Friday, July 27, 2012

Friday Floor Plan Porn: Steven A Klar

SELLER: Steven A. Klar
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $100,000,000
SIZE: 8,000 square feet, 6 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Good grief! We suggest y'all grab a smidge of your favorite mood stabilizer—we're already on our second gin & tonic—and steel yourselves for this one, butter beans. With houses and apartments at the highest of the high end in both Los Angeles and New York selling like water in the desert it seems like everyone with a trophy property—or a property they think is a trophy—wants on the high-priced real estate bandwagon.

Petra Ecclestone (in)famously plunked down $85,000,000 last year for Candy Spelling's 56,000 square foot faux-French-something pile in Los Angeles where rumors have begun to circulate on the real estate gossip grapevine that billionaire widow Dawn Arnall and financier Jeff Greene both want $150,000,000 for their baronial, multi-acre estates, hers in Holmby Hills and his up off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills.

In New York City, L.A.-based billionaire David Geffen just dropped $54,000,000 on Denise Rich's titanic, 12,000 square foot Fifth Avenue duplex, international casino tycoon Steven Wynn dumped a stroke-inducing $70,000,000 on an elegant duplex on Central Park South and Hamad Bin Jasim Bin Jabr Al Thani—the Prime Minister of Qatar and the very same fella who was (allegedly) nixed from buying two of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark's Fifth Avenue apartments due to concerns about his 2 wives, 15 children and extensive security detail and entourage—is widely rumored and reported to have coughed up somewhere above $90,000,000 for two full floors atop a still under construction building on West 57th Street.

Today, we first learned at the crack of down from our sleepless aide de camp Hot Chocolate, an eight-sided, three (and some) floor penthouse pad atop a Midtown Manhattan tower popped up on the open market with an international publicity assuring $100,000,000 price tag.

Property records indicate the wedding cake-shaped penthouse is owned by Steven A. Klar, a second generation, Long Island-based builder of middle-brow housing developments with yawn-spurring names like Ponds Edge in Muttontown, The Waterways at Moriches and Hidden Ridge at Scarsdale.

Property records we peeped aren't specific about what Mister Klar paid for the tower topping triplex but it does appear he's owned the place since 1994.

Current listing information shows the octagonal penthouse occupies the entire 73rd-75th floors—plus a wee bit of the 72nd floor—of Midtown Manhattan's City Spire building. The suburban (mc)mansion-sized penthouse measures in at around 8,000 square feet with another 3,000 or so square feet of wrap around terraces on two levels, according to listing details, with honest-to-goodness 360 degree city views. There are a total of six bedrooms and five full and three half bathrooms.

Listing information states the interiors were done by internationally renown interior decorator Juan Pablo Molyneux, whose own opulent Manhattan townhouse recently came up for grabs with a puffy $48,000,000 price tag. Really? Despite all the heavy-duty moldings, the inlaid marble and Parquet de Versailles-style hardwood floors, the lyre back Chippendale chairs and forest's worth of mahogany mill work, the day-core is just so painfully ordinary, drab and, yes, gravely comatose. These are adjectives rarely used when describing Mister Molyneux's more characteristically multi-layered and splendidly sumptuous work. It all looks like a supposed-to-be-really-fancy corporate apartment, luxurious but utterly devoid of personality. In Your Mama's humble and utterly meaningless opinion and with all due respect, this is not some of Mister Molyneux's best work, by far.

Anyhoo, the main living spaces, as shown on the floor plan (above) included with current marketing materials, features an octagonal foyer and adjoining reception gallery with inlaid green marble floor; six-sided and 40-foot long formal living and dining rooms; and an eat in kitchen with center island, butler's pantry, three refrigerators, direct access to the trash chute, and half  bathroom. The floor plan shows extensive storage and closet space in the rear hall that runs between the kitchen and the media room where (the inelegantly and somewhat inconveniently located) access to the upper floors is via a staircase or private elevator.

A second, switchback staircase in the rear hall descends to a walk-in wine cellar and self-contained studio-style suite complete with separate entrance, bedroom/sitting room, two closets, galley kitchen and attached bathroom with wall of city-view windows. This is a perfect set up for a live-in staff person, aging relative, boorish house guest or bratty teenager.

The middle floor, ringed by a narrow terrace guaranteed to make even a daredevil's nether region clench and cramp with High Anxiety, has a bookshelf and closet lined central gallery around which spoke four bedrooms, each with private bathroom. One of the bedrooms is much smaller than the others (and located down the same window-lined corridor as the laundry room) and was probably intended for use by a live-in domestic worker. Two of the bedrooms are divided by what's labeled as a "Conference Room" on the floor plan but could easily be pressed into use as a shared sitting room.

The master suite, privately situated all alone on the top floor, includes a wide entry gallery, reasonable-sized bedroom, adjacent and very narrow sitting room with convenient refrigerator, and a giant bathroom all done in dark wood and green and black marble. A long, window-lined closet/dressing room bends around the penthouse's private elevator to a rear entrance. This is a most excellent situation for a resident who employs a valet or hairdresser who can discreetly enter the suite through the rear entrance in the closet, do their business and leave without ever having to enter the more intimate areas of the suite.

Probably this could be a magnificent if quirky penthouse but, for what it's worth—and it ain't worth a damn thing—Your Mama thinks this place needs to be gutted and completely re-worked to resolve some of the less than optimal circulation patterns. Anyone want to give it a go?

The dome-topped, mixed-use City Spire building stands more than 800 feet tall and offers residents of this 300-and-some units full service amenties such as full-time dooman, a concierge, fitness center with swimming pool, children's play room, an on-site underground garage and a ground floor Dean & DeLuca market for gorgeous if expensive gourmet groceries and prepared foods. For all that Mister Klar's coughs up a total of $19,472 in monthly common charges and real estate taxes.

listing photos and floor plan: Prudential Douglas Elliman

28 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi Mama
great post. FWIW i think you added the same "Floor/plan" twice
and forgot to add the floorplan.gif for the Floor that contains the:
Living room /kithcen dining room floor .

See your text here:
Anyhoo, the main living spaces, as shown on the floor plan (above)**
"
except the "(above)" shows the Bedrooms-floor again.

Anonymous said...

Mama, I think you made a mistake with your floor plans. And that place is just so ...blah. No way will go for a hundred mil.

Anonymous said...

And lo and behold, Raphael De Niro gets the listing. Well at least it's not Frederik Eklund.

One 57, where the prince is rumored to be buying, is rising to ninety odd floors directly to the north of this building, and thus directly between it and many of the Central Park views it once had. In the pictures I looked through quickly on the listing site, the park views seem to not be straight on, due north, but only angled toward the upper East Side. So they seemed to be shooting around the reason he's probably unloading this place at this time.

Views of the park from the other major condo next door to this, Metropolitan Tower, are also being destroyed. A lot of folks in those buildings must be kicking themselves that they didn't unload a couple of years ago before the reality was staring their prospective buyers in the face.

Rosco Mare said...

Luxurious, but as boring as a Reagan/Bush era Ritz-Carlton hotel.

A few years ago, there was discussion about the possibility of the iconic Capitol Records building in Hollywood going condo. I wonder if a compact verrsion of this floor plan would work?

Anonymous said...

Good Shabbos Dear Mama and Precious Children,

Octagonal houses were briefly popular in the 1850s, when a few thousand were erected. According to the pseudo-science of the day, octagonal homes were considered economical to maintain, atmospherically light-filled, and especially conducive to good health.

The Rabbi is certain that if ensconced into the Klar penthouse she would lose fifteen pounds, appear fifteen years younger, and acquire fifteen new IQ points.

Wistfully yours,
Rabbi Hedda LaTess

Anonymous said...

No way Molyneux did this. Not remotely possible.

Anonymous said...

If he paid any designer, let alone Juan, I would request a full refund. That master bathroom light is direct from Home Depot. Please!

Anonymous said...

Oh look, the 90's.

Anonymous said...

There is just no way Mr. Molyneux had a hand in this mess. Looks like someone's misguided interpretation of how a "rich" person should live. Has all the charm of a high end Radisson Hotel. Yuck!!

Sebastian Leopold Berkowitz said...

Mama, puhleez,

I beseech you to reveal your source; who on the lawd's green earth lead you to believe Molyneux was responsible for this hot mess?

This P.O.S. is a first-rate tear-down, but the first problem is finding a rich-enough buyer who'd want to live in this PO-MO disaster.

Not that I know a goddamn thing about anything, but I'm going to make a wholly (un)educated guess that this domicile will sell for <50% of it's original asking price...? Bueller?

Brian said...

I'll bet it gets broken up into five/six units. No way this goes for $100M.

Anonymous said...

OMG, that decor is sooooo drab!!!!!!!

Why do super rich people usually have bad taste when it comes to interior decor. I don't get it!?

Timofey Pavlovich said...

The New York Times also writes that "Juan Pablo Molyneux, the Chilean-born interior designer, spent two and a half years outfitting the penthouse..." See link below.

But yeah, it all looks cheap and amateur.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/realestate/exclusive-reaching-for-100-million-at-cityspire.html

Anonymous said...

OMG, another hot mess of a property that the owner for some odd reason thinks is fabulous. after looking at the pictures and reading the article BUT before reading the comments, two things immediately came to mind--there's NO way juan molyneux did these interiors and it feels like the suite of a very dated high end hotel. the bedroom floor plan makes me absolutely crazy--NO flow to it at all.

Rugby E. Root said...

Yeah, I would say the problem with the decor is that it was all done right after the place was acquired in 1994. It's stuck in the 1990s.

Mama, I agree that it should be gutted. The octagonal floorplans in a building like that call for one of two things: either a very contemporary Modernist open plan layout or an extremely dramatic Deco remodel (think black lacquer walls) to turn it into something a French designer from the 1930s would be proud of.

It doesn't call for Ionic columns.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps it was originally designed by Molyneux but his furnishings removed and been redone by a stager. It looks completely depersonalized to me.

Candy Spelling said...

These silly New Yorkers! He thinks that pile is worth $15 million more than the Manor? Oh dear me. No, just no.

Anonymous said...

Dude paid $4.5 Million for the place in 94

Anonymous said...

He paid $4.5m for one floor not the total package.

Ekaterina Rybolovleva said...

Candy...you house was very ugly and very tacky. It should be burned.

Anonymous said...

It probably is more valuable than the Mnnor. The Manor is very cheap by price per sq ft. Such a monstrosity in London or New York would sell for 3x what that dump sold for.

Anonymous said...

Does it twirl? Like the Space Needle Restaurant? Now THAT would be worth $100 mill.

Anonymous said...

Candy, considering you reduced the manor $65M perhaps this is worth the same. $45M after reduction in price may just be accurate for this dump.

stolidog said...

There's nothing to be done about it, but the whole "open" concept is completely destroyed by having the elevator shaft run right through the middle of it...You have to traverse from room to room to get the whole view. it just doesn't work.

Anonymous said...

A Holiday Inn that needs updating.

Anonymous said...

The Molyneux decorations appear to have been removed. Here's an example of JP's work - judge for yourself:

Www.molyneux.com/fr/projets/penthouse-new-york.html

Anonymous said...

Juan Pablo Molyneux was originally hired by Mr Klar but his contract ended at the stage of preliminary drawings.None of the furnishings shown in the photographs come from JPMolyneux. I was drafting for that project at that time at Mr. Molyneux's office.

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