Lily Allen and David Harbour’s Breakup Townhouse Is for Sale

Lily Allen and David Harbour’s Cobble Hill townhouse is for sale. Maybe you knew this was coming, since Allen was quite candid about the place on her new breakup album. Singing about 381 Union Street, Allen explains: “Now I’m looking at houses with four or five floors / And you’ve found us a brownstone, said ‘You want it? It’s yours’ / So we went ahead and we bought it / Found ourselves a good mortgage / Billy Cotton got sorted / All the furniture ordered / I could never afford this / You were pushing it forward / Made me feel a bit awkward.”

Then, there’s the 2023 home tour they gave Architectural Digest, which is cringe, in retrospect; showing the couple bickering over every décor choice so thoroughly they don’t seem to agree at all about anything and certainly not about wall-to-wall tiger-stripe carpet. “That’s a little crazy,” Harbour says of Allen’s choice. Two couches, positioned to face away from each other, are ideal, they agree, for arguing.

The house is now for sale for $7.995 million — more than double the $3.5 million that the two paid in 2021 when they were just newlyweds who had met on Raya and eloped to Vegas. That price may take into account the neighborhood’s hot streak or the cash they poured in to the Billy Cotton renovation she name-checked. Before their arrival, the place had been with one owner for decades and had bad wall-to-wall carpet, cheap beige tiles in the kitchen, and old cabinets, according to the 2020 listing. Cue Cotton. The designer put in custom cabinetry, new moldings, and lots of fussy wallpaper from Zuber. There’s print, print, and more print. A bathroom features custom faucets modeled to look like little swans. Harbour called the designer “budget un-conscious” in the AD tour.

A listing photo shows a sitting area with couches positioned facing away from each other, which Allen and Harbour joked about in an Architectural Digest video, suggesting it’s the perfect setup for an argument.
Photo: Compass

As for whose idea it really was, Cotton told AD, “Lily is the one who really set the tone and drove the program,” he said. “Every time I tried to make it calmer, she kept pushing and pushing for more.” And even Allen admitted, at the time, that he tried to stop her. “Billy would say, ‘You know, this is a little crazy,’ or he’d bring up resale value,” she told AD. “But this is our home.” Or was.

The listing photo of the media room shows the tiger-print carpet, which Harbour doesn’t love, and some of the expensive custom moves that they both seem to lament, including a lacquer ceiling.
Photo: Compass

A listing photo shows a kitchen that Cotton told AD was based on the neighborhood’s Italian history and made to look as if “they’d inherited the home from a kooky Italian nonna with fabulous taste.”
Photo: Compass