Last September, on the heels of a $25,000,000 purchase of a modern Malibu beach house, Your Mama discussed at length the many private residences owned and maintained by quirky Microsoft co-founder and multi-billionaire Paul Allen.Two days ago, world slipped and slid down the New York City real estate gossip grapevine that Mister Allen recently added a $25,000,0000 penthouse to his already palatial pied-a-terre atop the impossibly posh limestone dowager at 4 East 66th Street in New York City.
Since 1996 when he paid around $13,500,000 for it, Mister Allen has owned a sprawling 18-room full-floor spread in the plainly elegant and exceedingly exclusive Fifth Avenue-fronting dowager. We have no idea what sort of monthly maintenance charges Mister Allen pays for his 11th floor co-operative residence in the whitest of white glove buildings but we can tell you that in 2007 a 4 bedroom and 7 bathroom apartment that eventually sold for $29,000,000 carried tummy-twisting monthly charges of $15,416.
Anyhoo, Mister Allen's new penthouse was sold–off-market, natch–by Angela Thompson, the widow of New Zealand businessman Wade F.B. Thompson who, according to the New York Observer, is best known for having overhauled the Airstream trailer company and donated $35,000,000 to help finance a renovation and re-do of the Park Avenue Armory, a swank military facility and social club for the so-called Silk Stocking Regiment turned high-brow arts and cultural center.
Mister Allen's new penthouse pad, set back from the facade and smaller by comparison to the other full-floor residences in the building, is estimated by a real estate professional and "Upper East Side maven A. Laurence Kaiser" to have about seven rooms. A little peeping around on Google Maps and Bing sows the barbell-shaped penthouse has banks of over-sized windows and is almost fully girdled by a wrap around terrace with panoramic Central Park and city views.
Little else is known–or at least so far reported– about the penthouse that Mister Allen will, we presume, combine at significant additional expense with his already vast full-floor pied-a-terre below.
Although the residents of 4 East 66th Street prefer their neighbors keep a low profile when it comes to their real estate affairs, the plum building was much in the news in 2007 and 2008 when luxe-living publishing widow and socialite Veronica Hearst battled to keep her 6th floor residence from slipping into the gaping maw of foreclosure, an almost unheard of event in buildings of this stature.
Miz Hearst's spectacular (and spectacularly opulent) Renzo Mongiardino-designed digs we're finally sold in July 2008 for a knee-buckling $36,500,000 to a 30-something year old hedge hog named Charles "Chase" P. Coleman III and his lovely finance heiress spouse Stephanie who, until she hitched her wagon to Mister Coleman's in 2005, did a little PR work for Vera Wang.
Other high-toned and ridiculously rich residents of the building include big pharma bigwig Howard Soloman, Deutsche Bank director Kevin Parker and his wife Ulla, and hedge fund honcho Daniel Nir and his wfe Jill Braufman who paid $29,000,000 for their 7,000-ish square foot full-floor unit in June 2007. Also in residence Ace Greenberg, former CEO of Bear Stearns, asset management mogul Lew Sanders, Iraqi-born financier and philanthropist Ezra Zilkha and his lady Cecile, and Texas-based oil tycoon Sid Bass and his socially prominent and powerful wife Mercedes.
photo: Scott Bintner for Property Shark
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