Big Ticket | Upper East Side Townhouse for $27.25 Million
In this week’s section: Real estate websites are supplying home buyers with hyper-specific community data to find New York City suburbs that fit. Also, two sanitation workers are on a mission to change how New Yorkers deal with organic waste.
A meticulously renovated neo-Georgian townhouse on the Upper East Side, defined by its multiple outdoor entertainment spaces and an interior-décor ode to blue, sold for $27.25 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.
The annual property taxes on the elegant six-story residence at 39 East 74th Street, built as an unremarkable rowhouse in 1879 by James E. Ware, are $86,943. The 20-foot-wide house, refurbished and upgraded in the 1930s, sits on a quiet residential block between Madison and Park Avenues.
The 16-room, 6,700-square-foot home, which has seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, two powder rooms, two staircases and four working fireplaces, underwent a comprehensive renovation completed by Diamond Baratta Design in 2007; it included the installation of a hydraulic elevator and dumbwaiter that serve all floors, a two-tier patio garden, and a sixth-floor addition with two bedrooms and a roof deck.
The makeover was commissioned by Eric J. Gleacher, a Wall Street financier who did mergers-and-acquisitions stints at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley before establishing his own investment banking firm in the 1990s. After he bought the property for $11.3 million in 2005, his preferred decorating motif began at the front door, which was painted peacock blue. Even the butler’s pantry has a blue marble countertop to match the accents of the fireplace in the formal dining room, and the walls of the third-floor master bedroom suite are, of course, blue.
Initially listed for $29.99 million in January 2013 when the Gleacher family decided to downsize, the home lingered on the market even after the asking price was cut to $27.5 million. But it found a qualified buyer this year in the Permanent Mission of the United Arab Emirates to the United Nations. Evidently key members of the mission, which is led by the foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan, and which named a new ambassador, Lana Nusseibeh, as a permanent representative to the United Nations in September, appreciate high ceilings, gracious gardens and blue.
Mr. Gleacher, who used a North Palm Beach, Fla., address in city records, sold the townhouse through his Eric J. Gleacher 2007 Revocable Trust. Steven Cohen, a broker with the Corcoran Group, handled both sides of the sale.
Copyright © 2014 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times.