Bridget Read

New York

Features Writer at Curbed

features @nymag proud @nyguild tips [email protected] pre-order LITTLE BOSSES EVERYWHERE from @CrownPublishing, out on May 6 2025 ⬇️

Articles

How One Woman Lost $75,000 Working for MLM Company Mary Kay

1 week ago | thecut.com | Bridget Read

Illustration: María Jesús Contreras When Monique looks back on the night she decided to join Mary Kay, she remembers being hungry. She was thirty-six in 2013, fresh out of the United States Air Force after sixteen years, and living in Tallahassee, Florida, where she knew almost no one. She was sleeping fifteen hours a day in her small, hot apartment, subsisting off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spending more money on food for her ninety-pound bulldog than on herself.
Timothée Chalamet’s Mom Takes Us Apartment Hunting

3 weeks ago | curbed.com | Bridget Read

Showing Apartment 17A at 1600 Broadway. It’s a rainy, gray March afternoon, not the optimal time to see a midtown apartment 17 floors above the Times Square M&M’s store. “It normally gets great light,” Nicole Flender says to the potential buyers, an Italian couple looking for a Manhattan pied-à-terre. They peer out the unit’s windows, a giant neon Krispy Kreme sign shining through the fog.
Apartment Hunting With Timothée Chalamet’s Mother

3 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Bridget Read

NowCNN — Like many American manufacturers, Tesla is caught in a bind thanks to President Donald Trump’s trade war. Unlike most of those other companies, though, Tesla has an added wrinkle – its CEO, Elon Musk, sometimes called the First Buddy for the close relationship he’s cultivated with the president. …
A Small English Village Is Furious at Kelsey Grammer

4 weeks ago | curbed.com | Bridget Read

Portishead is furious with Kelsey Grammer. No, not that Portishead — the English village of Portishead, a little town in the idyllic countryside of Somerset, where Grammer purchased a 200-year-old cottage in 2023. The Frasier star has just been given permission to knock the cottage down, and the villagers are incensed.
West Villagers Really Don’t Want This Private Padel Club

2 months ago | curbed.com | Bridget Read

Every action has a reaction, and every niche rich-person racket-sport club in New York prompts neighborhood backlash. In the past few years, anti-pickleball vigilantes have waged war in Brooklyn Heights, on the Upper East Side, and in the West Village. Now, West Villagers are taking yet another stand, this time against the impending arrival of a new private club at 120 Leroy Street: a would-be spa-slash-restaurant-slash-bar-slash–padel court.
Of Course There Will Be a Bravo Hotel

2 months ago | curbed.com | Bridget Read

A recession may be on the horizon, and the stock market is tanking, but reality star Lisa Vanderpump’s hospitality empire is apparently booming. Vanderpump, the Bravo matriarch, announced on Wednesday that next year she’ll be opening the Vanderpump Hotel in Las Vegas, renovating and rebranding a boutique hotel off the strip called the Cromwell in her pink-bedazzled-fedora-wearing image.
Everything We Know About the Case Against the Alexander Brothers

2 months ago | curbed.com | Bridget Read

Oren, Alon, and Tal Alexander were powerful, successful brothers who seemed to be on top of the world before June 2024. Oren and Tal were two of the country’s top luxury real-estate brokers. Their brother Alon was an executive at their family’s security firm. All three were handsome fixtures on the party scenes in Manhattan and Miami. Then the news broke that they had been accused by two women of rape and sexual assault. Another lawsuit followed. And the floodgates opened.
Spencer Pratt, After the Los Angeles Fires

Feb 11, 2025 | thecut.com | Bridget Read

Photo: Courtesy of the subject On a beach in Santa Barbara, the former reality-TV star Spencer Pratt is sipping a skinny margarita and recounting how he and his wife, fellow reality veteran Heidi Montag, lost everything. His son Gunner’s art, Montag’s collection of Hermès espresso cups. His own collection of crystals. His hummingbird sanctuary. His chargers. His gym equipment. The giant Martin Schoeller portraits of Pratt and Montag that once hung in their living room.
Rent Gouging Has Made the L.A. Housing Market ‘Like Mad Max’

Jan 15, 2025 | curbed.com | Bridget Read

Realtors Gita Vasseghi and Melea Avrach started hearing from clients looking for temporary housing as early as January 7, the day the Los Angeles fires began. Based on the East Side of the city, they quickly began helping friends, friends of friends, and desperate cold callers displaced from the massive Eaton fire in Altadena. But just as soon as they mobilized, something else started happening: Prices started going up.
Does the World Need Another Real-Estate Reality Show?

Jan 15, 2025 | curbed.com | Bridget Read

encounter Eleonora Srugo, friend to Mayor Adams and star of Netflix’s new Selling the City, thinks so. Noho is rainy and gray, but Eleonora Srugo’s tan is a deep ocher. We’re standing in the entrance to 40 Bleecker, a brick-and-glass luxury building, waiting to visit one of her clients in his multimillion-dollar condo.