In a 2012 post on her popular lifestyle blog A Cup of Jo, Joanna Goddard recounts “pinching pennies” when she moved to New York City from Michigan nearly 11 years earlier. In the entry, she remembers ordering bagels with cream cheese for lunch every day, which cost her $1.50, but couldn’t afford to add tomatoes for an extra 60 cents. Needless to say, her first city apartment was far from luxe.
“[It] was a small one-bedroom sublet in Midtown [that] I shared with a guy friend, and he slept in the bedroom and I slept with a blanket on the old sofa in the living room,” Goddard writes. “Now and again we had cockroaches and, even on the hottest days, we never turned on the air conditioner because we couldn’t pay extra on the utility bill.”
Things seem to be quite different now — especially in terms of her living situation.
Now married to New York Times reporter Alex Williams, with whom she has two young sons, evidence strongly suggests the couple purchased a four-bedroom, four-bathroom condo inside a 25-foot-wide Brooklyn brownstone in 2016 for $4.32 million. The purchase was masked by a limited liability corporation dubbed Masimoto LLC. The unit, located at 229 Degraw St. in Cobble Hill, originally asked $4.85 million, StreetEasy shows.
The intel comes from comments posted on an online forum over the last year.
“From what I remember, it is a big house in Cobble Hill with a private garage, wine cellar, gym, screening room, landscaped backyard, huge fancy kitchen, formal dining room, office and all the mod cons,” writes one commenter, adding that she and Goddard share a mutual friend. “Definitely in the $4 million [to] $5 million range.”
Another commenter in the same thread claims to live in the same neighborhood as Goddard and share a few mutual friends with her.
“She recently moved out of their [three-]bedroom apartment into a new brownstone that’s [4,000-plus] square feet and sold for $4.3 million,” says that individual.
They’re partly right.
This home, which runs 4,100 square feet, doesn’t seem to have a screening room and doesn’t fully occupy the brownstone. But it does have garage parking, wine storage for over 900 bottles, a gym, a backyard, a nice-looking kitchen, a formal dining room and an office.
For Cup of Jo fans, the kitchen is the biggest tip-off. Its features — including a double-wide refrigerator/freezer and white-tone counters, as seen in its listing — appear in a blog post written by Goddard last month that details “a very easy dinner party” that she held with her husband. (A photo from the party also appears on Instagram.)
In addition, shots taken into the family room — which show a television mounted above a marble-mantled fireplace — also match those photographed for the listing.
Goddard did not respond to a message seeking comment by press time. The home’s listing broker, Suzanne Wolf of the Corcoran Group, declined comment.
Goddard, who has 97,800 Instagram followers, founded her blog in 2007 as a weekend hobby. It’s been named one of the top 10 lifestyle websites for women by Forbes — Goddard has been called “the queen of the blogosphere” by Refinery29 — and receives 5.5 million monthly page views. A Cup of Jo features stories on style, food, design, motherhood, travel and relationships. It’s not immediately clear how much money the blog rakes in.