**If you'd like a good long look at all three of the floor plans for Huguette Clark's former digs at 907 Fifth Avenue, click here.
The 12th floor spread—a 14-room, half floor, park-facer with about 5,000 square feet—was listed in early March (2012) and went into contract less than a month later for—so the story goes—close to its $24,000,000 asking price.
Miz Clark's two other apartments on the 8th floor at 907 Fifth Avenue—where domestic doyenne Martha Stewart maintains a pied-a-terre—each measure in around 5,000 square feet. The adjacent units are not combined but together comprise one entire floor of the building. One, listed at $12,000,000, has 12 rooms (2 bedrooms, two bathrooms) and oblique park views, and the other, listed at $19,000,000, has 10 rooms (3 bedrooms and 6 full and 5 half bathrooms). Both eighth floor apartments have reportedly gone to contract for close to their respective asking prices that total $31,000,000.
No word has yet to reach Your Mama about the identity of the buyer looking to snatch up the 12th floor unit but Your Mama did hear earlier this week—and again this morning—from I.B. Uhrealestateuberinsider that the two 8th floor units are actually in contract with the same buyer: Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Muhammad Al Thani, otherwise known as the Prime Minister of Qatar.
I.B. Uhrealestateuberinsider also dished that word on the Fifth Avenue real estate street is that the Qatari prime minister might also be interested in the acquisition of a trio contiguous residences on the 7th floor, currently listed as a group with an asking price of $25,000,000.
Should the prime minister pass muster with the building's board—he is not, according to I.B. Uhrealestateuberinsider, a shoe-in despite the fact he could probably buy up half of Fifth Avenue with the change he loses in the cushions of his sofa—and be given the go-ahead to purchase both of Huguette Clark's 8th floor units and the trio of apartments below he'd possess more than 15,000 contiguous square feet on two-park-facing floors with a staggering, pre-renovation room count of 40 (or more).
Just take a moment to think about that...40 or more rooms on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
The current asking prices put the combined asking price of the quintet of co-operative apartments at $56,000,000 with, according to listing information, combined maintenance and common charges that add up to $28,915 per month or, according to our rudimentary calculations on our bejeweled abacus, a heart-stopping $346,980 per annum. Have mercy! And that's just to keep the keys turning in the locks and does not include staffing fees, utilities, renovations and improvements, furnishings, mortgages and other expensive what-have-yous.
If you think $56,000,000 might be too much for a bunch of fixer uppers in upper Manhattan consider that the prime minister (allegedly) spent more than a quarter billion bucks building his 430-plus foot long boat, Al Mirqab, and several well-connected sources have repeatedly snitched to Your Mama that he paid Los Angeles-based billionaire Tom Gores a bracing $34,500,000 in December 2010 for three vacant—vacant!—hill top parcels that total more than 8 super-prime acres above the Bel-Air Country Club and once had a rose-tinted asking price of $65,000,000. We don't have any details about what the prime minister plans to do with the land but it's probably pretty safe to assume whatever he would build would be nothing short of monumentally scaled and immodestly palatial.
All just rumor and gossip, children, delicious rumor and gossip about the staggeringly profligate real estate ways of the global giga-rich.
exterior photo: Brown Harris Stevens