By this time next year, Manhattan Island will be entirely occupied with very young and scrawny models, and, maybe, the well-fed executives who escort them.
Isabeli Fontana, the 24-year-old top Brazilian model, just spent $3.37 million on a three-bedroom apartment in the massive Trump Place development on Riverside Boulevard. (Never mind that she already has a penthouse in a Trump condo a few doors down.) Ms. Fontana, who was in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue at the record-setting age of 16, will have a marble master bathroom with his-and-her sinks, the listing says, plus a Jacuzzi.
Why did she stay in the Upper West Side? “Areas in downtown tend to be too busy, you can’t really be yourself, lots of fashion people are down there,” the Nigerian supermodel Oluchi Onweagba told The Observer in October. “Without me freaking out—‘Am I going to run into a hairstylist or a makeup artist?’—I want to be myself, and live like every other human being.”
The Village’s makeup artists must be manageable for Jessica Stam (pictured), reportedly the 15th-best-paid model in the world, because the perfectly pale, pixie-faced 21-year-old just bought her third apartment there.
City records show she sold off the first, a co-op on East 16th Street, for $510,000 in August 2004, upgrading to an $800,000 condo four blocks down. In late November she sold that place for $935,000 to a buyer named Duront Archibald Walton III. According to the listing with Corcoran’s Jared Seligman—who also represents DJ AM, reportedly Ms. Stam’s old flame—the one-bedroom comes with 12-foot ceilings and, of course, a whirlpool tub. Mr. Seligman had no comment.
Two days later Ms. Stam upgraded again, this time to a $1.4 million, 1,175-square-foot loft at the Petersfield on Fourth Avenue. (The glitzy Swedish male model Marcus Schenkenberg has an apartment in the building, too, city records show.) The listing with Elliman’s Leonard Steinberg doesn’t say that there’s a Jacuzzi, sadly, but as recompense there’s a steam shower—“a sophisticated spa-lover’s dream,” the listing croons.