LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $48,000,000, allegedly
SIZE: 5 bedrooms and bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Since we're feeling in a New York State of mind today let's continue from a contemporary, art-filled Union Square area loft owned by a Pulitzer Prize winning writer we discussed this morning to an opulent Upper East Side townhouse owned by the impeccably refined Chilean-born interior decorator Juan Pablo Molyneux and recently heaved on the open market with an asking price that may or may not be $48,000,000.
Mister Molyneux's classically rigorous, decidedly decadent and elegantly eccentric designs are really only available to corporate kingpins, potentates with limitless funds and other super rich sorts who can afford a much lauded and applauded decorator of international renown. We do not, of course, have an inkling of intel about Mister Molyneux's fee structure or net worth but its seems safe to say whatever he earns doing up the palatial dachas and voluptuous villas of the global elite is sufficient such that he and the missus, Pilar, are able to maintain a substantial townhouse mansion in New York City and am equally, if not more substantial office and residence in a very serious, 17th-century hôtel particulier in Paris' 4th arrondissement (Marais).
In additional private residences in South America, Russia and the Middle East Mister Molyneux's budget busting—or, more likely, budget free—projects span the globe and include (but are not limited to), as per his website, a garrett in Paris, a chalet in Colorado, several chateau in France, a penthouse in Manhattan, and "An approximately 150,000-square-foot manoir in northwest Quebec [Canada] on a property almost as big as Belgium that is inspired by the Kuskovo Palace." Sheesh. Wonder who's "house" that is?
Anyhoo, property records indicate Mister and Missus Molyneux picked up the east-of-Madison/west-of-Park Avenue townhouse way back in 1990 for an undisclosed amount of money. If they did a traditional 20% down purchase, based on the mortgage they secured (available through public property records) Your Mama guesstimates they shelled out somewhere right around $3,000,000.
When Mister and Missus Molyneux's Manhattan mansion first popped up on the interweb a few days ago, we were sent a link to the listing by the ever-industrious aide de camp Hot Chocolate. At that time, the listing showed the price tag set at $48,000,000. Current listing information has gone all mysterious and now shows the price as "Upon request."
Current listings available online skimp on the photographs and no floor plan was provided that we could locate. What it does show is the six story, limestone-faced townhouse has 15 rooms, five "serene" master bedroom suites and seven bathrooms (plus staff quarters), eight working fireplaces, four planted patios and balconies, a fitness facility, media room and, outdoor lovers will note, a duplex roof terrace with a "therapeutic pool."
The interior spaces shown in the few listing photos are positively palatial. Mister Molyneux speaks a hyper-sophisticated, upper crust kind of decorating language that, quite frankly, Your Mama just does not understand. None-the-less, we can understand that every scrap of fabric and French polished piece of pedigreed furniture is absolutely correct. It's museum quality Ming this and Han Dynasty that, a few Louis the Whatever fauteuils thrown around, and miles and miles of prodigiously passamenteried brocades and velvets woven with golden thread from Clarence House and/or Stroheim & Romann, every precious yard of which is so ludicrously expensive the drapery in the formal sitting room alone could probably break the bank of a lesser millionaire.
We're not sure if Mister Molyneux's townhouse interiors were photographed for one or another of the gloss shelter publications but we'd be surprised if it had not. The bi-continent couple's Parisian residence and studio/showroom, however, was photographed twice for Architectural Digest and once for the high-society chonicling blog New York Social Diary.
It's a good time, it seems, to float homes on the market with extraordinary price tags. There seems an almost endless supply of buyers looking to spend tens upon tens of millions to acquire trophy properties around the world only to spend another ten or twenty million on extensive renovations and customizations. If we've said it once we've said it a trillion times, such are the wacky and wildly profligate real estate ways of the rich and/or famous.
listing photos: Stribling