Though she owns several swanky residences in Los Angeles, since 2013 Rihanna has spent an honest-to-goodness fortune on rent for a spacious duplex penthouse atop a full service building in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown that, after first being listed over the summer at $18.75 million, is now available at $16.95 million. The 28-year-old, 8-time Grammy winning mononymic Barbadian superstar, who just launched an already smashingly successful line of beauty products and by some estimates presides over a net worth of close to a quarter of a billion dollars, first leased the airy aerie at a sky-high rate of $39,000 per month and, according to the New York Post, the rent has since ballooned to a heart-stopping $50,000 per month. The house-sized penthouse, 4,660-square-feet with four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms, is owned by Paris-born celebrity fashion photographer Antoine Verglas who bought it in late 2005 for $6.11 million and since 2009 has set it out for sale several times at a handful of prices between $9.65 million and $18.75 million.
A secure, key-lock elevator opens in an unfortunately abrupt manner directly into an immense, concrete floored L-shaped living, dining and entertaining space on the penthouse’s upper floor that stretches to a monumental 58-feet long with 13-foot ceilings and huge floor-to-ceiling windows. There’s also an expensively outfitted open chef’s kitchen, a dry bar, a discreet powder room and a double-sided fireplace shared with an a 2,400-square-foot wrap-around terrace. A floating switchback staircase crafted of wood and steel descends to the lower level where there’s one en suite bedroom for guests or staff, two more roomy bedrooms that share a hall bathroom with terrazzo tile flooring and a corner master suite composed of a large bedroom with open city views to the north and west, an ample walk-in closet and a bathroom with a glass-enclosed shower and a garden tub set below a massive window with open views to the Empire State Building.
The stately 11-story limestone-faced building, erected in the early 1900s as a facility for the printing industry, provides the residents of its 27 loft-style luxury apartments with a fully-staffed mahogany and stone lobby and a communal roof terrace.
It’s not clear if Riri, who reportedly maintains an opulent, $20 million townhouse-style villa at the One Sandy Lane resort in St. James, Barbados, plans to keep a residential toehold in New York City but she certainly has her pick of several multi-million dollar residences in Los Angeles that she’s hoovered up over the last several years. In the fall of 2014 she paid $5.45 million for a three-bedroom and four-bathroom condo at the tony Century building in Century City where earlier this year Matthew Perry dropped $20 million for a full-floor spread; In 2015 she scooped up a 2,000-square-foot condo in an apartment tower along the Wilshire Corridor for $925,000, and earlier this year she laid out $6.8 million for a 7,130-square-foot, city-view contemporary Mediterranean set behind gates and high on a hillside near the base of Nichols Canyon that includes a gated motor court, a state-of-the-art home theater, an infinity-edge swimming pool and a guesthouse atop a detached two-car garage.
exterior image: Joe Strini for Property Shark; listing photos and floor plan: Town Residential
