LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $77,500,000 (Yes, puppies, that's correct. It's really listed at $77,500,000)
SIZE: 10,882 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: While property gossips around the world were going ape shit yesterday over the official listings and floor plans for late (and famously reclusive) copper heiress Huguette Clark's three sprawling co-operative apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, real estate developer Christopher M. Jeffries (not entirely) quietly slipped his monumental Manhattan duplex condominium on the market with a positively bone-chilling price tag of $77,500,000.
Mister Jeffries, married for a few years to Princess Yasmin Aga Khan in the early 1990s, founded Millennium Partners in order to—as per Millennium's website—"pioneer a new concept in mixed-use, urban living and entertainment centers." He teamed up with both the Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts and The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company to develop luxury projects and has clearly been enormously successful.
Mister Jeffries acquired his humongous urban aerie, according to The New York Times, in 2002 for $20,000,000 and the current asking price makes it the most expensive condominium currently on the open market in New York City. While the stratospheric asking price certainly makes Your Mama gasp, guffaw and stomp our feet with flabbergast, it's probably not so out of the ball park given that Russian bajillionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev recently dropped $88,000,000 on retired financier Sanford 'Sandy' Weill's significantly smaller—but no less jaw dropping—penthouse atop supah-swank 15 Central Park West.
15 Central Park West—it and its sardine-like crush of freakishly rich and powerful residents the juicy subject of Michael Gross' next tome—may get most of the glory in the real estate media but the lesser ballyhooed, comparatively discreet and far more boutique-y dozen-unit Ritz-Carlton Residences on Central Park South ain't exactly real estate chopped liver, children.
StreetEasy shows only five of the lavishly large condos have changed hands in the last five years and Your Mama's rudimentary calculations show a hefty-hefty-hefty five-year average sale price of $24,750,000. The astronomical monthlies provide residents with the 5-star services of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that occupies the first 20 or so floors of building that stands directly across the street from the southern edge of Central Park.
The 23rd floor unit—9,455 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms—sold in the early days of 2007 for $29,500,000 and carried with it common charges and taxes, as per listing information from the time, that totaled $23,351 per month. As ear-piercingly high as that sounds (and is), it pales in comparison to the super-jumbo $29,651 in taxes and common charges due each month on Mister Jefferies' mcmansion-sized condo. That, children, is a heart-stopping $355,812 a year just to keep your key turning in the lock.
The main entrance and public rooms on the upper level include a brazenly capacious, nearly thousand square foot living room with mahogany-colored wood floors (that may or may not actually be mahogany), a regimented quintet of arched windows with big park view and terrace access, and a soaring, 15-foot gold-leafed coffered ceiling. There are two fireplaces, one at each end of the nearly 45-foot long room done up in a decidedly traditional, medium-level fussy day-core with lustrous jewel-toned fabrics, glittery crystal chandeliers—probably antiques and more than likely shockingly costly—and a lot of very expensive- and authentic-looking Chinoserie things.
The east wing of the upper level contains an intimately-scaled media room with park view and built-in entertainment cabinet as well as a "display room" for displaying museum quality trinkets and tchotchke, and a nearly 500-square foot library with built-in book cases and open city views to the south. Deep walk-in closets and storage areas plus a wonderfully private half bathroom complete the wing.
The upper level's west wing stretches back from the foyer and includes an airy formal dining room with eight windows on three sides, a fireplace on the fourth wall, and direct access to a fairly narrow west facing terrace with city and oblique park views. The adjacent, almost 35-foot long, suburban mansion-sized kitchen—no doubt a state-of-the-art culinary tour-de-force—has seven windows with park and city views and an adjoining, compactly cozy breakfast room that opens out to the aforementioned 80-foot wide terrace that runs along the north side of the apartment and practically hangs over Central Park.
Technically, the hulking apartment has four bedrooms but a quick study of the floor plan reveals two of them, both with en suite facilities, are quite small and tucked less than optimally into the back of the condo's lower level, opposite the bedroom-sized laundry room. A third, much more amply proportioned guest bedroom just off the lower level foyer/sitting room has direct park views and an attached bathroom but does not have—as far as we can see from per the floor plan—a closet.
The (possible) lack of closet space in the guest bedroom is more than made up for in the approximately 3,000 square foot master suite that consumes the entire east wing of the duplex's lower level and includes a 25-foot long entry gallery, a behemoth bedroom with fireplace and panoramic city and park views, his and her (park view) bathrooms and his and her custom-fitted dressing rooms.
His dressing room has a separate walk-in closet and direct park view and her 800 (or so) square foot, multi-room boo-dwar features a wee fitness room, a colossal, custom fitted dressing room with all kinds of built-in nooks and crannies for shoes, handbags and what-have-yous, and at the very rear of the exceptionally spacious space, a closet-lined sitting room with built in desk and open city views to the south.
Your Mama might suggest the next owner drop in an essentially hidden and tightly coiled staircase in the over-sized storage closet off the upper level's east wing corridor that directly connects to the lady's dressing room on the lower level.
The gigantic duplex, as it turns out, is not the only unit at the Ritz-Carlton Residences on Central Park South Mister Jeffries has owned. Our research turned up some 411 that clearly indicates the real estate tycoon purchased the 5,954 square foot, full floor simplex unit directly below his 30th and 31st floor duplex in December 2005 for $16,292,000 that he turned around and sold in July 2008 for $28,500,000. Taxes and common charges totaled $17,740 at that time of the 2008 sale.
The 29th floor sprawler, according to listing information from the time, has 3-4 bedrooms—including an approx. 1,500 square foot master suite, a total of 4 bathrooms, and 3 terraces—two that directly face Central Park. The buyer was hedge fund honcho Scott Bommer—a man well-known by New York real estateophiles for his exorbitantly high-priced real estate purchases—who re-sold the property in August 2011 for $30,000,000 to mysterious corporate entity with a Miami, FL address.
This is not, it may or may not surprise the children to learn, the first mansion in Fordune Mister Jeffries has owned. In early 2000 he sold a smaller estate next door to his current house that public property records reveal spreads out over 3.13 acres and includes a 7,037 square foot mansion, tennis court, and swimming pool.
interior and view photos and floor plan (NYC): Brown Harris Stevens
aerial image: Bing