Talk-show host and media giant Oprah Winfrey proves having money to burn can sometimes be a problem. Along with slumping ratings, a crumbling media empire and the recent firing of 30 employees at OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network), former daytime TV queen trying to unload a co-op apartment in a luxury Chicago building and she’s willing to sell it for half of what she paid only six years ago.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Winfrey is asking $2.8 million, quite a meager sum in contrast with the $5.6 million she paid for the place in 2006, and less than half of the $6 million she wanted when she listed it for the first time in 2008.
The 4,600-square-foot, 13-room Benjamin Marshall-designed Beaux Arts mansion, built in 1913 and perched on ritzy East Lake Shore Drive, boasts 10-foot ceilings, two foyers (one inner, one grand), a formal dining room, a solaium, a butler’s pantry, a wine room, and three bedrooms. The apartment boasts access to a private elevator, a wood-paneled library, huge jacuzzi jet tubs, granite counter tops and wood floors.
The views from the sixth floor are the real scene stealers, however: in summer, one can gaze upon the beach scenes along Lake Michigan.
Winfrey’s home at 199 East Lake Shore Drive is for sale by Prudential Rubloff Properties.
But potential buyers impressed by the celebrity cachet might be disappointed to learn that Ms Winfrey never lived in the apartment. Winfrey has spent her time in Chicago at her duplex condo in Water Tower Place a few blocks away, and first put the unit at 199 East Lake Shore Drive up for rent in November, for $15,000 a month.
She spends most of her time, however, at her estate in Montecito, California, nicknamed The Promised Land, which she purchased in 2001 for a reported $52 million. The media mogul also has a farmhouse in Kula, Hawaii, a holiday home in Antigua, a property by the shore in Lavallette, New Jersey, a ski chalet in Telluride, Colorado, and a home in Douglasville, Georgia.
Naturally, she has a $42 million private jet to travel between them too.
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