Anne Hathaway's Former Homes in Manhattan and Westport

Anne Hathaway, the Oscar winner for Les Misérables, and her husband, Adam Shulman, bought two East Coast homes in 2016, ten months apart, and have since sold both. One was a co-op apartment in an early-1900s row house on Manhattan's Upper West Side, which they kept for five years. The other was a 1920 house in Westport, Connecticut, which they kept for two, and which the press did not notice they owned until a year after they bought it. The thatched cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon that also turns up under her name belonged to the family of Shakespeare's wife, a different Anne Hathaway.

The Manhattan apartment was the longer stay, from January 2016 to the spring of 2021. Anne Hathaway's former Upper West Side apartment has a page of its own, with the purchase and the sale.

A co-op in a historic district

The row house was built for one family and stands inside one of the city's historic districts, so no owner can change its street front without the approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It is now a co-op. Residents of a co-op do not own their apartments outright: they own shares in the corporation that owns the building, which is why the Hathaways' purchase and sale appear on New York City's property register as transfer tax filings and never as deeds.

Bought from an estate, sold without a headline

The purchase closed in January 2016 and the filing was recorded in February, which is why the coverage at the time dated it to February. The sellers on the filing are the estate of the previous owner, acting through its executrix. The buyers are Adam and Anne Shulman, the name she uses on property records.

The couple had the apartment redone by Gramercy Design. When it went up for sale in February 2020, as Hello Magazine reported, a blog post from Sotheby's International Realty, the couple's broker, quoted Gramercy Design saying it had “painstakingly replicated mouldings and period architecture” to suit the building's origins. Sotheby's put the move down to space, since the family needed more room after their second child arrived.

The sale came 14 months later, and the outlets that had covered the apartment going on the market did not follow it up. The transfer tax return, filed in the spring of 2021, lists Adam and Anne Shulman as sellers of their whole interest in the apartment, to a private buyer we are not naming.

Westport, and the deed that came a year early

On November 26, 2017, Dan Woog's Westport blog, 06880, passed along a Page Six report that the couple had bought a house in town, then added a line that turned out to be the interesting part. A search of recent real estate transactions, he wrote, “did not turn up a sale to either the award-winning actress or her husband.” Variety ran its own report of the purchase the next day.

Woog was right that there was no recent sale. The town's property card shows why: the house had changed hands a year earlier, on November 18, 2016, by a deed to a trustee rather than to either of them by name. Two things tie that deed to the couple. Its price matches the figure Variety reported, to the dollar, and Variety's follow-up in November 2018 put the purchase a little over two years back. A trust keeps the buyer's own name off the town's land records, so a search by name in 2017 had nothing to find.

The 2019 version of this page dated the Westport purchase to December 2017, following the press reports; the deed puts it in November 2016. That version also repeated an unsourced line about the couple moving on to a larger waterfront house in the area. It never had a source, so it is gone.

The town card itself and the 2018 sale are filed with Hathaway's former Westport house.

Westport's assessor dates the house to 1920 and calls it a custom Cape, while Variety and Cottages & Gardens both called it a Colonial. It stands on nearly an acre with a barn and a pool. Variety described the pool house as a 1920s barn-style building with a loft and a cathedral ceiling, and a living room that opened through French doors onto a formal English garden. They sold it on November 1, 2018, in a private deal that never came to market, and Variety put the couple's loss at $90,000 before carrying costs, improvements and agent fees. The town card agrees on the date and on the gap between the two prices.