Gwyneth\'d5s Kid Brother Buys \'d4Lusty Victorian Flat\'d5 for $2.12 M.

The New York Observer, July 17th, 2007

If New York City still looked like an Edith Wharton novel, with women in big dresses settling down with men in tall hats, photographer Taryn Simon and filmmaker Jake Paltrow (son of Blythe, brother of Gwyneth) would be a dandy 30-ish power couple.

Late last month they bought a six-room, 125-year-old co-op at The Portsmouth on West Ninth Street, a place with fluffy drapes and a chandelier or two, according to a marketing snapshot. City records show the couple paid $2.125 million to a seller named Julie Goldsmith Rosenberg.

The building’s apartments, according to the AIA Guide to New York City, are “lusty Victorian flats.” It’s a showbiz kind of Village place: In advertisements, Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Pamela Huson, who happens to be an ex-model and actress, said the spread was featured in an Ed Burns movie (and on a House Beautiful cover). So naturally it has a scenic wood-burning fireplace and a big master-bedroom suite, but also “great closet space.”

Incidentally, Mr. Paltrow’s upcoming debut feature, The Good Night, is (partially) set in the neighborhood. Danny DeVito apparently plays a “post-Beat-era Greenwich Village idealist,” plus there’s Penélope Cruz, The Office’s Martin Freeman and Gwyneth, too. (As the Rush & Molloy gossip column pointed out recently, the siblings luckily now live “just a jog” from one another.)

Will Ms. Simon put up her photographs in the 19th-century co-op? Until last month she had a show at the Whitney, called “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar”—weighty and handsome portraiture of cryo-preservation and seized contraband and nuclear waste.

Generous Gwyneth has said in interviews that her London walls include “a little Jasper Johns” and Helmut Newton and “my brother’s girlfriend, Taryn Simon.”