Prices for the 68 units range from $3.15 million to $65 million, with the mansion and the penthouse commanding top dollar. But, Ms. Justo said, “each is attracting a different type of buyer.” Penthouse people crave grandiose views; mansion people crave grandiose interior space and walls meant for displaying supersize art. The common denominator: grandiosity.
According to Karen Mansour, who is coordinating sales at 33 East 74th Street, a 10-unit luxury condominium assemblage of brownstones that includes the
Grosvenor Atterbury Mansion, a 17,000-square-foot landmark, “Buyers are looking for grand spaces with grand amenities: that’s where the pendulum is swinging in Gold Coast neighborhoods.”
The developer, Daniel E. Straus of JZS Madison, had intended to market the Atterbury Mansion — named for the architect who built it for a railroad heiress in 1901 —as a two-unit condominium. But after early feedback from potential buyers, JZS Madison is considering keeping it intact as a single-family residence (in which case the assemblage will total 9 homes, not 10). “People seem to want an uber-residence with condominium services attached,” explained Ms. Mansour, an executive vice president for development marketing of Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
“The trend of buyers in search of grand, elegant new homes that aren’t jerry-built but are intentionally built on a grand scale has taken hold up here,” said Sabrina Saltiel, also of Elliman.
She is the director of sales for the Marquand at 11 East 68th Street, the conversion by the HFZ Capital Group of a Beaux-Arts apartment building that also incorporates a new 20-room three-story residence on the approximate site of a mansion built in 1884 for Henry Marquand, a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an art collector and a railroad financier. (The original Marquand mansion was torn down in 1912 to make way for the apartment building.)
At the reimagined 22-unit Marquand, prices begin at $15 million and escalate to $58 million for the 10,500-square-foot, 48-foot-wide mansion, which according to the Marquand’s principal architect, Lee Mindel of Shelton Mindel & Associates, will be “the redefinition of a mansion.”
“These rooms are of a proportion not seen since the Carnegies and Astors,” Mr. Mindel said. “It would be a perfect embassy, or like getting to belong to, and own, your own private club. It has the luxury of autonomy and the added luxury of full condominium services. Previously we called it the maisonette or town house, but now the final scale of it warrants ‘mansion.’ ”
As do so many creative trends, this one supposedly began in Greenwich Village.
The sold-out
Abingdon, the artsy, expensive 10-unit conversion of 320 West 12th, seems to have test-driven the mansion concept three years ago with a pair of behemoths at its base. The larger, a 9,600-square-foot triplex that sold for $23.4 million, is purportedly a recent acquisition of Steven A. Cohen, the head of the embattled hedge fund SAC Capital, as well as a collector of art and real estate. The smaller, a 6,000-square-foot duplex, sold for $13.2 million.
“We didn’t set out to create mansions,” said Tim Crowley, a managing director for Flank Development, “and if you try to add value to a property by using the word, that’s a pretty transparent marketing ploy. This was an architectural response to the space we wound up working with: the 13-and-a-half-foot ceilings, 56-by-30-foot living rooms, grand sweeping staircases, wood-burning fireplaces and overall volume distinguish them from town house or maisonette nomenclature. ‘Mansion’ is really the only word that gets it done.”
Also downtown,
Delosis building a $45 million mansion as part of 66 East 11th Street, a five-unit loft-style experiment in residential wellness technology. The mansion has its own “green wall” garden and, for an extra $1 million, its own garage.
Uptown near the Whitney Museum on East 75th Street, the 17,000-square-foot Atterbury Mansion will be just a shell of its former self, but whatever: the au-courant Manhattan mansion is the antithesis of an antique. That’s part of its charm.
Even an authentic oldie on the market for $30 million at 7 East 84th Street, a 13,000-square-foot, 25-foot-wide landmark built in 1884, boasts of its state-of-the-art security, air-conditioning and sound systems. One of a handful of homes between Fifth and Madison Avenues with private garages, the neo-Classical mansion has 8 bedrooms, 10 full baths, a wine cellar and tasting room, and 8 fireplaces with antique mantels imported from
Europe. According to its listing brokers, Jessica Cohen and Lisa Simonsen of Douglas Elliman, the mansion nobly straddles two centuries: it offers “today’s amenities and retains yesterday’s romantic sensibility.”
Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt might be horrified to learn that meditation nooks, lap pools, Zen gardens and media centers have usurped the ballrooms, gift-wrapping rooms, flower-arranging rooms, double staircases, endless fireplaces and handy dumbwaiters that were must-have amenities in turn-of-the-20th-century mansions. But certain features remain the same: private entrance, grand staircase, at least one elevator, outdoor space and a gallery capable both of displaying major artwork and entertaining major-league guests.
“ ‘Mansion’ is a powerful word, and what we’re seeing at these condominiums is a blend of words for marketing purposes,” said Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens, a frequent broker of historic mansions. “It used to be that 20 feet wide could be a mansion, but these days it’s closer to 30. It’s become more of an ego matter.
“But,” she continued, “there are only a finite number of them left — true mansions where the owner has full control of his own little castle. The
Harknessset a record at $53 million, but by the time Larry Gagosian got it for $36.5 million, there was a 50-foot limestone facade but no bones left. What he bought was width and location. The prime of the prime, in my opinion, is still the Duke-Semans, with 27 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue and 110 feet on East 82nd Street.”
She was referring to the traditional trophy mansion, that free-standing limestone island unto itself with at least 25 feet of prime Fifth or Park Avenue frontage, which has become an endangered species.
“I think there may be just three left on Fifth Avenue still operating as single-family residences,” said Sharon Baum, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, who sold the most flamboyant of the bunch, the Duke-Semans, at 1009 Fifth Avenue opposite the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, for the Duke family matriarch in 2006. “It had been in the family for more than a hundred years; the only reason she sold it was, no one in the family wanted to move to New York City to live in it.”
The price was $40 million, and five years later Carlos Slim, one of the wealthiest men in the world, bought it for $44 million. With 19,000 square feet and eight levels, the house is generally acknowledged to be “the most important Beaux-Arts residence in New York,” Ms. Baum said, adding, “But it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.”
When it was on the market, Ms. Baum fielded inquiries from potential buyers wondering “how many acres there were” and whether “it had bulletproof glass in the windows.”
Wendy Maitland, a senior managing director of Town Real Estate, disagreed with the rule of thumb that width and frontage are default determinants of mansion status. “There can be a mansion that is 20 feet wide, if it is done in a specific way and possesses gravitas,” she said. “You can’t just define a mansion by width or square footage: it has a private street-level entrance and is a stand-alone building, usually built in the late 1800s, typically limestone with five levels and multiple fireplaces and outdoor spaces, and the rest are, in my humble opinion, not actual mansions.”
Not all developers of luxe condominiums have jumped on the mansion bandwagon. At
18 Gramercy Park South, a genteel makeover of a Salvation Army boardinghouse by the team that brought 15 Central Park West (and Fifth Avenue pricing) to the West Side, there was no hesitation about what to christen the 3,746-square-foot, $9.53 million, two-bedroom three-and-a-half-bath residence with its own Irving Place entrance. Despite 17-foot ceilings and park frontage, it is a maisonette, period, and the least expensive unit.
“A mansion is a stand-alone home or very important town house,” said one of the condo’s developers, William Lie Zeckendorf. “A maisonette is a town house contained within an existing building. A maisonette benefits from the building’s services and staff, whereas a mansion needs to have its own services and staff.”
Having sold many of Manhattan’s most opulent establishments, Ms. Baum finds humor in the sudden popularity of mansions, in whatever form. “Don’t forget about the mansion tax that has to be paid on any home that costs more than $1 million,” she said. “If you use the mansion tax as your definition, it means practically anybody who buys a home in Manhattan in this market is buying a mansion.”
