Jennifer Lawrence House-Hunting in New York City

By Mark David

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Though she’s widely reported to own a house-sized condo in lower Manhattan that she may or may not have ever occupied, newly engaged leading lady Jennifer Lawrence and her art gallerist fiancé, Cooke Maroney, were recently spotted peeping around pricy apartments with a high-profile broker from Douglas Elliman Real Estate in some of downtown New York City’s most exclusive apartment houses.

In the early weeks of 2017, property gossip columns went wild when the Oscar-winner reportedly paid a bit more than $9 million for a 3,200-square-foot loft-style condo in a celebrity-packed and allegedly paparazzi-proof Tribeca building that, curiously enough, soon popped up as a luxury rental at $27,500 per month. And, someone in a position to know swears that for the past year or so she’s leased a high-floor condo in a luxury tower in an unfashionable pocket of the Upper East Side. So, since she doesn’t appear to want to live in the Tribeca condo and she’s shacked up in rented digs, it makes perfect celebrity real estate sense that she and Maroney would be looking for a new, more permanent and no doubt prodigiously expensive pad in which to begin their Big Apple married life together.

The “Joy” star, next to appear on the silver screen in the superhero film “Dark Phoenix,” also maintains a celeb-pedigreed Beverly Hills home tucked into a leafy enclave chock-a-block with entertainment industry A-listers. Previous owners of Lawrence’s home, which she snapped up in 2014 for a bit more than $8.2 million, include Ellen DeGeneres and Jessica Simpson, and some of the neighbors close enough for Lawrence’s assistant to pop over for a proverbial cup of sugar include Adele, Cameron Diaz and Katie Perry.