She climbed her way back to the top of the pop charts, but nothing's more
satisfying to Mariah Carey than coming home to her penthouse pad in Manhattan.
It would be difficult to describe the past year as anything short of a triumph
for Mariah Carey. Her album The Emancipation of Mimi was the best-selling CD of
2005, won her three Grammys (she now has five), and helped the 37-year-old
singer tie Elvis for the second most number-one singles (17) of all time. But
Carey also staged a miraculous comeback on the domestic front: overhauling her
12,000-square-foot Manhattan triplex after a water tower burst, soaking much of
her elaborately hand-painted, antiques-laden, chandelier-strung abode.
"Everything was perfect and then - whammo! Talk about a leak!" says Carey's
interior designer, the renowned N.Y.C. decorator Mario Buatta. "All the
furniture had to be taken out and put into storage, every wall had to be
repainted, the baseboards had to be ripped out - the place had to be completely
redone. It was a nightmare."
A garden-variety superstar might have lost her cool, but Carey, who rented a
house in Bel-Air while the damage was being repaired, didn't get all worked up
over the matter. After a few difficult years she's in a good place - literally
and figuratively - and on this balmy March evening she's utterly relaxed in her
newly dressed-up digs, despite being more than an hour late for a flight to L.A.
The plane isn't going anywhere without her, though: It belongs to movie mogul
Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sent it to fly her to his Oscar party, at which she has
agreed to perform. "Remember, Mariah, it's not your plane," her personal
assistant anxiously reminds her. "Oh, right," Carey replies nonchalantly. "I
forgot."
Downtime is so precious to Carey that it's easy for her to overlook such
relative trifles. But as far as her over-the-top image is concerned, she is
always ready to have a good laugh at her own expense. "The greatest thing about
this apartment is that it's the first place I've owned by myself, so it's all
me," she says. "If someone else ever bought it, she'd have to be a total diva!"
Plush sofas, taffeta curtains and hallways dripping with glittering sconces make
the triplex "art deco-y and Old Hollywoodish, the kind of place I dreamed about
having when I was little." After her parents divorced, when she was 3, Carey and
her siblings grew up living with their mother in 13 successive houses on Long
Island, which left her feeling "like a rug was literally being pulled out from
under me. I remember saying to myself, 'I want to have a good life and feel
secure,' I had to have faith. That's how I got over every obstacle along the way
- by visualizing and believing in something better."
During the early years of her career, Carey married music-industry titan Tommy
Mottola and had a taste of the world she once could only imagine, living on a
majestic 50-acre estate outside N.Y.C. (the couple later divorced).
"Unfortunately this was a time when all I was allowed to do was sit there and
pick out sconces," she says. "I can still spend hours talking about door
handles." A remnant from that era, which sparked her passion for interior
design, now anchors her informal family room: an ornate, hand-carved cherry
mantelpiece featuring flowers, hearts and her trademark emblem, a butterfly.
"This piece took two and a half years to finish," Carey says. "It's a little
garish, but I love it because of what the butterfly represents: freedom."
Both extravagant and comfortable, Carey's apartment reflects her hard-won
maturity and independence in almost every corner. Hallmarks include glazed peach
walls (they required eight coats of paint), a marble steam room with a waterbed
(the humidity is good for her voice), and a brand-new Marrakech-inspired
solarium that looks like something out of Arabian Nights. "After my roof garden
is finished and I put a hot tub out there, I'm going to call this room Chez
Mimi," she says, referring to her nickname. "I won't go to smoky clubs anymore.
I'll party with my posse here, and we'll watch the sun rise."
Surprisingly, her biggest indulgence looks anything but: a chipped white baby
grand piano, which set her back $662,500 at a Christie's auction of Marilyn
Monroe memorabilia. "I could have gotten the 'Happy Birthday, Mr. President'
dress or whatever," Carey says, "but that would have represented Marilyn
Monroe's stardom, whereas the piano belonged to her mother and was a piece of
her childhood." The singer identifies strongly with the often misunderstood icon
and has even accessorized one of her bathrooms with photographs of the star and
other mementos. "She had such a childlike quality," adds Carey, who tends to
embrace her own youthful impulses more often than not. Her fans love to send her
stuffed animals, butterfly figurines and Hello Kitty keepsakes; she has created
a sort of shrine to the latter in another small bathroom. "Lindsay Lohan, Sean
Lennon and I had a jam session in there the other night. They were obsessed with
my Hello Kitty bathroom."
If the apartment has a pulsing heart, though, it is most certainly the family
room. When Carey's father died of cancer in 2002, he left behind dozens of
family photos that she had framed and hung from pink ribbons on the walls. Other
inherited pieces include a flag from his stint in the army, cards that she had
given him as a young girl, and her grandmother's pink hand mirror, which has a
yellow butterfly painted on it. "My father was going to give the mirror to me as
a birthday gift, but then he passed away," Carey recalls. "He had saved all
kinds of things for me, and I never knew it. I never knew he cared about me like
that. This is the stuff that really matters."
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