Unreal Estate: The $43 M. Runner-Up

Last year, back when the Greek pharmaceutical executive Dr. Athanase Lavidas put his full-floor, 11-room, five-fireplace apartment on the market for $43 million, it was the most expensive co-op available at 2 East 67th Street, one of the Upper East Side’s most dictatorially patrician apartment houses. But a $34.9 million sprawl two floors up now has a $45 million tag, thanks to a pair of really peculiar price increases this month.

That means Dr. Lavidas’ place is the cheaper choice by $2 million—a swell bargain! And while the $45 million apartment upstairs doesn’t have a publicly available floor plan, Dr. Lavidas’ listing with Brown Harris Stevens comes with a gem: It shows where those five fireplaces are; how to navigate from the sauna to the gym, or from the private landing to the powder room; where the maids sleep; and how the place measures up to an older layout. — Max Abelson

Brown Harris Stevens.

On the plus side, the apartment’s private landing opens onto a 21-foot-long gallery with a fireplace. Then again, the entrance gallery in Dick Fuld’s 640 Park Avenue co-op also has a fireplace, but the gallery is 25.5 feet long. Zing!

Having a 648-square-foot corner living room that faces both Fifth Avenue and East 67th Street must be amusing, but also demanding. What does one do with all the space? Probably recline near the wood-burning fireplace and guffaw.

The apartment has seven zones of central air conditioning. Bob Weinstein’s $29.75 million penthouse at the Beresford has three (and merely three fireplaces).

On an older floor plan, the maid’s room was called the butler’s room and it was only 8 feet wide. But it’s apparently been given some space that used to belong to the pantry, which means there’s a nice new walk-in closet. Kindness to your servants is the new meanness to your servants.

Three maid’s rooms were apparently combined into one bedroom, but, oddly, it has a door that connects to one remaining maid’s room. The indignity! Weirder still, the bedroom and maid’s room share a bathroom.

The 60-foot-long corridor has the same square footage of many respectable Manhattan studios. It even has three closets—three more than this writer’s apartment.

The master suite’s 94.7-square-foot dressing room beats this 93.5-square-foot dressing room by just a smidge. But the loser apparently features a petite opening that leads to the gym.

This bedroom doesn’t get a walk-in closet like its two neighbors, but it has its own bathroom. And the listing says that all of the co-op’s bathrooms have been redone by John Saladino, the Yale-educated mega-designer whose 3.4-pound book on style costs $65.