Big Ticket | A Floor Full of Light, Sold for $13.5 Million

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times All the units from the 11th floor up at the Franklin Tower in TriBeCa, a building once known as the Corn Exchange Bank, occupy an entire floor.

An elegant loft that commands the entire 15th floor of the Franklin Tower, an 18-story luxury condominium at 90 Franklin Street in TriBeCa, sold for $13.5 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.

The 5,027-square-foot loft, No. 15, spent just over a month on the market and was last listed at $15.5 million. As on every floor from the 11th and up, it enjoys light from four exposures, has 1 0-foot ceilings, and showcases city and Hudson River views from its 28 windows.

The four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath residence is entered from a private elevator landing that opens onto a gallery suitable for displaying super-size art. The Boffi kitchen has a center island, a separate pantry and stainless-steel appliances by Gaggenau, Sub-Zero and Bosch. In the spirit of a great room high in the sky, the kitchen is fully visible from the 23-by-33-foot living/entertainment space, which in turn connects, via pocket doors, to a 23-by-13-foot library with a fireplace and a surround-sound audio system.

A hallway leads to the corner master suite, which has cedar-lined closets and a separate dressing room, as well as a sprawling Waterworks bath with double sinks, a glass shower and the ever-popular claw-foot soaking tub. Another wing off the entrance gallery houses three guest bedrooms and two bathrooms. There is also a staff suite with its own entrance. Franklin Tower, which began as a bland-faced brick building known as the Corn Exchange Bank in 1930 and underwent a conversion at the turn of the millennium, has a rooftop fitness facility and deck, an Art Deco marble lobby, and ample storage for its residents' bicycles, scooters and other mobile devices (but no parking garage).

One of the first buyers at 90 Franklin was the pop chanteuse Mariah Carey, who in 2001, just after being turned down uptown at the Ardsley, where she had offered $8 million for Barbra Streisand's penthouse, paid $9 million to combine the top three floors into a stunning triplex penthouse. The diva-esque proportions of her residence are epitomized by a 38-foot-long master bath/spa. Ms. Carey's opulent triplex constitutes No. 15's one and only upstairs neighbor. Other notable Franklin Tower residents have included the actor Ben Stiller and Bob Vila of “This Old House” renown, who has since sold his 14th-floor domicile, perhaps because he got bored living in a turnkey apartment where nothing needed his Midas touch with power tools.

The seller of No. 15, Stephen Kahn, who traded his Manhattan aerie for the higher elevations available in Aspen, Colo., was represented by Richard Orenstein of Halstead Property.

The buyers, a bicoastal couple who used the limited-liability company 90 Franklin Street Fifteen, were represented by Yael Dunsky of Yael Dunsky Real Estate. Ms. Dunsky said they had rented an identical loft on the 11th floor for several years and had been unable to persuade its owner to sell. “For the past five years they looked at everything else in TriBeCa, anything up to $20 million,” she said. “But they never saw anything with the kind of 360-degree views they had on Franklin. They really wanted to stay right where they were.”

So they did, only better: now they own a home with superior views and more elaborate details than the one they had rented. It was de finitely, Ms. Dunsky said, a kismet trade-up.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

A version of this article appeared in print on 06/23/2013, on page RE2 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Floor Full of Light .