Taylor Swift agreed on her new apartment when she saw Gandalf sitting "in his pyjamas" in the kitchen.
The 24-year-old singer is currently busy travelling the globe promoting her latest album 1989, her first ever pop release, but made the time to house-hunt for a new pad. She looked at various properties in New York earlier this year and one in particular stood out, mainly due to the magical quality it held.
"So basically, I found this apartment online and was looking at all these different places in New York, and I had my realtor reach out to the realtor who rented this apartment, and we kept trying to get a showing, and they kept putting us off and not responding, so it became like a mystery: why can't we get into this apartment? What's in there? Why do they have it on the market but clearly don't want to sell it?" she recalled during an appearance on talk show Alan Carr: Chatty Man, which airs in the UK tomorrow.
"And then so, as I do, we just obsessively called - 'Can I see it? Can I see it? Please? Can I see it?' And so eventually that worked and I got a showing, and I'm walking in kind of like 'What is the deal?'. I fall in love with the place immediately, and then I walk into the kitchen and [Lord of the Rings and Hobbit character, portrayed by Sir Ian McKellen] Gandalf is sitting at the kitchen counter, in his pyjamas. It was magnificent. I was like 'I'm buying it. Does he come with it?'"
It turned out to be director Peter Jackson's home, who has helmed all the fantasy movies, and Ian was simply staying at the property at the time.
Taylor herself has recently been in the headlines regarding her Los Angeles home, inviting fans over earlier this year when previewing her new record and filming the music video for debut single Shake It Off. There were 25 followers who visited in total, but only one odd disappearance.
"I think, one of the soaps went missing. Because one of them was like 'she doesn't have any soap in her bathroom', and I was like 'well if there's no soap, it's because somebody took the soap,'" she quipped.
"So then I just put all these little soaps in the bathroom, so that if they wanted to take them they could. If you want to take the soaps, then I will make it readily available for you to steal them. At least no one's going to go without soap now, I don't want to come off as unclean."
