When entertainment industry power couple Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel sold their former penthouse pied-a-terre in New York’s Soho neighborhood in 2018 for $6.35 million, it was about $220,000 less than the almost $6.568 million paid eight years earlier. Certainly, that’s an affordable loss for Timberlake, who has for many years ranked as one of the highest earning men in show business; In 2014 alone, according to Forbes, he hauled in around $57 million.
Nonetheless, even rich people dislike losing money. Lucky for Timberlake and Biel, then, they’ve exponentially made up for the loss with the $29 million off-market sale of another lower Manhattan penthouse, in a famously celeb-packed Tribeca building, that they bought in 2017 for $20.186 million and have now sold in a $29 million off-market deal that closed just before Christmas.
Since it was not listed on the open market, nothing is known about what upgrades and/or alterations the Timberlake-Biels may have undertaken. However, marketing materials from the time of their purchase show the north-facing duplex penthouse measures 5,375 square feet and was then configured with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, plus two powder rooms.
Floor plans included with old listings reveal an elevator opens directly into the apartment, that one end of the 40-foot-long great room has a fireplace, and that the primary bedroom has two good-sized walk-in closets. A second-floor family room/entertainment lounge spills out to a 2,400-square-foot wrap-around terrace complete with outdoor kitchen. Taxes and common charges racked up to more than $15,500 per month at the time of the 2018 transfer.
Represented by Tal Alexander at Douglas Elliman, the mysterious buyer, as noted by the property gossips at the Wall Street Journal, the first to report on the clandestine transaction, appears in property records as the same perplexingly named corporate entity that recently sold a triplex penthouse in Soho for a neighborhood record shattering $49 million. Interestingly enough, tax records reveal that late last year a similarly named corporate entity linked to the same deep-pocketed buyer paid just over $33 million, combined, for a three-bedroom apartment and a 6,400-square-foot townhouse in a new development in the West Village, and in 2018 plunked down $15 million for Blue Heron Farm, a 9.5-acre Martha’s Vineyard estate where President Barak Obama vacationed during his presidency.
Once a book binding factory, the handsome 19th-century red-brick building was designed with a courtyard motor court entrance (below) that allows paparazzi attracting residents and guests the ability to enter and exit the building without being snapped by cameras. This feature has unsurprisingly attracted all sorts of famous folks, including Mike Myers, Rebel Wilson, Meg Ryan, Jake Gylenhaal, Harry Styles, and superstar Formula One racecar driver Lewis Hamilton, who recently sold a nearly 9,000-square-foot triplex penthouse, which he never even moved into, for $49.5 million.
As for the Timberlake-Biels, the couple nowadays lives primarily in Montana, where they built a big house at the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club. They also have a 250-plus-acre tract of undeveloped farmland not too far from Nashville that they scooped up almost seven years ago for $4 million, and in 2018 they dropped another $2.2 million on a secluded 125-acre farm about ten miles away that at the time they acquired it had a couple of modest homes and a cluster of equestrian buildings.
They also have an impressively showbiz-pedigreed pad in Los Angeles. Built on what was once part of an estate owned by Errol Flynn, Timberlake bought the pushing-up-on 14,000-square-foot mansion in 2002 for $8.3 million from sitcom royal Helen Hunt (“Mad About You”). However, the couple are in the mood to change up their property portfolio and looking to get rid of it, too, last year hanging a $35 million price tag on the 10-plus-acre spread that’s billed in promo materials as “the ultimate hideaway” that “has always had an important Hollywood connection.”
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Image Credit: StreetEasy -
Image Credit: StreetEasy