Lawyerly Lairs: Two Kitchens, One Couple(Or: An actress turned lawyer's uptown abode.)

An actress from an iconic film of the 1990s went to law school, got married, and had a family. They recently moved to a Harlem townhouse. Let's have a look-see....

When I receive the sections of the Sunday New York Times that get delivered on Saturday, the first one I reach for is Real Estate. And one of the first features I read is The Hunt, Joyce Cohen’s delightful column chronicling the victories and defeats of those who dare to take on the New York City real estate market.

A recent installment of The Hunt featured a lawyer who was previously a movie star. With two daughters and a penchant for entertaining, she and her husband had outgrown their three-bedroom condominium on the Upper East Side. They wanted a townhouse. But with a budget of no more than $2 million, they had their work cut out for them.

Who is the actress turned attorney — a star of one of the most iconic films of the 1990s, in fact — and where is her new home?

Meet Allison Rutledge-Parisi. As noted on her Wikipedia page, “Allison Rutledge-Parisi is an attorney, and a former chief administrative officer for Kaplan, Inc., and a former actress. She is perhaps best known for her role as Jane Clark in Whit Stillman’s critically acclaimed film Metropolitan (1990).”

Ah yes, Metropolitan — a wonderfully witty film, which deservedly received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Rutledge-Parisi played Jane Clark, the best friend of Audrey Rouget, one of the central characters.

(Also in the film: Isabel Gillies, a star of Law & Order: SVU and author of the bestselling memoir Happens Every Day (affiliate link), which I highly recommend. Despite her fame as an actress and author, among ATL readers she might be best known as Mrs. Peter Lattman.)

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Sorry for the digression; back to Allison Rutledge-Parisi. As noted on her Wikipedia page:

In the early 1990s, Rutledge-Parisi gave up acting and enrolled at Columbia Law School in New York City, where she was named a Harlan Fiske Scholar. After graduating from law school and passing the bar exam, Rutledge-Parisi clerked for Judge Robert W. Sweet in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. After working as an intellectual property lawyer for the firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in Manhattan, she joined Kaplan, Inc. in 2004. Three years later, she was promoted to Kaplan’s chief administrative officer.

Columbia Law, S.D.N.Y. clerkship, Patterson Belknap — all in the wake of a successful acting career. Allison Rutledge-Parisi is clearly a woman of many talents.

What is she up to these days? As noted in the Times, she is an executive at a retail design start-up, fab.com. Her husband, Dr. James Marion, is a gastroenterologist. They have two daughters, Molly and Ella.

After Rutledge-Parisi’s mother expressed the view that the family needed more space, they started looking. From The Hunt:

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Few apartments offered the space they craved. With a price ceiling of $2 million, they couldn’t afford a town house in Carnegie Hill, where Streeteasy.com lists nine town houses for sale, the least expensive almost $4 million. But they felt they could afford one in Harlem; at the moment, 14 town houses in Central Harlem below 125th Street are on the market, ranging from $1.2 million to $2.9 million.

To read about all the places they considered, check out the Times write-up. We’ll focus on the place they actually ended up in….