Tech Bigs Buy Village's Bacchus House Where Napster Once Partied [Update: The Buyer Is Sean Parker]

So much for West Village townhouses lagging behind their uptown neighbors. The 24-foot-wide converted carriage house at 40 West 10th Street has finally sold after nearly five years on the market for the stupendous price of $20 million. “It’s like you’re outside a little palazzo in Tuscany,” Brown Harris Steven super-broker Paula Del Nunzio told The Observer back when the 8,500-square-foot home first came on the market.

The Tuscan feel fits not only in terms of the exquisite Beuax Arts architecture that dates, in part, to 1833 but also the building’s pedigree–it has been in the possession of Italian wine heir and financier Enrico Marone-Cinzano for almost exactly two decades. (He bought the place in
January 1991.) Now, according to city records, it belongs to the San Francisco-based Founders Fund. 

The $20 million deal makes this the first trophy sale of the year, of which there were only two such townhouse sales last year–another sign of an improving real estate market, perhaps.

Ms. Del Nunzio dubbed this the Bacchus House, a nod to the god of wine both past and present who inspired the space. Reconfigured by sculptor Charles Kreck, who lived at 40 West 10th Street for more than 60 years, and further renovated by Mr. Marone-Cinzano, the main feature of the home is a 40-foot landscaped atrium, around which the main rooms are arranged. It is like the Marriot Marquis in miniature, with breakfast enjoyed overlooking bamboo trees that rise 30 feet into the space. There are six bedrooms and seven-and-a-half baths.

The sale was first reported by our old colleague Roland Li at Real Estate Weekly.

The Bacchus House first came on the market five years ago for $19.5 million before jumping $2 million in price a year later–and then being listed two days later with Sotheby’s for $18.75 million. The house has been unlisted for more than a year, but that still did not keep it from nearly setting a downtown townhouse record. That prize belongs to 2 North Moore Street, one of the biggest sales of 2010.

Yet the Bacchus moniker fits for another reason, as well. As Curbed points out, Napster co-founder and Founders Fund partner Sean Parker once rented the townhouse for a whopping $45,00 -per month, where he threw elaborate bacchanals. Will his fellow Founders, PayPal creators Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, be throwing brash bashes there once again, or is the gang all grown up and this is about business? 

Perhaps this will become the city’s grandest tech incubator yet.

UPDATE 1/25: The Post‘s Jennifer Gould Keill confirms that the house is not for company use but solely the domain of Sean Parker–who also gets a bitchslap from a local broker. “The parties were great, but Parker could have done much better with that kind of money,” Paolo Zampolli told Gould Keill. Somebody just got defriend

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo