[Alec Baldwin voice] "Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th year," but you can rent it right now.
The iconic home from Wes Anderson's 2001 film is on the market, fully furnished, for $20,000/month. BYO-Scalamandre wallpaper, because it doesn't appear anywhere in the listing photos.
When The Royal Tenenbaums was released, the director and Citi Bicycle enthusiast told the Observer, "We spent months searching for different houses. It needed to be a New York house that wasn’t stereotypical, and where you’d have a real strong sense of family history." Before the script was even done, he found the Archer Avenue house, which in reality is at 339 Convent Avenue (at 144th Street) in Harlem's Hamilton Heights. "[It] kinda has a storybook quality to it," Anderson said.
The 8,000-square-foot mansion was vacant when Anderson and his team spotted it, but had just been purchased by Willie Woods for $460,000. He allowed Anderson to rent it for 6 months before starting his own renovations on it.
Long before Anderson's dysfunctional family (who summered on City Island) moved in, it was home to U.S. attorney Charles H. Tuttle, and "several illustrious New York personalities, such as Fiorello LaGuardia and James Russel Parson, were regular guests."
There are six bedrooms, 4.5 baths, a butler kitchen, a chef's kitchen, hidden cigarettes, six fireplaces, an elevator, and over 50 windows. It is also conveniently located near the A/B/C/D stop at 145th Street, but if you're living there, hopefully your mode of transportation is a bit more whimsical and includes a sidecar with Bill Murray as a permanent fixture.
The Royal Tenenbaums is getting a 20th-anniversary screening at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, with a post-screening reunion Q&A session with Anderson and much of the cast (including Alec Baldwin, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, and Danny Glover).
