Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Floor Plan Porn: 740 Park Avenue




SELLER: Courtney Sale Ross
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $60,000,000
SIZE: Titanic

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Buckle your real estate safety belts butter beans because Time Warner widow and philanthropist Courtney Sale Ross has just re-listed her monumental duplex apartment in New York City's s 740 Park Avenue with an asking price of $60,000,000.

Y'all are in luck this time around because Miz Ross not only listed the behemoth apartment on the open market yesterday, she and her Real Estates included photographs and floor plans for her sprawling spread located near the top of the impossibly posh, exceedingly exclusive and hideously expensive 17 story limestone-clad edifice.

Back in 2008 Miz Ross quietly floated her colossal co-operative apartment–an awkward quasi-combination between two already halaciously huge high-floor duplex units–on the market back with a rumored and reported price tag of sixty million clams. In May of this year (2011) the two-unit mega mansion-sized apartment was semi-officially listed when it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Miz Ross had made them available together (at sixty million bucks) and separately, one for twenty-five and the other for thirty-five million.
Perhaps the simplest way for the less-luxurious living children to attempt to comprehend the magnitude of Miz Ross' ree-donkulously gigantic apartment is to peruse the floor plan (above) including with the listing. By Your Mama's count the Ross residence spreads out over 2 floors and encompasses 30 (or so) rooms with more than two dozen closets and dressing rooms, 9 full and 3 half bathrooms, 6 principal bedrooms that include a sprawling master suite with private sitting room, 2-3 staff bedrooms, 7 wood burning fireplaces, 6 separate landscaped terraces (none of them particularly large), 2 grand entrance galleries each with swooping floating staircase, 2 living rooms (one 35-feet long and almost 20-feet wide), two dining rooms, 2 well-equipped chef-friendly kitchens, two libraries, and one game room/gym.

Brace yourselves for this puppies because not only is the palace-sized co-operative apartment currently priced at a toe-curling $60,000,0000, listing information shows the monthly maintenance totals $34326 per month. No babies, that is not a typo. According to Your Mama's bejeweled abacus that comes to a blood curdling $411,922 each year.

Miz Ross is making the two apartments available for purchase together–at $60,000,000–or separately. The smaller 14-room duplex comes with a $25,000,000 price tag and the larger 16-room duplex is listed at $35,000,000.

Sixty million bucks might quite logically seem like a frighteningly high and unrealistic amount of money for Miz Ross to ask for her pair of not completely combined duplex apartments. In fact, Elise Knutsen over at the New York Observer is taking bets on how much the combo-crib will sell for and when. (She says two years and $42,000,000.) However, it seems to Your Mama that Miz Ross and her Real Estates just may have timed the market right for despite the ongoing global economic turmoils–Hello Italy, Greece and Zuccotti Park–the super rich, those immune to even the steepest of economic down towns, seem to be in a spendy mood to acquire lavish and insanely priced properties.

Por ejemplo, at just 22-years old Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone is already a major international real estate baller. Not only did she reportedly drop $100,000,000 of Daddy Ecclestone's dinero on a massive mansion in London late in 2010, she also threw down $85,000,000 in cold hard cash–allegedly mostly borrowed from her former model mother Slavica–for Showbiz widow Candy Spelling's hulking, 55,000 square foot house in Los Angeles's hoity-toity Holmby Hills 'hood.

In New York this last summer, telecom heiress Sloan (Lindemann) Barnett and her businessman husband Roger Barnett unloaded their historic Peter Marino-designed Upper East Side townhouse in a private deal worth $48,000,000 to notoriously peripatetic Band-Aid heiress Libet Johnson. The children may recall that Mister and Missus Barnett just paid $33,000,000 to acquire a 17,000-plus square foot San Francisco (CA) mansion long owned by the recently deceased, couture-clad iconoclast and international high society maven Dodie Rosekrans. The Barnett's new house, just a block from their old smaller but still huge house, sits hard up next door to a contemporary mansion owned by Oracle multi-billionaire Larry Ellison who himself has spent more than $100,000,000 over the last few years snapping up a trio of non-contiguous compounds that hug the punishingly pricey shore of Lake Tahoe.
 
photo (exterior): Property Shark
listing photos (interior): Brown Harris Stevens

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

I for one am not in the "60 Million" Price Range but this unit seems Titanic in nature with an odd layout that is not cohesive or inviting. I am sure the space could be reconfigured so something Spectactular but the current flow does not get my engine running.

Anonymous said...

Perfect. Sold!

Wrap it up. I'll take it!

The Aussie

Anonymous said...

Doesn't look like there is a way of getting on the 13th floor master bedroom.

Arun said...

Wow, what a country. Steve Ross (Rechnitz) took his family's parking lot/funeral home business all the way to being the head of Time Warner, and leaving his widow with.. this.

I loved Michael Gross's book on 740 Park, it was uh, engrossing. And these photos show a perfectly nice place indeed. I just don't understand the point of living in a grand old building like that but renovating so it looks like anyplace- those ceiling lights really irk me for some reason. There's no ambience or history to this apartment, I think. It's been stripped away and sanded down.

(While I wish the Widow Ross best in selling this vast place to some qualified buyer, I must confess a distste for her. I live in the Hamptons, and when her husband died she bought up like, 75 graveyard plots in the East Hampton cemetery, for her family in perpetuity, like the Rosses were royalty. Creating a scarcity for the locals- tough shit, Bonackers! Making even a gravesite in the place their loved ones lived and died a luxury item, out of reach. Money talks. I just find that especially loathsome and greedy. )

candi speling said...

Thanks Mama I needed some good porn today. hugs

Anonymous said...

Beautiful apartment but her taste is stuck in the 80's I am afraid.

Anonymous said...

I couldn't get my head around the floor plans until I realized that they are in fact two separate apartments. Each apartment is a behemoth, I can't imagine someone combining them, but it only takes one Russian oligarch or Saudi prince to decide he has to have the BIGGEST apartment in New York...

Occupy Park Avenue (in the east 70s)!

The Murphys said...

Nice property but her decor is horrible! 60 million dollar place and she didn't hire a designer??

Anonymous said...

Sometimes, in my wildest flights of imagination, I wonder what would happen to all these people if al=Qaida got a nuke and used it on Manhattan. Would all their money keep them safe? (Buffett, who knows something about risk, has said it will happen some day.)

Anonymous said...

Info please. When did Manhattan real estate mount upward to the point where it is at today? As I recall Jackie Kennedy purchased her large apartment in 1964 for under $300,000.

Anonymous said...

$250,000 in 1964 would be $1,760,000 in 2010 following the CPI. So Manhattan RE has appreciated way way way more than consumer prices. Why?

Anonymous said...

A bit more on RE price appreciation in Manhattan.
Using the Kennedy apartment as an example, it appreciated at a rate of 12% from 1964 when Jackie bought it to 1996 when it was sold. And then from 1996 when it was purchased to 2008 when it was sold again it appreciated at a rate of 6% a year. So the period 1964 to 1996 saw double the rate of appreciation of the period since 1996.

Anonymous said...

Looking at her apartments decor, I can see where the "SALE" comes from in her name.

Anonymous said...

LMAO, the maintenance alone is more than the top 1% annual household income in the United States.

Anonymous said...

Well, Manhattan, like any other luxury corner of the world (Central London, Central Paris, Aspen, the Hamptons, Beverly Hills, Palm Beach) were all "cheap" in 1964.

The difference between now and then is that wealth has exploded. Tremendously.

For instance, how many billionaires were there worldwide in 1964? Zero. None at all. In 2011, the United States has over 400 billionaires and there are 1,210 billionaires in total worldwide.

Not to mention, being the United States capital of wealth, glamour and culture, New York is one of the very few "it" cities for the global rich. The other two being London and Paris. Like London and Paris, New York real estate is heavily inflated by the rise of the ultra high net worth campy Russians, the Arabs, the Asians and Western Europeans who prop up these markets.

REITII said...

This is an absolutely stunning property. Clearly, time and thought were put into its development.

Anonymous said...

With all the newer buildings that one could buy into, I also don't understand the point of buying an elegant old apartment only to decorate it in such a manner whereby it looks like a fancy doctors office.

Anonymous said...

Jackie bought her apt for $250,000 in 1964. It was sold to the jerk David Koch as in Koch Industries in 1995 for $9.5 mil. That apt turned out to be too small for him (15 rooms) and he moved to...surprise 740 park ave........where coincidently enuf Jackie Onasis s father built the co op building originally and where she lived for many years as a child. So, isnt life full of coincidences and #2.... even if the apt this story is about is a trophy place, would you really want david Koch as a neighbor?

Anonymous said...

They should have ran a plane into this building, during one of those grandiose parties instead of the World Trade Center. This is the real terrorism.