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