Your Mama Hears...

...(via the New York Observer) that Kanye West wants 4.5 million bucks for his Big Apple bachelor pad, a 2,300-ish square foot two unit combination crib in SoHo that he had decked out in austere, haute-minimalist style by maverick Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin in 2007. Property records we picked at and perused reveal he paid a total of $3,140,000 in two separate transactions for the fourth floor apartments.*

Mister West's East Coast pied-a-terre apparently popped up on a New York City-centric real estate listing service but quickly disappeared in—you got it—a proverbial New York minute. A subsequent report in today's New York Post reveals that the 21-time Grammy winner's top producing real estate agent hosted an invite-only open house yesterday for some of the city's top brokers. There are—not surprisingly—"more than a dozen" pair of high-cost sneakers in the master closet and—more surprisingly—several small statues that one broker who toured the space described to The Post look like "an angel, or a little boy Cupid." Oh dear.

Other high profile residents of the full-service building include actor Julianna Margulies and model/t.v. presenter Padma Lakshmi who records show paid nearly eight million clams for her two-unit penthouse pad in early 2012.

Mister West also owns a contemporary, art-filled residence in the Hollywood Hills he's been trying to unload on and off since at least May, 2010 when it was briefly on the open market for $3,995,000. The multi-story hillside house is currently priced at $3,150,000.

Mister West reportedly also maintains an apartment in Paris near his fashion world b.f.f. Riccardo Tisci, the very same Givenchy creative director who just bought a West Village townhouse from high brow performance artist Marina Abramovic and with whom Mister West has been salaciously rumored to share something more than just Platonic. Whatever the case—and who cares, really?—the tabloids and celebrity gossip blogs went berserk this week with unconfirmed reports that the newly divorced Miz Kardashian has agreed to live in Paris with her baby daddy for at least three months after the birth of their bundle of joy. Hard to believe her mother/manager would allow that, but K.K. is a grown woman, and can do what she likes right? Anyways...

In February (2013), Mister West's soon-to-be baby momma Kim Kardashian shelled out $9,000,000 for a 9,000 square foot faux-Tuscan/mock-Med mish-mosh macmansion in the guard gated Bel Air Crest community in Los Angeles. Call us a cynic—and we've certainly been called worse—but Your Mama can't imagine Mister West, a man who fancies he has posh and cutting edge taste, actually living in such a downright ordinary macmansion any more than we imagine our mean ol' pussy cat Sugar speaks Cantonese. We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.

*Mister West bought the first and larger of the two apartments in December 2004 for $1,890,000 and the smaller adjacent unit in February 2006 for $1,250,000.

photos: Claudio Silvestrin