After nearly a year on the market at declining prices, Wendy “How your doin’” Williams has sold her suburban home in Livingston, N.J., about 20 miles due west of Midtown Manhattan, for $1.475 million. Unfortunately for the feisty and sometimes controversial chat show diva, divorced earlier this year from second husband Kevin Hunter after it was revealed he’d fathered a child with another woman, the sale price is well below the not quite $1.9 million it was originally priced and, even more deflating, more than $600,000 below the $2.1 million she paid in 2009.
Behind gates at the head of a horseshoe drive on just over three-quarters-of-an-acre of landscaped grounds, the three-story home spans more than 5,700 square feet with another 2,500 square feet of finished basement space. The home’s five bedrooms and four full and two half bathrooms include a main floor homeowner’s retreat replete with private sitting room, two huge walk-in closets and a marble bathroom complete with steam shower.
A spacious if otherwise unprepossessing suburban home on the outside, some of the interior spaces make valiant efforts to present a bit of glitz and glamour. The double height foyer aims for aristocratic with a glossy, black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, an office/library sports floor-to-ceiling cherry wood bookcases and tiger-patterned wall-to-wall carpeting, and there are at least three dainty crystal chandeliers in the chef-accommodating kitchen, four if you add the one in the adjoining breakfast nook. A handful of formal and informal living rooms and entertainment lounges are sprinkled throughout the house, and include a second floor den under a massive skylight and a vast space in the basement with an office-like dropped ceiling and a wet bar.
The driveway heads around the side the of the house where there’s garaging for four cars, and, at the back of the house, a sprawling stone terrace amid mature plantings gives way to a great sweep of lawn that stretches out to a dense wooded greenbelt. A sport court is partly surrounded by practical if unsightly chain-link fencing.
The property was listed with Jamie Silverman at Coldwell Banker Realty, who also represented the buyers.
Williams, who plans to resume taping her long-running daytime talk show on September 21st, moved out of the house last year and, according to Velvet Ropes, in to a $15,000 per month apartment in lower Manhattan’s Financial District. The 2,400-square-foot two-floor unit was reported to have three bedrooms, three bathrooms and pretty views of the Hudson River.