During the last few years, super fancy salon-owner John Barrett has catered to the informal inclinations of his upscale clientele by opening both a braid bar and a ponytail bar, where time-crunched fashionistas can pay stylists $50 to pull their hair back with an elastic band.
But when it comes to real estate, the famed stylist has abandoned his laid-back Downtown ways. The salon owner has ditched the tired Village—teeming with tourists and college students—for the more classical Parc Vendome uptown at 333 West 56th Street.
Last month the hair-do honcho sold his one-bedroom at the Greenwich on 13th Street to Joseph Schwartzman, a Kenyan businessman with some shady associates, for $2.5 million.
At 1,750 square feet, his new tenth-floor apartment is a bit bigger than his old Greenwich Village digs, and it’s also much cheaper: just $1.8 million. It’s also right down the street from work, at his salon on Park Avenue inside of Bergdorf Goodman. Two blocks south of Columbus Circle, on the same block as Norman Foster’s Hearst Building and backing up onto 57th Street, which is sprouting half a dozen high-luxury towers at this very moment, we wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Barrett’s latest real estate gamble is as successful as his last, on which he made $1.1 million.
The sellers weren’t so lucky. Peter Fish, a film and television composer, and Diane Singer, who works in the fashion industry, have owned the combo unit for longer than city records will tell us, so they probably made a decent profit, but not as much as they were hoping, and not very quickly. They first listed the unit in 2008 for $2.37 million, but it wasn’t until its fourth listing—after its fifth brokerage—that they finally landed on Corcoran and allowed themselves to take a half-million-dollar haircut.
But once they did, Erik Ternon and Noble Black made short work of it—they listed the unit in the middle of December and by the middle of January it was in contract, for just $50,000 less than they asked. The equivalent of an ooh-and-awe spin-around reveal in the salon?
