A reminder that Barbra Streisand has a mall in her basement with a doll shop & sweet shop

Everyone's buzzing about Barbra Streisand's in-home shopping mall—we've got your inside look: http://t.co/L6wCuXckco pic.twitter.com/xyv6FcrDAn

— Harper's Bazaar (@harpersbazaarus) February 7, 2014

Basements are making a comeback, baby! Earlier, we talked about the unconquerable Patti LuPone giving small tours of her basement (she finally opened the lockers, btw.) And with all the celebrities filming from home, with mysterious stairways that lead to somewhere, basement fascination has been brought to the forefront of the media. Well, if you’re going to discuss basements, one can never leave out one of the most famous basements of the 21st century: Barbra Streisand Basement Mall at her Malibu estate. The mall was showcased in a 2010 Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot that you can see here. But once you hear Barbra Streisand built a mall in her basement, it tends to stick with you, as it did for Pajiba writer, Kate Hudson. Kate’s in the middle of moving across country so her own living space has been boxed up and shipped, leaving her a whole lot of quarantine hours to mull over the legendary singer’s space devoted to displaying her things in a shop layout:

So many questions—

Is she spending time in it during all of this? Does she derive great pleasure from it, or does she occasionally forget it’s there? Does she allow her cloned dogs down there or is it just a place for her, to get away from the world/her cloned dogs? Is that where the cloned dogs are cloned?! Why did I enjoy The Way We Were so very much when I saw it years ago, yet I’ve never revisited it. Is her mall basement safe in an earthquake?

[From Pajiba]

As a native Californian, I would answer Kates questions as follows:

1)Babs forgets nothing
2)I assume the cloned pups run free, wherever they want and it would only seem natural they get their own storefront. The question is, do the pups manage their own store?
3)I don’t know, when I finally saw The Way We Were I was shocked how much I didn’t like it (even still, Robert Redford… yum.)
4)Yes. Most things in California worth their salt are earthquake proof. The mall likely serves as an earthquake bunker in the event of The Big One.

Here’s my thing, when I first saw photos of Barbra’s basement mall, I shrugged and thought, “of course she does.” You don’t grow up in the state of the Winchester Mystery House, Hearst’s Castle, Watt’s Tower and Neverland Ranch and not learn to shrug off most California architectural add-ons. But honestly, when I heard why Barbra built a mall in her basement, it made perfect sense to me:

In the basement of the barn Barbra put in a village of shops, which were inspired by Hector Guimard and the Art Nouveau era. This is where Barbra keeps many of her antiques. “I have a lot of stuff, and instead of storing it just in a basement, why not make a street of shops that would house these things?” she says.

Among the shops is a Louis XV–esque antique clothing store. The shop showcases some of Barbra’s most opulent and ornate garments, like a black lace cape and an Irene Sharaff gown constructed with green chiffon over pink silk. Barbra wore this gown when she sang the song “People” in Funny Girl.

[From Oprah.com]

I’ll admit I am a little obsessed with basements in general. We don’t have many in California. Most homes I’ve ever known had crawl spaces or just sat directly on a slab foundation. So I get a thrill when I hear someone has a basement and have spent many years thinking about how I would use a basement if I ever had one. Barbra’s mall is brilliant. Why box everything up in some storage unit when you can display all the treasures you can’t let go? Most of my garage is Halloween and Christmas boxes, how fun would it be to “shop” everything I’ve collected over the last twenty years once I picked my theme? Honestly, I’m less of the mindset that it’s weird that Barbra has a mall in her basement and more in the camp of it’s weird that everyone else who has a basement doesn’t. As for how often Barbra uses it, I imagine everyone who comes to her home asks to see it so she’s probably down there all the time. I’ll bet she decorates it as a little Victorian street scene at Christmas, replete with phony snow and muffs you can borrow as you visit.

Maybe we can get a basement map of the stars thing going with Barbra and Patti as the anchor stops.

This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the mall in Barbra Streisand’s basement pic.twitter.com/P2OxtpQMG5

— Katie (@Katiefrom5to7) November 23, 2017

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Photo credit: WENN/Avalon and Twitter via Pajiba

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