Nine years ago, the public got a peek at the interiors of Lena Dunham’s childhood home courtesy of her semi-autobiographical debut film Tiny Furniture, which was set in her parent’s Tribeca loft. Her relationship with real estate remains complicated.
Dunham’s first apartment, located in Brooklyn Heights and purchased for $500,000 in 2012, sold for $850,000 in 2017. In 2014, she bought another Brooklyn property with then-boyfriend Jack Antonoff: a four-bedroom, $4.8 million condo in the same neighborhood. By then, Dunham had also added a West Coast pad to the mix: a Greek Revival-style bungalow with a storied Hollywood history for $2.7 million.
“My man was afraid of dust. So we bid on an apartment that hadn’t even been built yet, and I spent the year making obsessive scrapbooks just like my mother made before me,” Dunham wrote in an essay for Domino Magazine. Later, “The last time I saw that apartment was when we agreed, with love, that someone had to go.”
Her next apartment purchase might qualify as textbook rebound behavior. Dunham purchased the three-bedroom, $2.9 million apartment within months of leaving the shared Brooklyn Heights condo. Within months, the place was up for sale for a marginal profit, at $3 million . It eventually found a buyer for $2.63 million. “I made a massive real-estate mistake, the kind that nightmares are made of,” she reflects in the essay. “I never moved in, and magazines wrote about it when I sold it at a loss.”
The story isn’t without a silver lining. In her new place—”a rental on the second floor facing the street, directly across from where a group of liberal arts students smoke and shout” that is “close enough to the art supply store”—she has finally found a home. [Domino] — Elizabeth Kiefer