Though it may not be too much of a surprise to any dot-connecting real estate obsessed listeners of reality TV impresario Andy Cohen’s radio program, Ellen Barkin has sold her townhouse in New York’s West Village in an off-market deal valued at $11 million. The 68-year-old Bronx native earned a tidy profit on the handsome house she picked up for $7.5 million in 2006, shortly after her acrimonious split from billionaire Ron Perelman. The new owner appears in records as an LLC tied to Glendale, Calif., based venture capital and real estate private equity investor Wolfgang Buehler.
The Greek Revival townhouse was built as a single-family home in 1841 and, for about a decade beginning in the mid-1850s, was leased by a local grocer who lived there with his family and servants. The house remained in private hands until 1981 when it was acquired for an unknown sum by The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. The prestigious college sold up in 2002 for $2.6 million to high-powered investment services executive Joseph Bae and writer Janice Y.K. Lee, author of the 2009 bestseller “The Piano Teacher.” The couple made several improvements (and an addition) but only owned the townhouse until 2006, when it was sold privately to Barkin.
Since the house has not been listed on the open market in more than 20 years, little is publicly known about its current condition or layout. Tax records, which may or may not be accurate, show the four-story red-brick residence measures 2,577 square feet, while reports from the time of Barkin’s purchase reveal that Bae and Lee had an I.M. Pei-designed 20-foot extension added to the rear of the house. Other features at the time of Barkin’s purchase included a finished basement and an outdoor stainless-steel kitchen.
Though she hung on to the place for 17 years, Barkin didn’t much care for the townhouse, at least not at first. While she did admit it was beautiful, she explained to multiple publications shortly after her purchase that she preferred living in an apartment where she can call the super when anything goes wrong. She also said that she once thought about starting a garden but decided against it because, “I’m a New Yorker. I wouldn’t care if I never saw a tree again in my life.” (As it turns out, Barkin had long owned an actual apartment, on lower Fifth Avenue, not too far from her townhouse, which she sold almost two years ago for $1.8 million.)
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Image Credit: Google Cohen did not reveal on his radio show last December that Barkin was selling her townhouse. Instead, to those listening close enough, the clue she might be looking to unload the townhouse was Cohen saying that she had moved into his much-coveted pre-war apartment house in the West Village.
And sure enough, it looks like she did. Tax records indicate it was Barkin who, almost two years ago, via a humorously named trust, splashed out $5 million for a designer-done co-operative apartment just a few floors below Cohen’s multi-unit duplex.
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Image Credit: Brown Harris Stevens Listed at the time with Chris Poore, then at Brown Harris Stevens and now at Sotheby’s International Realty, marketing material showed the three-bedroom and two-and-a-half bathroom two-unit combo (above and below) had been recently updated and fashionably decorated with a slew of designer details: hand-painted wallpaper in the dining room, a minimalist carved marble fireplace in the living room, and polished brass cabinetry topped by slabs of honed Italian marble in the windowed kitchen.
With a built-in Murphy bed, the smallest of the bedrooms easily did double-duty as a study or home office, while the main bedroom provided a dressing hall lined with custom wardrobes and a vintage-style bathroom sheathed in more imported honed marble.
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Image Credit: Brown Harris Stevens Residents of the pet-friendly apartment house are treated to a host of conveniences such as an attended lobby and a full-time doorman, a bike storage room, and an on-site laundry room. And yes, there’s a live-in super that Barkin can call if any of her plumbing goes on the fritz.
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Image Credit: Brown Harris Stevens While Cohen is likely to move before too long — he dropped $18.2 million on a duplex penthouse a couple of blocks away last year — other notable folks who own in the building include OxyContin heiress and self-described “social entrepreneur” Marissa Sackler, Hollywood icon Sally Field (her two-bedroom two-unit combo abuts Cohen’s duplex), and Barkin’s “Sea of Love” co-star Robert De Niro and his former partner Toukie Smith, who between them own three penthouse units according to records.