Their primary bedroom, meant to evoke a luxurious hotel suite, is perhaps the most seductive space of all, enrobed in tones of silvery gray from the plush wall-to-wall carpet to the wall niche hand-gilded in silver leaf. Vintage sconces, salvaged from a decommissioned ocean liner, cast a romantic glow. “It’s so nice, sometimes I will come home and lie right on the floor,” Ripa admits.
The top floor marks a deliberate departure from the house’s predominantly Deco aesthetic. Here, the media room (a.k.a. Consuelos’s cigar room, “Bar 5”) channels a more hedonistic 1970s vibe with deep blue lacquered walls, a fiber-optic cocktail table, and artwork hung salon-style. The pièce de résistance is a backlit bar nook, curtained in midnight-blue velvet with a whimsical painted cigarette motif overhead. “What’s so ironic,” notes Ripa, is that “Mark doesn’t allow cigarette smoking.”
“Because I hate the smell of cigarettes!” Consuelos avers. “By the way, we installed an amazing ventilation system,” Ripa adds. “You would never know anyone ever smoked in here.”
Now, with their youngest son, Joaquin, a senior in college, the couple has entered their empty-nesting phase. But they’ve kept the kids’ rooms almost exactly as they left them, all the more to encourage visits. And they themselves have no plans to ever leave. “I don’t want to sound morbid,” says Ripa, “but they’ll have to carry me out of here feetfirst because I have gotten good and comfortable in this house.”
This article on Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos’s home appears in AD’s January issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
