"In late October, two days after the British singer-songwriter Lily Allen unexpectedly released her confessional fifth album, "West End Girl," about the breakdown of her marriage with the actor David Harbour, the couple's Brooklyn brownstone went on the market for eight million dollars. Situated in Carroll Gardens, the house had, as Stefon from "Saturday Night Live" would say, everything: wall-to-wall white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, a commode modelled after those in Versailles."
""And now we're all here, we've moved to New York / We've found a nice little rental near a sweet little school," Allen sings. "Now I'm looking at houses with four or five floors / And you've found us a brownstone, said 'You want it? It's yours.'" She makes clear that this is something he wanted: "I could never afford this / You were pushing it forward / Made me feel a bit awkward.""
"In an Architectural Digest tour of the place, from 2023, the couple show off the sauna and cold plunge in the back yard. Harbour said that they wanted their floral, carpeted bathroom, which contained a fireplace and an armchair, to have "a Parisian kind of feeling, somewhere where you could feel like you're reading Proust and smoking Gitanes in the bathtub, or something." The dream!"
Lily Allen released a confessional fifth album, West End Girl, about the breakdown of her marriage to actor David Harbour. The couple listed their ornate Brooklyn brownstone in Carroll Gardens for eight million dollars. The house featured extravagant decor: white tiger-print carpeting, swan taps, Versailles-style commode, a sauna, and a cold plunge. Harbour described a floral, carpeted bathroom meant to evoke a Parisian reading-and-smoking atmosphere. The album's first track frames domestic life and a brownstone purchase, then follows a narrator who leaves for a West End play, concedes to an open-marriage request, and narrates a spectacular marital collapse.
Read at The New Yorker
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