Yahoo News Inside Mariah Carey’s Rented COVID Quarantine Mansion
Like many urban dwellers with the freedom and resources to do so, Mariah Carey decamped her plush mansion-sized penthouse in lower Manhattan sometime in March to sequester in seclusion and high style at a grand Westchester County country estate. She brought along her two kids, of course, and, being the well-heeled high-maintenance diva she is, a handful of dedicated staff that New York Magazine called her “COVID-quarantine pod.” The internationally beloved whistle-stop songstress, now 45 with five Grammys (and 29 more nominations), has rented the lavish spread for an unknown amount, but we can all bet our life savings she’s shelling out more money for her short stay than some people will earn in a lifetime.
The stately stone mansion presides over more than five acres of manicured grounds and sits regally at the head of a circular drive with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms plus four powder rooms in about 10,500 square feet spread over three elevator-serviced floors. One of just a couple dozen multi-acre estates hidden among thick woods in a prestigious gated enclave in bucolic Bedford Corners, the estate is not too far from Martha Stewart’s huge Katonah farm and only about six miles from the extravagant manse she once not-too-happily shared with her first husband, music mogul Tommy Mottola.
The property last sold in 2012 for $4.8 million to former Wall Street executive Jay Dweck, who spent a fortune transforming the staid estate into a high-tech residential haven for the ultra-rich. A pastiche of architectural styles originally built in 2006, the baronial stone-accented manor house’s palatial traditional exterior belies its myriad state-of-the-art technologies that include a cutting-edge home automation system and a comprehensive security system that incorporates more-than 20 cameras and biometric keyless entry. And then there’s the pool, a grandiose, 90-foot-long violin-shaped flight of fancy that is the estate’s most unconventional and attention getting feature. Reportedly constructed at a cost of about $1 million, the 50,000-gallon pool is sheathed in almost half-a-million glass tiles with fiber optic strands that light up for extra pizzaz, as if a violin-shaped pool needed more pizzazz. A spa serves as the violin’s chin rest and two slender koi ponds stand in as the bow.
The renovated estate first came for sale over the summer of 2015 at nearly $10 million. With no takers, it was taken off the market a year later before it was re-listed with the exact same price. There were still no buyers, and the next July the estate got a staggering 30% price reduction, to just under $6.9 million. Alas, it also languished at the hugely discounted price until the summer of 2019, when it was taken off the market.
Sophisticated and understated with plenty or room for Mimi to swan around in six-inch Louboutins with a full-time hair and makeup artist in tow, the mansion offers an elegant foyer with a gracefully curved staircase and comfortably generous formal living and dining rooms, the former with a gleaming black marble fireplace. There’s also a fully paneled library with lighted bookcases and a fireplace emblazoned with carved wood lion heads. Less formal but no less deluxe family quarters include a colossal gourmet kitchen, an adjoining breakfast room and a family room, the latter two with French doors to the backyard. Other notable creature comforts include a basement level games room/media lounge with a 900-gallon saltwater fish tank, a light-filled fitness room and a home theater with wet bar. The five guest suites — two upstairs and three more on the main floor— are joined by a star-worthy main-floor master suite that comprises a private sitting room, spacious bedroom, a dressing area with extensive closets and, naturally, a spa-style bathroom large enough to comfortably accommodate the pop superstar’s resident glam squad.
Out back, the idiosyncratic swimming pool is surrounded by vast (and heated) stone terraces. There’s also an outdoor kitchen, an outdoor shower, a fire pit, a sport court and, beyond the pool at the base of a series of undulating terraced gardens, a baseball-field-sized stretch of lawn
The “Caution” singer’s Manhattan penthouse was acquired in 2000 for an unrecorded amount and done up by the so-called Prince of Chintz, late decorator Mario Buatta, before it was featured in Architectural Digest in 2001. And, though she has made it available for sale at least a few times over the last decade, as far as this property gossip knows Mimi still maintains an oceanfront hideaway on plutocrat-favored Windermere Island in the Bahamas, a slender strip of sand accessible only by guard-gated bridge, boat or helicopter and known for its hyper exclusivity and pink sand beaches. Carey and her now second ex-husband, Nick Cannon, were married at the property in 2008.
Launch Gallery: Look Around Mariah Carey’s Sumptuous COVID Quarantine Mansion
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