Lifestyle of the Glamorous: Vanity Fair Editor Radhika Jones’s 5-Bedroom Home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Radhika Jones, the Indian American editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, has “quietly” purchased a renovated four-story townhouse in Brooklyn, New York, the New York Post reported, citing city Department of Finance records. According to the Post, Jones and her husband, Max Petersen, who closed the property in the Cobble Hill section of the borough, “spent $6.25 million” for the five-bedroom home. The property was put on the market in July.

The Post goes on the describe the home with its “1854 brick façade, ironwork and cornice.” Inside, the home has “19th-century details,” the Post notes, including “floral crown moldings and wide-plank flooring.” The home additionally “has central air, a kitchen with a bold marble island that opens to a dining area and, through glass doors, a deck and a south-facing garden,” the Post notes.

The new owners “also have a parlor-level living room with a wood burning fireplace,” along with a marble mantel and 11-foot ceilings. Other highlights of the home are two bedrooms on the third floor and “an open play/study space as well as a room that can be used as a third bedroom or a home office,” the primary suite on the top floor, “featuring beamed ceilings, a dressing room and a bathroom with a double vanity, a freestanding claw-foot tub and a shower near a skylight,” and a room at the garden level, “which can be separated into its own apartment,” with a media room and its own kitchen.

A graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities, Jones previously held senior roles at the New York Times, the Paris Review and Time.

As the daughter of an American father and an Indian mother, Jones, 44, mostly grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. On The New York Times website, Jones once wrote, “I might define myself as an American writer, but to others, I will always be an Indian-American writer.”

On The New York Times website, Jones once wrote, “I might define myself as an American writer, but to others, I will always be an Indian-American writer.” 

A Twitter post on Aug. 1, 2012, indicates that her parents eloped in Paris. “42 years ago my parents eloped in Paris. Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad!” her tweet says, accompanied by a photo of her father, folk musician Robert L. Jones, wearing a suit while her mother wears a sari and holds a bouquet.

One can also get glimpses of Jones’ personal life through her writing, however. In a two-part series, she wrote for The Paris Review in September 2010, “A Week in Culture,” she mentions that she grew up in Cincinnati but visited New York City every summer. She also indicates that her parents live in Connecticut and so do her sister, author Nalini Jones (“What You Call Winter”), her brother-in-law and her nieces.

She mentions spending time with her father watching “Foyle’s War.” “It’s about a detective based in a small town on the southern coast of England during World War II; he solves crimes against the backdrop of the expected German invasion,” she wrote. The diary also talks about her husband Max, to whom she introduces “Foyle’s War” over some popcorn.

Jones also informs us that during that time she learned the bhangra. She said she started taking the class with her friend Sailaja about six years earlier (roughly 2004). “We had no dance background, and I have the flexibility of a No. 2 pencil. But our teacher, Ambika, is brilliant and after a year or so we had become, as Sailaja put it, not great bhangra dancers but passable bhangra students. Which we thought was pretty impressive.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair on Nov. 13, 2017, the day her appointment was announced, Jones described herself as an “omnivore, culturally speaking, and story-wise too.” She said she is always ready to be interested in something. “That’s my default position.” She said Vanity Fair holds “this very unique place” in the culture; “there’s no title that compares.” She said having worked at different places, “the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I could draw on different parts of my experience in a way that would be meaningful.” But getting a job at the magazine was a longshot she thought, “so maybe that took a bit of the pressure off.”

A few months after she took over as editor-in-chief, she made waves in March 2018 when choosing then-up-and-coming actor and writer Lena Waithe for her first cover for Vanity Fair. In her first letter to her readers, Jones said there was, “a tremendous opportunity to draw attention to the people who are on the culture’s cutting edge: Whose talent and creative vision transform the ways we see the world and ourselves.”

(Top photos, courtesy of Realtor.com. Inset, courtesy Vanity Fair)