Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times The building at 144 Duane Street was first designed as a department store, then became a warehouse before its current residential-retail iteration.A vintage TriBeCa loft building designed as a department store in 1862, reinvented as a warehouse for a children’s shoe company and then, in 2001, gut-renovated and transformed into boutique apartments, has sold for $43 million. It was the most expensive sale of the week, and garnered one of the highest prices for a downtown residence, according to city records.
Crowned by a triplex penthouse, the building was first on the market for $45 million in 2011, and last year the asking price escalated to $49.5 million.
A six-story building with an elaborately carved limestone exterior and an elegant street-level storefront whose sole tenant is the German perfume maker Drom, 144 Duane Street was transformed by Studio Rivelli Architects in 2001 for the present seller, a private investor. The renovation created an 11,000-square-foot triplex on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors and two full-floor lofts on the second and third floors.
Daniel Romualdez Architects was retained to reimagine the interiors, which in contrast to the historic exterior are starkly modern and include multiple skylights and a floating staircase with blue glass steps, though ample exposed brick and cast-iron columns give a nod to the past. The building has eight bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, a rustic wood-burning fireplace girded in brick, and a combined 23,100 square feet of residential space.
There is, of course, an elevator among the refurbished mechanicals, and the penthouse also has 2,775 square feet of outdoor space divided between a roof deck and a terrace. The ceiling heights vary from 12 to 17 feet, the windows are oversized, and the 41-by-91-foot basement now contains a private gym and a half-court basketball court. The third-floor loft is a 4,000-square-foot floor-through, and the second floor is currently split into two units. The owner’s triplex had previously been on the rental and sales markets as a separate entity. The asking price was $30 million; the monthly rental fee was $100,000.
Leonard Steinberg, Yoko Sanada and Hervé Senequier of Douglas Elliman Real Estate handled the transaction on behalf of the seller, who used a limited-liability company, 144 Duane Street Corporation. The similarly anonymous buyer, identified in city records as Duane Street, was represented by a business manager/lawyer and did not use a broker. The commercial space, with a dedicated entrance, will remain on the ground floor, but the buyer requested that the residential portion of the building be delivered vacant, suggesting that it might be recombined as a single-family dwelling.
The week’s second-priciest sale, at the River House at 435 East 52nd Street, the 1931 Art-Deco co-op renowned for its panoramic East River views and emphatically selective co-op board, was also a property that had been on the market for several years and traded for less than the asking price.
The 13-room residence, No. 6A, sold for $10 million; it entered the market in 2010 with a list price of $18.89 million, and after several changes in price and listing brokerages, the most recent asking price had been $10.3 million. The elegantly proportioned co-op, with monthly maintenance fees of $10,446, has four bedrooms, four and a half baths, two fireplaces, three maids’ rooms and, in the dining room and library, romantic bay windows that overlook the river. The 26-story River House, with a pair of 15-story wings and a quaint cobblestone driveway, was designed by Bottomley, Wagner, & White.
The sellers, the romance novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford and her husband, Robert, were represented by Serena Boardman and Eva J. Mohr of Sotheby’s International Realty; the buyer was the actress Uma Thurman, who somehow clicked with the stuffy co-op board, which in previous years had discouraged show-business personalities from buying there, a slight to which the actress Diane Keaton, among other rejected applicants, can attest.
After an in-house dispute over the fate of the River House’s private club, the River Club, the board has put the 62,000-square-foot club on the market to be recreated as a private mansion for a qualified owner with deep pockets and patience. John Burger and Kyle Blackmon of Brown Harris Stevens are the listing brokers, and the price is $130 million.
Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.
