Six or so weeks ago Your Mama—and just about every other property gossip around the globe—went goo-goo over a gluttonously luxurious full floor spread at the venerable, impossibly pricey and haughtily high-nosed Sherry Netherland building on Fifth Avenue in New York City that Liberty Travel co-founder Gilbert Haroche and wife Charlene pushed onto the open market with a hair raising—and publicity securing—$ 95,000,000 price tag.
At the time—and much to our chagrin, online listings did not include a floor plan for the approximately 7,000 square foot sprawler, a careful and costly combination of several apartments across the entire 18th floor of the palatial pre-war tower. On top of its unusually ample interior spaces, the apartment has three major terraces that total 2000-or-so square feet and serve up sweeping views of Midtown Manhattan, the Plaza Hotel and Central Park South, Central Park itself and the swank residential towers that line the lower end of Central Park West.
Well, today is your lucky day because, thanks to a thoughtful fellow we’ll call Will Keepyallinformed, it’s come to our boozy attention that a floor plan for the show-stopping 15-room simplex apartment is now included with the online marketing materials. And, children, is it ever a pee-in-your-pants palooza.
Listing information shows the suburban mini-mansion sized combo-cooperative crib has seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms. The newly released floor plan now included with online listing details, however, indicates there are more specifically seven full and two half bathrooms and just four rooms marked as bedrooms.
There is, of course, a decadent master suite that comprises the entire northeast wing and encompasses an entrance hall that increases privacy, a 30-plus foot long bedroom with spacious sitting area, an (approx.) 500 square foot private terrace, two windowless bathrooms, a walk-in closet and an elaborately fitted, boutique-style dressing room larger than many Manhattan studio apartments.
The other three rooms marked as bedrooms on the floor plan march like soldiers down the southeastern flank and have a view of and/or access to a sizable south-facing city view terrace. A careful perusal of the floor plan, however, indicates just one access point for all three of the so-called bedrooms. We may only be as smart as a small pile of toenails but it appears to Your Mama as if the trio of rooms marked as separate bedrooms on the floor plan may actually function as a single, super-luxe suite of three interconnected rooms with two fireplaces, two windowless bathrooms, a windowed pantry kitchen and a fitted dressing room with spectacular city view.
Two more rooms that could be pressed into use as permanent or part-time guest or family bedrooms open off a short corridor that shoots east from the luminously paneled, park view library. Each room has two east facing windows and a compact, windowless private bathroom. The larger of the two rooms has a roomy walk-in closet in the back of an even larger walk-in closet. This room is marked as a “DEN” on the floor plan. The smaller room is more curiously demarcated as a “DRESSING ROOM.” Who, pray tell, dress there, right off the library and formal living room? Or do these two rooms function and a two-room suite with two bathrooms, loads of closet space and a hidden panic room?
As convoluted a route as it appears to be from the formal dining room in the southwest corner to the 31-plus foot long formal living room in the northwest corner, a close read of the floor plan indicates to Your Mama that it would be difficult if not next to impossible to get a more open sweep of space, a more harmonious intersection of the public rooms or a less complicated traffic pattern due to the building’s immovable structural elements—the I-beams, the fire stairs, the plumbing stacks and etc.
None-the less, the proportions of the individual rooms as they currently exist strike a balance between elegantly grand and luxuriously intimate. The living room is a mite narrow but very long with a Juliet balcony that practically hangs over Fifth Avenue and Central Park and the nearly 350 square foot formal dining room makes an interesting geometric connection to a den that benefits from the exceedingly rare feature of having windows on all four sides, two of which open to separate terraces.
At just over thirty feet long, the sun flooded south facing eat-in kitchen is absolutely spacious, expensively finished and well-equipped, like a better version of something in a really nice gated development in Roanoke or Akron. Howevuh, hunties, for $ 95 million Your Mama wants a big ol’ butler’s pantry with a goddamn dishwasher situated between the formal dining room and the kitchen so that our decidedly hoi polloi pals like Fiona Trambeau, Lucy Spillerguts, Helen A. Hightower, The Chicken and Beebah don’t have a direct sight line into the belly of the beast where our sometimes vengeful house gurl Svetlana may or may not be sabotaging the amuse-bouche.
Anyhoo, while there is a kind of nonsensical interconnectedness between some of the rooms—such as the ability to go from the kitchen directly into the dressing room of the guest/family bedroom suite—the main method of traversing the large apartment is along a slightly modified L-shaped corridor.
Running north to south is the shorter leg, a 30-foot long, mosaic-tiled foyer into which all three passenger elevators open through decorative gold-toned grill work. The longer leg, at 85 feet, runs east to west and is divided into two sections separated by a privacy door. Numerous public and private spaces open off the six foot wide western end of the hallway including the study, formal dining room, kitchen and the bedroom wing. The eastern leg, off of which open the four rooms marked on the floor plan as bedrooms, is a still-generous but more confidential four foot wide passage that sort of does double duty as a not entirely private dressing hall as it’s lined completely along one wall with closets.
In addition to the private terrace off the master bedroom there are two other and even larger planted terraces. The west-facing terrace runs nearly sixty feet with direct and unimpeded views over Central Park. The south side terrace is even longer at almost 85 feet and faces the gleaming towers of Midtown with an oblique but unobstructed view of The Plaza Hotel and Residences.
Sure, the sky-high price gleefully screams “Let them eat cake!” and probably seems uncessarily garish and silly to anyone but those who belong to, fraternize with or desperately desire to be part of the fortunate sliver of folks who make up the world’s increasingly and freakishly rich demimonde. None-the-less and despite its remarkable cost and the handful of uncomfortable spatial moments sprinkled throughout, the apartment is of an utterly monumental scale that is both humbling and inexhaustibly thrilling. For chrissakes, people, it’s 7,000 square feet all on one floor in a top flight building at one of the vortexes of high-priced real estate in of New York City and that is really something to behold for a moment or two.
floor plan: Brown Harris Stevens
Image via howard-f / Curbed LA flickr pool
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SELLER: Estate of Monique Uzielli
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $ 29,500,000
SIZE: about 4,000 square feet, 2-5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Listen booterbeans, Your Mama just dropped in to New York City on the red eye and we are beyond exhausted so, in the interest of our own mental health, we’ve got to keep it short and simple today with a wee tidbit of juicy Big Apple floor plan porn.
Late last week word slipped down the international property gossip grapevine that a near mythic penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue had hit the market with an asking price of $ 29,500,000. And children, is it ever a damn doozy of a penthouse.
The roughly 4,000 square foot full floor penthouse pad, girdled by (approximately) 4,000 square feet of wrap around terrace with 360-degree city and park views, was originally the top floor of a monolithic, mansion-sized 54-room triplex apartment of cereal heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post. Miz Post’s palatial penthouse, perched atop 1107 Fifth Avenue (at East 92nd Street), is reported to have included such super-rich people style amenities as a silver storage room, wine cellar, cold storage space for furs and flowers, a private carriage driveway and private elevator, a separate ground floor suite of rooms for a concierge, and another separate suite of rooms for her parents.
At one time the Post penthouse was the largest apartment in all of New York City but was later broken apart and in 1959 the uppermost floor was purchased for an unknown sum by a European aristocrat lady named Monique Uzielli (née de Gunzberg). Miz Uzielli “passed away peacefully” in Montreux (Switzerland) in early October 2011.
Listing information for 10 room spread shows there’s a private elevator landing, 2-4 bedrooms depending on how one counts and how one configures the space, 3 bathrooms plus a cell-sized staff bedroom and bathroom, 4 wood burning fireplaces, 2 kitchens, and considerable but hardly unheard of monthly maintenance and common charges of $ 13,470.
The floor plan included with current listing materials shows the penthouse has been divided into two separate living spaces. A smaller north and east facing apartment, perfect for live-in domestic staff or long-term guests, encompasses a living room with terrace access, one bedroom also with terrace access, a compact but windowed kitchen, and one bathroom.
The larger apartment features and entrance gallery larger than most Manhattan living rooms, a paneled living room with fireplace, library (with fireplace, bathroom walk-in closet and walk-in safe, formal dining room, and service quarters that consists of a kitchen with direct terrace access, 21-foot plus long butler’s pantry, and the aforementioned cell-sized staff room and bathroom.
At the opposite corner of the penthouse the two-room master suite include s large boo-dwar with fireplace and park view, cozy corner sitting room with fireplace and jaw dropping views over Central Park, built-in storage cabinets, a dressing closet and multi-winged walk-in closet, and downright small by today’s standard attached bathroom.
Iffin Your Mama were the betting type, and we are most definitely not the betting type, we’d wager our retirement account this penthouse will be quickly snapped up by a deep pocketed globe trotting type who will undoubtedly spend many millions more reconfiguring, redecorating and otherwise doing over the entire penthouse into a world class show stopper of an apartment.
Would any of the children like to give it a go and try to reconfigure the floor plan?
listing photos and floorplan: Brown Harris Stevens
Image via xavier servin / Curbed LA flickr pool
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