Bespectacled food expert Ted Allen, the onetime Chicago Magazine senior editor who vaulted to national fame as one of the five cast members on Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” has sold his five-room, 2,258-square-foot condo loft in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood for a reported $2.75 million and has said he plans to renovate a brownstone in Brooklyn, according to the New York Observer.
We have no reason to doubt Allen, who along with his partner, interior designer Barry Rice, paid $1,895,000 in 2004, according to public records, for the three-bedroom condo at 245 7th Street in the predominantly gay Chelsea area. However, neither the sale of his loft nor the purchase of anything in Brooklyn has appeared in public records just yet. Still, it’s been very clear that Allen, 41, recently had listed the Chelsea unit. Features in the “square shaped Sun-flooded corner loft” include a newly renovated kitchen “custom designed and built for a celebrity chef,” along with stainless steel Viking appliances, a six-burner stovetop, two electric convection ovens, a microwave oven, a warming drawer, two dishwashers, a 150-bottle, three-zone wine cellar and kitchen counters that are custom cut quartz composite, according to listing information.
The rest of the loft has no shortage of features either, including a media room with 5.1 channel surround sound speakers and two winged bedrooms that have been newly renovated.
Back when they were in Chicago, Allen and Rice sold their single-family house in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood in the summer of 2004 for $760,000 to former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, who now is based in Chicago and heading the Congress for the New Urbanism. The couple had bought that house in 2000 for $485,000, according to public records. We will keep you posted on where Allen and Rice wind up in Brooklyn, along with details if available. “At this stage of the game, the stuff I want to do has less to do with 24-hour craziness and nightclubs than having a great private space,” Allen told the Observer. Read the story here.