Actress Naomi Watts, up for an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in The Impossible, and her Tony-winning actor husband, Liev Schreiber, made real estate headlines last year when they finally settled on a permanent home in NYC. After a long house hunt, the couple purchased a rough-hewn loft at Tribeca's 427 Washington Street for $3.95M. The 4,300-square-foot raw space was delivered as two independent units, which the couple had planned on combining, but less than a year later, the pair were said to have decamped to L.A. At least the commute to Sunday's awards ceremony will be a bit shorter.
? Actress Anne Hathaway, who is nominated for her role as the gaunt Fantine in Les Misérables, settled on a home with her husband in Brooklyn, choosing a rental at Dumbo's famous clocktower building at 1 Main Street. Hathaway moved in last March and is paying around $6,000 a month for the one-bedroom unit, which boasts a modern chef's kitchen, sweeping views of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a home office. Plenty nice, but a far cry from the $37,000-per-month rental she once occupied with then-boyfriend and current convicted con artist Raffaello Follieri.
? A lion of the silver screen and a pioneer of Manhattan's once-decrepit, now-glamorous Tribeca neighborhood, Robert De Niro doesn't have much to prove to anyone at this point. He has already won two Oscars and he's up for another on Sunday for his work in Silver Linings Playbook. He owns or co-owns plenty of New York real estate, so chopping the price of his West Village townhouse to $9.5M from the $14M he was initially asking probably wasn't much of a hit. Best of all, De Niro's son landed the commission on the sale, so at least $285K is headed back into the family coffers.
? Months before the release of Zero Dark Thirty brought near instant stardom and her second Oscar nod—the first came last year, for The Help—Jessica Chastain was spotted checking out a two-bedroom garden apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Despite an asking price of $1.15M, the simple apartment looked entirely inappropriate for a movie star. Why? Well for one, the master bedroom's ground-floor windows face the street, rendering Chastain an easy target for paparazzi.
? Producer Megan Ellison is nominated for Zero Dark Thirty, but if she is far from a household name for her film work, she's quickly gaining notoriety in the real estate world. Upon settling in L.A., Ellison scooped up three adjacent properties in the Birds—a tony neighborhood named for its avian-inspired street names—for $36M. This year, she momentarily decided that she didn't need all three, and listed one for $15.5M. After it failed to sell, she pulled it from the market. After all, that sort of sale is minor when compared to her father's $500M purchase of an entire Hawaiian island.
· 427 Washington #2EW [Streeteasy]
· West Coast move for Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber [NY Post]
· Exile on 1 Main Street: Anne Hathaway Moves to Dumbo [Curbed NY]
· Robert De Niro Finally Sells West Village House for $9.5M [Curbed NY]
· Actress Jessica Chastain May Be 'Help'-ing Out Paparazzi [Curbed NY]
· Curbed's Whale of the Day: Megan Ellison [Curbed National]