(Photo: Patrick McMullan )

Four days before his Billy Elliot won the Tony for Best Musical, Stephen Daldry (pictured) bought a house in Chelsea. A source says the director-producer has gone into contract for a 4,600-square-foot 16-room home in the West Twenties. (Others who looked at the house include Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ang Lee, and Brooke Shields.) It’s unclear whether he’ll be moving in anytime soon: The redbrick townhouse is currently a rental with three units, one of which has a tenant until April 2010. (The listing suggests conversion “back to the original single dwelling design.”) The asking price was just under $5 million; no word on how much Daldry paid, but it’s been on and off the market since December 2007, which suggests that the price might’ve been cut. Corcoran’s Bill Kowalczuk, who has the listing, could not be reached for comment.

Lord Norman Foster, the British architect best known in New York for expanding the Hearst Tower 40 stories upward, is indulging in some growth of his own. An insider tells us that months after closing on a $7.2 million 2,700-square-foot Fifth Avenue co-op, he bought the apartment next door for $6.7 million.

Related:

• Archive: “Real Estate”
• Articles by S.Jhoanna Robledo
• Table of Contents: Jul 13, 2009 issue of New York | Subscribe!