Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times Harperley Hall on the Upper West Side once served as home and playground for the pop star Madonna, who combined two units into a duplex.The Harperley Hall duplex created by Madonna Ciccone way back in a former century, when she and Sean Penn were a hot item and she was very much a Material Girl on the rise in the matter of shrewd real estate acquisitions, sold for $16 million in the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.
The 6,000-square-foot combined space, No. 5/6A, at 41 Central Park West and 1 West 64th Street â€" the side entrance has the special Madonna-approved guardhouse â€" was first listed for $23.5 million. But it did not attract a cash-flush suitor until a recent reduction to $19.95 million. Monthly maintenance is $11,774.
Back when it was first listed, Madonna and her current entourage were already comfortably ensconced in an enormous (12,000 square feet) Upper East Side town house â€" with a Garbo-esque private garage, as opposed to Harperley Hall’s semiprivate one â€" for which she paid $32.5 million in 2009.
Harperley Hall, an Arts and Crafts-style building on the northwest corner of 64th Street and Central Park West, was designed by Henry W. Wilkinson and completed in 1911; Juliet balconies festoon its windows, and French doors are among its many decorative quirks. The Madonna duplex, which was created after a skirmish with the co-op board, has 10-foot ceilings and 110 feet of park frontage, along with six bedrooms in four bedroom wings, eight bathrooms and five wood-burning fireplaces. The eat-in kitchen has marble slab counters, and the master bathroom, where the mode is vintage, has twin pedestal sinks, a claw-foot soaking tub and a marble shower.
After the combination of the fifth- and sixth-floor units was approved (a lawsuit figured into the negotiation), Madonna commissioned her younger brother, Christopher G. Ciccone, to impart a peaceful but elegant karma to the décor before the apartment was featured in Architectural Digest. But the duplex was apparently not peaceful enough for some of the neighbors, who complained about overly loud parties with music and dancing, not to mention the paparazzi perpetually attached to the Madonna bandwagon.
The new owners of the duplex, the hedge fund wizard Deepak Narula and his wife, Anju Murari-Narula, are guaranteed to be less obstreperous. Mr. Narula, the founder of the $1.4 billion Metacapital Management fund, was anointed a “Hedge Fund God†last fall in a Business Insider posting after Bloomberg News reported that his market machinations had yielded the company a 34 percent increase in assets; he is doubtless too busy making money to make waves on the home front. But Harperley Hall shareholders should be aware that Madonna still has a toehold in the building: the separate seventh-floor unit she snapped up in 2008 for $7.35 million was not included in this transaction.
Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group and Arabella Greene Buckworth of Brown Harris Stevens shared the exclusive listing and also represented the buyer.
Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.
