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The east coast real estate gossips are all abuzz and atwitter that pint-sized superstar Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and the City, Smart People, The Family Stone) and her two-time Tony award winning huzband Matthew Broderick might finally be dumping some serious cheddar on an oddly configured doo-plex at The Brentmore, the same swank Central Park West building where Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels lives and where Sting and Trudie Styler owned a titanic 18-room doo-plex until earlier in the year when they sold it for $17,750,000 to billionaire biznessman Michael Naify.Although the downtown denizens, parents to a toddler and a younger set of twins, have long lived in a 4,100+ square foot townhouse in the heart of the West Village they've been on an extensive hunt for new digs that has led them to high-priced pads both uptown and downtown, a quest chronicled in the press. They reportedly had a look-see and apparently nixed at the titanic Park Avenue triplex of habiliment honcho David Chu (now listed at $25,800,000) and the triplex penthouse at the newly converted Bouwerie Lane building on Bond Street (then priced at $15,400,000).
The 14-room Central Park West residence in question, first listed in August at $25,000,000 and last listed at $21,500,000, belongs to Laurie Tisch, an heiress to the Loews theater fortune. Miz Tisch has done moved on over to the East Side where in March of 2009 she paid a staggering $29,000,000 for a 13-room residence in the über-exclusive 834 Fifth Avenue. Miz Tisch's new home has just 2 bedrooms (plus three more cell-sized one in the staff wing), 3.5 poopers, at least 4 fireplaces, multiple terraces that hang over Central Park and monthly maintenance charges of $9,538. Other residents of the posh pre-war dowager include (but are not limited to) heavy hitters such as Rupert Murdoch who famously paid $44,000,000 for his penthouse, Swiss ink tycoon Maurice Amon, financier Mark Rachesky, disgraced financier John Gutfreund and his wife Susan, retail baron Leslie Wexner, and octogenarian, socialite and haute couture queen Carroll McDaniel Portago Carey-Hughes Pistell Petrie.
The sprawling "L" shaped apartment has a total of 8 bedrooms, 5.5 poopers, 17 closets including 2 walk-ins located in the surprisingly petite park view master bedroom, 2 full kitchens, a fitness room and a 32-foot long living room with panoramic views over Central Park and towards the towers of Midtown Manhattan. Other rooms include a formal dining room with oblique park views, a second floor library (that could just as easily be a bedroom), and another library/family room on the first floor that separates the main kitchen from the formal dining room, an arrangement that's klutzy at best.
The current configuration shows the apartment is really two completely separate apartments connected only through a set of French doors at the tail end of the long long long second floor corridor. The larger of the apartments encompasses the entire lower level (entrance gallery, living, dining, butler's pantry, library/family, eat-in kitchen, laundry closet and powder pooper) and a significant portion of the second floor where there are 3-4 bedrooms depending on how you count, a smaller room for the Pilates machine or whatever trendy body torture device rich people are using nowadays, and three full terliting and bathing facilities.The smaller apartment–certainly far larger than the average New Yorker's two bedroom crib–has a separate entrance, foyer, living room and dining rooms, a full windowed kitchen, and a mile long hallway that leads back to two bedrooms and 2 poopers. The current layout, with this generously proportioned two bedroom wing is perfect for those with live-in domestics or family members who come and stay and stay and stay.
Your Mama and our real estate crazy pal Hot Chocolate have been looking at this cockamamie floor plan (above) for a couple months now in an effort to reconfigure the rooms into something with a more elegant layout. Either of us have yet to succeed but tonight after we've downed a few gin & tonics we'll give it another try and see if liquor loosens up our abilities to rearrange rooms in large and mind-numbingly expensive but gracelessly laid out New York City apartments.
listing photos and floor plan: Stribling NY
18 comments:
Since the gossips are forever predicting the end of the Broderick/Parker union, maybe this is a way for them to remain married without having to share space. He'll probably be banished to the smaller apartment and she'll live with the kids in the larger one. Although my middle-class mind doesn't understand why 4100 sq feet in Greenwich Village is NOT ENOUGH!
I think just the opposite Madam. NO ONE goes through the surrogacy process and such a real estate investment to keep a facade marriage together. This purchase gives them bigger quarters for their family with live-in quarters for the nanny, great private schools in the area and Central Park right across the street. If you insist on raising a family in NYC and you have the $$, this seems like a good purchase for them.
What wonderful space for a family! Upstairs for living, downstairs for entertaining. I think it will be converted into four bedrooms, with four room sized walk in closets. Or SJP will have to buy another apartment for her shoes.
I need a nerve pill just looking at this mess.
Has anyone else noticed that there is no powder room for guests? The only way to go to the potty is by entering one of the bedroom's bathrooms, unless you want to head up to the second apartment.
Some days this site is just depressing when you're staring at a $211 gas bill you can't afford to pay.
This apartment can be saved.. what really needs to happen is that staircase needs to be flipped (if possible) so that the front area where the park view is on the second floor can be made into a proper master bedroom. That master bedroom is really the biggest crime in this apartment, the rest is fine/can be easily made normal.
"NO ONE goes through the surrogacy process and such a real estate investment to keep a facade marriage together."
You don't know much about Hollywood!
Mark my words, the twins are destined for Ethical Culture down the street (which is also where the Seinfeld kids and the Consuelos/Ripa kids are enrolled). The older one will probably end up there, or at least will transfer to the upper school which is Fieldston up in Riverdale, the Bronx.
Another note: potentially, there is better stuff available over on Fifth, but they can't get passed the boards there so if it's a park view they're looking for, it's got to be CPW. There are better layouts in other buildings on CPW, but probably nothing else available anywhere near this big at the moment or in the near future. There are some huge combinations going on in various buildings, including the Century condo at 25 CPW, but they require a lot of time to, first, assemble, and then combine. If the super rich Laurie Tisch lived here, then you know this apartment, despite its layout issues, is impeccable and ready to move in.
for the question about the guest bathrooms...look closer.
on the lower level, there is a tiny powder room off the butler's pantry for guests. on the second level, there are 2 bathrooms that can be accessed from corridors without entering the bedrooms.
Not perfect, but they exist. Now i need a damn nerve pill!
I wish them all the joys of a worm.
What a horrible layout of rooms! That is one reanson why some of those white glove Upper East Side buildings still command a premium price. But despite the cash, Show Folk are usually seen as undesirable by these buildings.
SJP doesn't need a large master bedroom, just throw down some straw; she sleeps standing up.
apparently it's not a done deal with the board of 88 Central Park West.
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I have drunk and nerved pill my damn self into a stupor over this floor plan and have come up with only one solution. Turn it into two apartments, one duplex, one simplex.
Cut the duplex off right at that door in the upper hall by the bathroom.
Leave the rest alone. I would rather have two separate apartments with relatively decent layouts than one large hot mess with two damn kitchens. What are you going to do with two damn kitchens?
Actually, I'd sell the simplex and live in the duplex. Better park view from that one anyway. How many children are these two planning on having anyway? The entire thing is a disaster. For that money they could have done better, perhaps even gotten some outdoor space.
I need another cocktail.
After several more cocktails I have decided that we shall extend the duplex all the way to that corner bedroom/library (givng each child his/her/it's own room)and then use the remaining 2 bedroom apartment for staff/guests/tricks/shoes or whatever. But I think that's actually what Mama may have already said. That's all!
If you look closely into the listings on the building, At one point the combined 910NW apartment was available as a whole, meaning the duplex plus the upper simplex. Which by the way, I can see from my kitchen window. But the extended duplex which includes the gym and the other bedroom library seems to have been delisted as well. Makes one wonder, what happened to the other part of the simplex? In the early 1900's floorplan, the bedroom/library are actually the living room and library of the simplex that faces West. Does this mean there is a new smaller 2 bedroom apartment available now?
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