November Sales Included Liv Tyler’s West Village Brownstone
By: Vivian Marino
Published: 12/8/2019Source: The New York TimesFeaturing Deborah Kern's sale at 220 Central Park South and Cathy Franklin, Alexis Bodenheimer, and Marion Smith's sale at 49 East 67th Street, Upper East Side:
BIG TICKET
November Sales Included Liv Tyler’s West Village Brownstone
But the priciest transaction, once again, took place at 220 Central Park South, where an apartment sold for $64.1 million.
Liv Tyler has parted with her longtime home in the West Village.
The actor and former model, who relocated to London last year with her family, sold her fully restored, four-story brownstone at 255 West 11th Street for nearly $17.5 million. The sale, done privately, was one of the top closings in New York City in November.
The largest closed sales, once again, took place at 220 Central Park South, where two full floors sold, for $64.1 million and $59.6 million. The month’s priciest co-op closing, at $47 million, was a palatial apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue acquired by Aerin Lauder, a granddaughter of the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder.
In other notable November transactions, George Cheeks, who oversees late-night television at NBC Entertainment, traded one penthouse for another in Midtown. On the Upper East Side, the investment banker Thomas Unterberg sold a townhouse, while Jon Steinberg, the founder of the video streaming service Cheddar, bought one.
Ms. Tyler became somewhat of a fixture in the West Village after buying her brownstone in 2001. Shortly after the purchase, she undertook an extensive restoration of the building, which had been carved into apartments, with the help of designers and architects at Fairfax & Sammons Architects, including Ben Pentreath, who later worked on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s flat in Kensington Palace.
In a tour of the home last summer with Architectural Digest, Ms. Tyler explained how she gutted the building and meticulously renovated the space with many architectural details reminiscent of the late 1800s, when the house was built, along with modern flourishes.
“This home is special to me,” she said, without any hint that she might be selling, “because I bought it when I was in my early 20s.”
The property features a lush garden with a large blossoming magnolia tree in the rear, off the kitchen. The parlor level, just above, contains a large living room with a fireplace and a library separated by pocket doors, which were used throughout the house.
The bedrooms for the children (she has two sons and a daughter) were on the next level. The master suite encompassed the entire top floor and included an en suite bath with subway tile accents and a dressing room with hand-painted de Gournay wallpaper. There’s also an attic, where Ms. Tyler kept her film memorabilia, including a sword from the “Lord of the Rings” series in which she had starred.
But her secret “favorite place,” she said, had been the laundry room in the basement, which was once “like a dungeon.”
Last year, Ms. Tyler and her fiancé, Dave Gardner, a British sports and entertainment manager, bought a townhouse in London. According to public records, the buyer of the Manhattan house was a limited liability company with an address linked to an East Hampton address, once owned by the fashion designer Betsey Johnson.
The latest big sales at the 220 Central Park South were apartments on the 46th and 49th floors of the tower, between Columbus Circle and Seventh Avenue, with the higher-floor unit the pricier of the two.
These sponsor apartments, each 6,591 square feet, are similarly configured, with five bedrooms, and six full and two half baths, according to the offering plans. Each also has two small balconies facing Central Park and a huge master suite featuring two spacious dressing rooms and two baths.
The buyer of the 49th-floor unit was listed as K & J Assets (US) Inc., with an address in Hong Kong. The purchase was financed with a $37.8 million mortgage. Monthly carrying costs total $26,186, according to the listing with the broker Deborah Kern of the Corcoran Group. Public records listed the buyer of the 46th floor as the limited liability company CPV46 of St. Petersburg, Fla.; that purchaser also picked up a 519-square-foot unit for around $1.9 million.
Also selling last month was a 10th-floor apartment in the 18-story villa building, directly facing the park, (with the 65-floor tower rising behind it). This sponsor unit, at nearly 4,000 square feet, has four bedrooms, three and a half baths and a small balcony. It was purchased for $46.5 million. And a 3,222-square-foot sponsor apartment on the 54th floor of the tower closed at $26.2 million. That unit has three bedrooms, three and a half baths and a small balcony. Both were acquired through limited liability companies.
The 220 Central Park South condominium, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, set a national record earlier this year for the highest price paid for a single residence, nearly $240 million.
The month’s biggest co-op sale was a stately unit on the 10th floor of the 12-story 960 Fifth, at East 77th Street, designed by Rosario Candela in the late 1920s and considered one of the city’s grandest apartment houses.
The residence had been the longtime home of C. Douglas Dillon, Treasury secretary in the Kennedy administration and ambassador to France under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He died in 2003.
It was sold by Mr. Dillon’s estate to Ms. Lauder, who is the founder of Aerin, a beauty, home and luxury lifestyle brand that she started in 2012.
Ms. Lauder will get a chance to put her home-design chops to good use in this 13-room residence, which has five bedrooms and six full baths and comes with a storage room, as well as panoramic views of Central Park and the city skyline.
The home is entered through a spacious formal gallery that opens to the entertainment spaces — a living room, library and formal dining room adorned with ornate fireplaces and decorative moldings, according to the listing with Sotheby’s International Realty. The south wing contains the main bedrooms, each with an en suite marble bath. The staff quarters and kitchen are on the north side.
Mr. Cheeks of NBC and Laurence M. Hausman, an anesthesiologist and professor at Mount Sinai Health System, bought and sold at 425 West 50th Street, a.k.a. Stella Tower. After selling their penthouse duplex for just under $6 million, they bought a larger penthouse in the same building for nearly $7.3 million.
Their new home is 3,455 square feet, with four bedrooms and three and a half baths, according to the Sotheby’s listing. The unit also has 1,074 square feet of outdoor space, including a rooftop terrace with expansive cityscape views.
The recently sold 2,688-square-foot penthouse, which Mr. Cheeks and Dr. Hausman had bought last year for $6.7 million, contains three bedrooms, four and a half baths and a 644-square-foot terrace.
Mr. Cheeks is a vice chairman of NBCUniversal Content Studios and in charge of the network’s late-night lineup.
The townhouse sold by Mr. Unterberg and his wife, Ann Unterberg, both philanthropists, sits in the Upper East Side Historic District, at 49 East 67th Street, off Park Avenue. The unidentified buyer, who made the purchase through a limited liability company, paid $11.8 million; it had been listed for as much as $26 million in 2016.
The 1878 brick house is five stories high and 20 feet wide, with nearly 9,000 square feet of interior space, including a finished basement that has a sauna and access to a neighboring co-op’s pool, according to the Corcoran listing. Outdoor space includes a landscaped rear garden and two terraces, one off the master suite and another off a fourth-floor bedroom.
The fully renovated house has six bedrooms, five full baths and two powder rooms. There are also six wood-burning fireplaces, a skylight on the top floor, and at the parlor level, a glass-enclosed solarium overlooking the garden.
A five-story brownstone on East 64th Street, a block from Central Park, sold for $9.7 million. Mr. Steinberg of Cheddar, who is also a former president of BuzzFeed, and his wife, Jill Steinberg, were the buyers. The seller used a limited liability company in the transaction.
The fully renovated house, built in the late 1800s, has around 7,500 square feet of space. It features five bedrooms, five and a half baths, a family room and eight fireplaces. Outdoor space includes a large roof deck, a patio off the kitchen and a terrace on the third floor, where the master suite is situated.
Also closing in November:
Several more apartments sold at 15 Hudson Yards, the first residential building to open in the megaproject. The largest of these sales, at $8.5 million, was a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath unit.
The Fifth Avenue apartment of Eugene M. Lang, an investor and philanthropist who famously promised to pay the college tuition of sixth-graders in Harlem who completed high school. He died two years ago, and his fourth-floor co-op unit at 912 Fifth was sold by his estate for $3.3 million to Ronald Peltier, the founder and former chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway’s HomeServices of America.
And then there’s what you might call a “model” apartment in TriBeCa. This 4,215-square-foot loft, at 44 Laight Street, near Hudson Street, comes with its very own custom steel catwalk, along with three bedrooms, two full and one half-bath, and a glass-enclosed media room. (The catwalk provided a whimsical connection from a billiards room to the media room, both on raised platforms.) The apartment was sold for nearly $4.7 million by Cory Margolis, an owner of Mantiques Modern in Chelsea, and Jacqueline Margolis. The buyers were Samuel Hayden Powell and Elyssa Beth Kaplan.
Copyright © 2019 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Vivian Marino/The New York Times.