Real estate reporter (and former celebrity property gossip) Bob Goldsborough at The Chicago Tribune revealed today in his Elite Street column that daytime chat show hostess and media mogul Oprah Winfrey has put one of her Chicago condominiums up for sale with a $2,800,000 price tag.

Not only did Miz Winfrey pay $5,600,000 for the full-floor, lake-view spread in Chicago's upscale Streeterville 'hood in 2006, she never even moved in, put it out for lease last year at fifteen grand a month and now she's willing to take a multi-million dollar loss just to get rid of the damn thing.

The new and current price means that even if someone comes along and pays the billionairess the full $2,800,000 asking price, she's still facing a $2,800,000 loss not counting carrying costs, taxes, maintenance charges and real estate fees. Not that she can't afford such a loss, but still a multi-million dollar loss is a mulit-million dollar loss even if it is just couch-cushion change for a billionaire like Miz Winfrey.

Your Mama has dissed and discussed the 13-room sprawler that spreads out over 4,607 square feet on the sixth floor of a beauteous Beaux Arts building. Iffin yer innerested in our thoughts about the apartment you can go here (with photographs and floor plan) and/or here and/or here.

Miz Winfrey has long-owned a multi-unit combination duplex atop Water Tower Place in Chicago but since her television network (OWN) is headquartered in Los Angeles she accordingly spends more and more of her time farther west at The Promised Land, her 40-acre estate in Montecito (CA) and her farm in Hawaii.

Your Mama imagines if the lady can indeed make this network of hers work for the long haul she'll snatch up a private and pricey bolt hole in Los Angeles where she can stay when she doesn't feel like shacking up in a 5-star hotel or commuting back and forth to The Promised Land via chauffeured car or helicopter. We shall see, kittens, we shall see.

listing photo:

BUYER: Lena Dunham
LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY (Cobble Hill)
PRICE: $500,000
SIZE: (approximately) 800 square feet, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: A little birdie in Brooklyn chirped to Your Mama that up-and-coming filmmaker, screenwriter and actress Lena Dunham recently bought her first bachelorette pad apartment in the tony and genteel Brooklyn Heights 'hood just across the murky East River from lower Manhattan.

A brief but none-the-less exhausting search of the interweb indicates the Brooklyn Heights apartment picked up by Miss Dunham in mid-March (2012) wasn't on the open market but property records and other online documentation do reveal she coughed up $500,000 for an approximately 800 square foot, 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom co-operative apartment on the top floor of Mansion House, a large and dignified, pre-war doorman building just around the corner from the Clark Street subway station on a fairly narrow but urbanely charming tree-lined street. Unfortunately for the curious, that's about all the details we have about Miss Dunham's new digs.

Twenty six year old Miss Dunham created and currently stars as the endearingly clunky, slightly zaftig and hardly employed Hannah Horvath on the Judd Apatow-produced coming-of-age comedy Girls, a smart and hipsterish (if a weensy bit precious) boob-toob send up of early Sex and The City without all the Manolos and shiny Tinseltown tinsel.

Before Girls Miss Dunham earned accolades and attention for writing and starring in the quirky, 2010 feature-length film Tiny Furniture, a sort of semi-autobiographical story of an unsatisfied recent graduate of a liberal arts college in the Midwest who moves back in to her mother's loft in New York City's TriBeCa neighborhood. Miss Dunham, dontcha know, graduated from Oberlin and comes by her creative bent quite genetically as the older daughter of accomplished Pictures Generation artist Laurie Simmons and (orifice-obsessed) painter Carroll Dunham who live—you got it—in a big ol' loft in TriBeCa, the very same loft, as it turns out, featured in Tiny Furniture.

We expect more (and probably increasingly mainstream) films and television programs will be created by Miss Dunham and with her fast-tracked climb up the Showbiz ladder of fame and fortune Your Mama anticipates Miss Dunham will make a real estate upgrade in 2-3 years. Then again, what do we know? We shall see, butter beans, we shall see.

exterior photo: Google

SELLER: Not A Celebrity
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $11,995,000
SIZE: 13,250 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen chickens, Your Mama feels like veering a little off track this afternoon. Instead of our customary celebrity real estate fare we're gonna have a wee look-see at Artemesia, a wet-your-pants-with-awe Craftsman-style architectural tour de force privately positioned on 1.79 acres in the hills above Hollywood and newly listed with an asking price of $11,995,000.

Listing information shows the hulking but achingly elegant and intricately articulated main house—the largest Craftsman-style house in the U.S., built in 1913 and painstakingly restored and upgraded over the last 25 years by its businessman owner—measures in at 13,250 square feet with 7 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms.

A long, gated drive passes though a porte-cochere, wraps around the front of the house and continues up the hillside to a detached and deliciously stodgy red brick structure with a garage on the lower level and additional living space above for guests or live-in domestic staff.

Numerous terraces and deep, shaded porches surround the house and give way to thickly wooded hillside grounds laced with pathways and dotted with water falls and ponds.

Rather than prattle on endlessly as we're want to do most of the time, we're just gonna leave y'all to gasp, drool and weep with real estate envy. We suggest you take special note of the ceiling treatments in the formal living and dining rooms; the built-in pipe organ in the living room; the 6 enormous Batchelder tile fireplaces; the roller rink-sized ballroom on the lowest level with full bar and the stoutest of stout columns; the intricate, artisanal carpentry throughout; the barrel-vaulted, green-tiled bathroom with step-down shower; and the kill-me-now-we're-in-heaven sleeping porch with Murphy bed.

P.S. Lots more photos to pore over here and here. The swooniest of the listing snaps can be perused here.

listing photos: Michael McNamara (Shooting LA) for  Keller Williams Beverly Hills