Julianna Margulies may be a hot Hollywood star, known for her role as Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife, but that in no way makes her exempt from the banes of home ownership. Featured in the February issue of Architectural Digest in an elaborate spread showing off the utmost in New York City apartment design, she and hubby Keith Lieberthal eagerly anticipated receiving the magazine with the photos of their home. The issue awaited them upon their return from a Christmas skiing vacation, but something else did, too. When they walked into their apartment they quickly learned their upstairs neighbor’s radiator exploded–leaving everything below it–namely Margulies’s home–flooded.

Even the trip home, preceding their discovery of the apartment catastrophe, was wrought with a bit of stress due to weather across the country. It actually took the family 30 hours to get to New York from Colorado.

“The whole time I kept saying to my son, ‘We have our health,’ ” she told Ellen DeGeneres earlier this week. “We actually enjoyed it. We went and stayed at the Marriott in Denver. The airport Marriott, the beds were very comfortable. We were fine and then they lost our luggage, and that’s fine. It happens.”

When they finally arrived home–a bit travel-weary, but grateful–they were greeted with an uninhabitable mess.

“We walked into our brand-new apartment with this [magazine] – it was in the mail – and everything was flooded,” Margulies says, showing Ellen the issue of Architectural Digest, featuring a much different take on their apartment. “The whole place had completely flooded from the guy upstairs.”

“His radiator exploded,” she added. “So at least we have pictures.”

“Of what it used to look like,” DeGeneres quipped. “It looked amazing.”

It really did look spectacular as seen in this Twitter post from Architectural Digest.

Designer @VicenteWolf decorates Julianna Margulies’s serene Manhattan loft. http://t.co/npmhfwBk9h http://t.co/5U01fk2VR2

— Architectural Digest (@ArchDigest) January 8, 2014

Fortunately Julianna Margulies stars in The Good Wife. That aforementioned tidbit of information definitely lends itself to her current household hell. It, at the very least, means she has everything required (namely money) to gut her family’s New York apartment and start from scratch–or at least pay for fancy digs while the renovation takes place. They probably aren’t staying at an airport Marriott during the renovations, however. It sounds like this mess is going to take quite a while to repair.

Image via Wikimedia