It is not Versailles, certainly, but Sofia Coppola’s two-bedroom condo at 161 Grand Street is lovely. Just not lovely enough to keep the Marie Antoinette director interested.
Ms. Coppola has sold her “sun-drenched” corner loft for the $2.75 million ask, according to city records. Margaret Challa is the buyer of this roomy, high-ceilinged space. Read More
Time. We really have so little of it. Just a few years ago it seemed like condo and co-op owners had all the time in the world with their beloved tax abatement and now it’s expiring.
There are plenty of abatements out there, of course—ones for new construction and capital improvements, senior citizens and veterans, but this one is special. This is the one that gives a generous 17.5 percent property tax reduction to just about all co-op and condo owners. And it’s going to die on June 30 if an extension doesn’t come along to save it.
The situation has looked bad before, of course. The abatement, first passed in 1996 to help offset the disparity between the tax rates of co-op and condos versus one- to three-family houses, has required several renewals. Still, have things ever been this dire? Read More
Most 24-year-old New Yorkers are putting up with the indignity of shared bathrooms and subdivided living spaces converted into pseudo-bedrooms with pressurized walls.
But not Sophie Auster, whose lit-star dad Paul bought her a one-bedroom condo when she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence.
During an extended tour of Ms. Auster’ amazing condo, the budding chanteuse reveals to the Post that daddy dearest, who lives in a regal Park Slope brownstone, had considered purchasing a Paris pied-a-terre. But when the economy began to hiccup in 2008, Mr. Auster dropped the idea of a pad in the city that fostered his early literary life, opting instead to buy his daughter a place in Hudson Square.
“They thought, well, if we’re going to invest money in some place, we might as well invest it in a place for our child to live while she is trying to do what she wants to do,” Ms. Auster told the Post. Read More
In February of last year, Ilan Bracha, the developer and star broker now heading up Keller Williams NY told The Observer, “We’ll be No. 1 in five years,” He was referring to his firm, but the Bracha family has now taken the top spot elsewhere—at Gary Barnett’s hugely successful Rushmore condominiums at the Riverside South development.
Mati Bracha, Ilan’s wife, just paid $5.28 million for penthouse 3A, according to city records. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Bracha would be moving in. Read More
Nick Sprayregen made his fortune, and his name, on the West Side of Manhattan, where his family’s Tuck-It-Away storage empire was based. It was a humble business until Columbia University decided it wanted to expand its campus into Mr. Sprayregen’s backyard, at which point he became one of the staunchest opponents of the university’s plan, and a media darling because of it.
Still, Mr. Sprayregen has long called the Upper East Side home, where he has just as great a propensity for turning a strong real estate deal. Three years ago, Mr. Sprayregen bought the Newhouse’s duplex on East 76th Street for 40 percent off. Now, the self-storage kingpin has sold his home around the corner for twice what he paid a decade ago. Read More
77 Reade Street could be called the Jekel and Hyde of Tribeca. One half of the new condo development is an 1852 cast-iron and brick loft building, of the vintage that have been converted into sprawling homes for decades now. The other side is all sleek limestone and hard edges, a nod to the past that is very much rooted in the present, the work of well-regarded New York firm BKSK.
The development came on the market last June, and its first unit has just closed, a combination of two penthouses for $6.54 million. The two duplex units, one of them a two-bedroom, the other a three, straddle both the original building and its centuries-younger sibling, giving this new home a split personality. Read More
The stars he works with live in multimillion dollar homes all over the world, yet songwriter Tobias “Toby” Gad doesn’t have it too bad himself. Mr. Gad, who has written such timeless classics as Beyonce’s “If I Were A Boy” and Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” has just sold his New York digs for $1.9 million, city records show. Read More
Supermodel Natasha Poly took the world by storm in the early aughts, establishing herself in the modeling elite. Having graced the pages of every global iteration of Vogue, Ms Poly, née Natalya Polevshchikova, is the picture-perfect face of the moment. She now has a picture-perfect condo to accompany her severe looks. Ms. Poly has purchased a posh condo at Jean Nouvel’s crystalline creation at 100 11th Avenue. Sources say she bought the place with her husband, Peter Bakker, though his name does not appear on the deed. Read More
Both Perry Rubenstein and his wife, Sara Fitzmaurice are adept sellers. As an art dealer, Mr. Rubenstein has sold millions of dollars of artwork to collectors across the globe. Ms. Fitzmaurice, the founder of PR mega-company Fitz&Co, sells brands, ideas and campaigns for the art world. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the two have sold their Chelsea apartment for an incredible profit. Read More
While he may be headed for one of Britain’s largest divorce settlements, moneyman Pierre Lagrange seems to be doing just fine on this side of the pond. The former Goldman Sachs trader has just purchased the penthouse at new Chelsea hotspot HL23.
Mr. Lagrange, who paid $11.29 million for the pad, made headlines last fall when, after separating from his wife, he came out. He has since been linked to fashion designer Roubi L’Roubi. Read More
