresses that, against all that black, were all the more eye-popping.

Fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez introduced the Narciso Rodriguez for eBay Collection on the online marketplace yesterday.

Called a "capsule" collection, the line will be sold exclusively through the Narciso Rodriguez for eBay Collection redefining how and where savvy shoppers can buy designer fashion. It is the designer's first direct-to-consumer online retail venture.

"I am extremely excited by the possibilities that this new online sales channel brings to my business long term," says Rodriguez. "For me it's always been about dressing many women of all ages, all types, all sizes, and this special collection on eBay is a unique opportunity to reach a broad global audience."

The eight-piece limited-edition collection is made from imported Italian fabrics, and bears Rodriguez's signature streamlined look and sophisticated color blocking created in a red, black and white color palette. The collection will be offered at accessible, fixed price points ranging from $65 - $350, in sizes 0 to 14, or extra small to large.

In an episode of Sex and the City, "Carrie" and "Miranda", the characters portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon, sat on a bench eating Magnolia Bakery's pink frosted cupcakes, as they discussed Carrie's love life. Magnolia Bakery hasn't been the same ever since. The neighborhood bakery located in a residential section of the West Village of Manhattan, is now a New York institution. Tourists from all over the world go to the Magnolia Bakery, often waiting in a long line that winds its way around the block.

There's a reason why Magnolia Bakery has had staying power. Its baked goods, especially its cakes and cupcakes, are home made and absolutely delicious. What other bakery but Magnolia needs to impose a one dozen limit on the number of cupcakes a walk-in customer is allowed to purchase? So it should come as no surprise that Magnolia Bakery is a nominee for a Readers' Choice Award for Best Cupcake. It is also a nominee for a Readers' Choice Award for Best Cake.


Magnolia Bakery is a family-owned and operated business where everything is made fresh from scratch on premises, all day, every day, using the finest ingredients.

Open since 1996, the bakery is often credited with starting the modern day cupcake craze with its signature pastel-colored buttercream-frosted versions. Magnolia Bakery specializes in classic Americana baked goods including red velvet cake, icebox cake and banana pudding. Magnolia prides itself on tradition and quality and strives to satisfy loyal patrons while maintaining the integrity of the brand. All Magnolia Bakery locations are certified as Kosher by the United Kosher Supervision. For more information and location hours, please visit Magnolia's website.

Sarah Jessica Parker is reaching for Halston, but we're not talking the white dress from the spring 2010 collection she wore in the trailer for Sex and the City 2 (pictured above).

The Internet was buzzing yesterday that the actress is following in Lindsay Lohan's Ungaro footsteps and becoming creative director or design director -- or at least a design consultant -- for the storied New York label. Apparently, SJP is no longer just the face of Halston -- she became the face back in September -- but will be taking a more active design role in Halston Heritage, a recently launched secondary collection whose look harks back to the house's glory days of the '70s. There is word she'll take an equity stake, too.

None of this could be confirmed late last night, but no matter. People are excited.

"Considering SJP's impeccable taste, this is sure to be a successful collaboration," gushed one blog.

It's true that Parker has designed before. She created the line Bitten for Steve & Barry, the now shuttered cheap and chic retail chain. But as much as I love SJP (she's one of the nicest people I've ever met in my 15 years in Hollywood), let's not forget that when we refer to Sarah Jessica's impeccable taste, we are mostly referring to the way she looks in the Sex and the City franchise. And those looks are courtesy of costume designer Patricia Field.

Still, SJP wears anything well and it's a smart move for Halston. Having the actress, who's become synonymous with New York fashion, on board will give the beleaguered brand some badly needed press. But where she will ultimately take the line is anybody's guess.

Halston hasn't had it easy lately. In fact, it's been called the "Halston curse."

Since the designer Roy Halston Frowick's death of AIDS-related causes in 1990, Halston has had at least eight owners and six designers, including Randolph Duke, Kevan Hall and Bradley Bayou. Then, in the fall of 2008, an unlikely team had a go: movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Choo's Tamara Mellon and Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe. The team picked Marco Zanini as creative chief. I remember seeing Zanini's first season in the Halston showroom in New York in February of 2008 and I thought it was disappointing. Sure enough, Zanini was gone a few months later. Subsequent collections have been designed by a team.

When you look back at old pictures of Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat, Bianca Jagger dripping in gold lame or Lauren Bacall in a long cashmere dress, you can't help but think Halston's sitting on a goldmine!

Can SJP break the Halston curse?

In recent years celebrities popped out fashion lines nearly every time you turned around. And every luxury brand seemed to have a movie star in its ad campaign. Then the recession came along and suddenly a lot of those lines folded and fashion campaign deals went to the models. But could the tide be changing yet again? It looks like some celebrities are turning back toward collaborations with high-end brands. At Paris Fashion Week Lindsay Lohan unveiled her new fashion collaboration with Ungaro. Lohan already has her own leggings line, 6126 and was announced as the new creative director of the fashion house three weeks ago. She has since been working with head designer Estrella Archs on the quickie collection and the two ended the show by strolling out onto the catwalk together. So far the reviews of the 1980s-inspired line have been less than kind. WWD called it "cheesy and dated" and others took issue with the lines use of sequined heart pasties used not just to cover nipples but as forehead adornment. Neon colors, harem pants and shoulder-baring tops recalled the very worst of 1980s fashion. Earlier this year, my colleague Kristin Taylor Young questioned whether or not celebrity designs made a mockery of fashion, clearly in this case many people think the answer is yes.

Lohan might not be the only one to step into high fashion. Today the Daily Mail reported that Sarah Jessica Parker may be the new face of Halston. Sarah Jessica Parker also had a clothing line "Bitten" which has shut down. She may front the Spring 2010 campaign for US fashion label Halston with the ads set to appear around the time "Sex and the City 2" opens. Parker's design chops are a little more advanced than Lohan's so if she decides to step back into the design studio hopefully the results will be a bit more promising.

You've probably seen the first picture of new twins that Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick recently brought home. The gorgeous twins and their family are also posed on some pretty beautiful sheets. The couple picked up the D. Porthault taupe jete de fleurs linens (and matching terry) at the D. Porthault New York boutique on Park and 58th in preparation of the twins' homecoming a few months ago. The queen-sized set costs $1150.

Like the black diamonds on Sarah Jessica Parker? The designer is Itay Malkin, who makes custom jewelry using rough-cut black diamonds.

Itay Malkin has quite a following in the film and tv world:

"Sarah Jessica Parker wore Itay's sexy, delicate strands of black diamond beads in the movie version of Sex and the City. Adrien Grenier wears a strand of Black Diamonds on this season's finale episode of "Entourage." Itay has also collaborated on a line with Patricia Field."

You can find Itay Malkin jewelry in Sex and the City stylist Patricia Field's store in New York City or online directly, here.

Sarah Jessica Parker is wearing the Black Diamond Carrie Necklace, $3,220. A gallery of our favorite items follows.

Thanks to the imploding economy, once-thriving clothing lines from celebs like Sarah Jessica Parker (above), Ashley Judd, Venus Williams and LL Cool J could quite possibly go out of business, AdAge reports. Following the worst holiday shopping season in four decades, numerous retailers that partnered with the star's brands are going bankrupt or being liquidated, taking the celebrity clothing lines with them. "Even before the economy went bad, the market became over-saturated with celebrity brands," Victoria Brynner, CEO of Stardust Visions, a boutique entertainment-marketing service that brokers celebrity endorsements, tells the magazine. And Dan Butler, VP of merchandising and retail operations at the National Retail Federation, says more celeb lines will inevitably disappear.