The famous NYC townhouse owned by Lily Allen and David Harbour has been listed for sale just days after the release of ‘West End Girl’.
The new record arrived on Friday (October 24) via BMG and marked Allen’s first new album in seven years – following on from 2018’s ‘No Shame’.
In the tracklist, the singer opened up about her split with husband, Stranger Things star David Harbour, and made numerous references to the alleged infidelity of her husband during their marriage.
Allen and Harbour began dating in 2019 after meeting on the dating app Raya, and tied the knot in an intimate Las Vegas ceremony in September 2020.
Now, their townhouse in New York City has been listed for sale, after being referenced multiple times throughout the devastating album.
The late 19th-century brownstone is located in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and was bought by the couple for $3.35 million (£2 million) in 2021. The five-bedroom, four-bathroom property is now listed for sale at $8 million (£6 million).
In ‘West End Girl’, Allen refers to the home in the title track and suggested that she felt uncomfortable as her partner pushed to buy the property. “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’,” she sings.
Later, in the song ‘Pussy Palace’, she sings about finding out that the West Village apartment owned by her partner – which she thought was a workspace – may actually have been used for affairs.
“I didn’t know it was your pussy palace,”’ read the lyrics. “I always thought it was a dojo.”
Allen moved to New York to live with her partner, and is now believed to have moved back to London with her two daughters. She and Harbour are believed to have split in February this year, and filed for divorce in September.
The brownstone in Brooklyn was renovated with interior designer Billy Cotton and architect Ben Bischoff (via Elle), and went viral in 2023 when Allen and Harbour gave Architectural Digest a look inside.
The video, which now stands at 8.2million views on YouTube, saw Harbour praise his then-wife’s style and vision for the home. “Lily is someone who lives with colour in a deeper way than most. Her taste is bold, silly, fun, eccentric,’ he said at the time.
Around the time of the album release, Allen opened up about how it was inspired by her “deep-rooted issues with rejection and abandonment” after a divorce. She also explained how the separation affected her wellbeing, and threatened her sobriety.
Soon after, a woman came forward claiming to have had an affair with Harbour during his marriage to the singer and actor, and suggested that she may be the ‘Madeline’ referenced throughout the record.
Despite her claims, Allen insisted in an interview with The Sunday Times that the song ‘Madeline’ is a fictional character who is a “construct of others”.
‘West End Girl’ was given a four-star review from NME, and praised as “a sleek, smart collection that sees Allen back at her very best”.
“As you’d expect from her most ‘vulnerable’ album, there’s a lot of grief and misery across ‘West End Girl’, but it never sounds depressing,” it read. “Since ‘Smile’, Allen’s always had a knack for making devastation sound exciting.
“There’s rage behind the pulsating ‘Ruminating’ as she struggles with the realities of an open marriage, playful other woman anthem ‘Madeline’ is a dizzying cocktail of uncertainty, fury and empathy, while the gorgeous ‘Just Enough’ is as crushing as it gets, heartbreak amplified by lush strings. It feels like a much-needed purge.”
