Celebrity Home of the Week: Donna Karan's Island Retreat

After yesterday's post about a famous hip-hop mogul's home, we figured we'd give you something nice to look at today.  Fortunately, the latest issue of Architectural Digest (December 2009) offers plenty of choices. We just got ours in the mail this week and we were delighted to see that the entire issue is devoted to celebrity homes. And we loved almost every home we saw!

We especially loved the British West Indies family retreat of celebrated fashion designer Donna Karan (shown above on the left, with her daughter Gabrielle).  It's earthy and gorgeous!

SEE MORE PHOTOS OF THIS RETREAT AFTER THE JUMP BELOW

Winning Bidder Pays $35,000 to Tour Bill Gates' House

Todd Bishop, a blogger for Seattle-based TechFlash.com, recently reported that Bill Gates donated a tour of his Lake Washington home once again this year for a charity event.  He's talking about this techie-lover's dream home, we featured a while back. 

Anyway, last year, the winning bid was $8,600.  This year, it came in at a whopping $35,000!   Either the economy is really bouncing back, or somebody has waaayyy too much money on their hands.  Hey, may we tag along?

A big thanks to Zillow Blog for spotting this news item.

Can You Guess Who Owns This House?

This living room is filled with tons of furniture, drapes, and accessories.  In fact, the whole house is filled with so much opulence that it's hard to believe anyone can even breathe here.  So whose house is it?

FLIP THE HOOD BELOW TO FIND OUT & SEE MORE PHOTOS!

Kimora Lee Simmons looks to trade $16.5M New Jersey estate for new Manhattan pad

Will she ever unload this house?  We saw Kimora's mansion on MTV Cribs a while back, when she was still married to Russell Simmons.  We hated almost ever inch of this house.  We'll dig up some photos later and show you why.  In the meantime, read the full story here:

Kimora Lee Simmons looks to trade $16.5M New Jersey estate for new Manhattan pad | The Real Deal | New York Real Estate News

Website Listing Addresses and Aerial Photos of Celebrity Homes Comes Under Scrutiny

The L.A. Times reports today that one our favorite sources -- Celebrity Aerial Address -- is currently under scrutiny in connection with a criminal investigation. A search warrant revealed that one of the alleged Hollywood Hills burglars used the site to obtain the addresses of celebrities, including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Orlando Bloom.

Some people may not realize that the addresses of celebrities' homes are public information.  It just take a little bit of legwork to find it.  Or you can visit CelebrityAerialAddress.com.  The site's operator, David Ruppel a.k.a. Celebrity Dave, gathers publicly available data on celebrities' homes into a one-stop shopping site and charges a fee for the service. 

We use Dave's service occasionally.  (So do a lot of other celebrity real estate bloggers!) We try to avoid publishing the addresses of celebrities, however.  We believe our readers typically don't care about where celebrities live.  They're just curious about how celebrities live.

Tell us, do you think there's anything wrong with having access to celebrities' addresses?

Metropolitan Home Magazine Folds

Hachette Filipacchi Media, publisher of Elle Decor and other notable magazines, announced today that it will halt publication of Metropolitan Home magazine.  December 2009 will be its last issue.  Another one bites the dust.  Too bad.  Met Home was one of our favorite sources for info on celebrity homes.

Thanks to Casa Sugar and Shelteriffic for alerting everyone.

Mad Men's John Slattery Says "Not In My Backyard!"

We Tivo'd last night's season finale of Mad Men and started watching it this morning.  We were on the edge of our bed waiting to hear a final quip from our favorite character, Roger Sterling.  But, as luck would have it, our Tivo ran out of storage space and didn't record the last few minutes!  Oh well!

We decided to spend this morning looking for info about the homes of Roger, er, John Slattery, that is (above). We know this handsome actor is married to actress Talia Balsam--who plays his ex-wife on the show and also happens to be the real-life ex-wife of George Clooney.  We also know that they split their time between New York and Los Angeles.

Looks like they might be spending more time in New York . . . so they can keep fighting!  No, not each other!  They are fighting the city's plans to build a $346 million sanitation department building in their neighborhood.  For more details, check out the Huffington Post article here.

We'll let you know if we find photos.  In the meantime, if you want to get your fix on the homes of Mad Men stars, be sure to read our earlier posts showcasing the homes of John Hamm/Don Draper, January Jones/Betty Draper, and  Bryan Batt/Sal Romano.  By the way, Sal was conspicuously absent from last night's show, but we'd bet money he'll be back!