Matches Fashion Founders Get $23 Million for Aileen Getty’s Former Townhouse

Married retail fashion moguls Ruth and Tom Chapman met in London in their early 20s and opened a clothing boutique in the city’s posh Wimbledon district in 1987. Twenty years later they launched the Matches Fashion website, which stocks hundreds of high-end designer brands. (So the story goes, the website got its name from the leftover matches Tom Chapman used to light the 40 cigarettes a day he then smoked.)

The website took off like a rocket and in 2017, the couple, now in their 50s, took in about half a billion dollars when they sold most of their stake in the high-end online retailer, which also maintains several shops in some of London’s nattiest nabes.

It wasn’t long before the British couple, who still maintain a plush home in Wimbledon, employed some of their newfound mega riches to snatch up a couple of high-priced homes in the United States. They first splashed out $24 million for a revamped midcentury modern in Beverly Hills they had worked over by Studio Shamshiri before they sold up late last year for $35.3 million to a low-profile Hong Kong businessman.

Then, in 2019, they paid oil heiress (and property gossip column regular) Aileen Getty $19 million — the exact same price Getty paid venture capitalist Adam Dell just two years earlier — for a fully updated and smartly turned-out turn-of-the-century townhouse in New York’s West Village. The couple first hoisted the fashionably dressed Greek Revival-style home on the market last summer at $25 million and the price remained steady until an as-yet unknown buyer swooped in and paid them $23.14 million for the four-floor home.

The 20-foot-wide townhouse had been updated by a previous owner to include radiant heated flooring, central air conditioning, and state-of-the-art mechanicals and audio-visual systems. And though the Chapmans certainly dressed the house in fine furnishings and adorned the walls with eye-catching works of art, they appear to have made few alterations beyond painting, adding a bunch of patterned wallpaper, swapping out light fixtures, and adding curtains with, of course, the perfect amount of break.

Set atop a basement with a gym, tons of storage and a spacious laundry room, the front door opens to an open-plan parlor floor that comprises a living room and an adjacent dining area that is open to the kitchen. Steel-trimmed doors open to a balcony enshrouded in trees and foliage. There are four (and potentially more) bedrooms and five and a half bathrooms scattered throughout the roughly 4,900-square-foot edifice. The main bedroom sprawls across an entire floor and encompasses a private terrace, two walk-in closets, and a wardrobe-lined dressing corridor that connects the fireplace warmed bedroom with the vintage-style bath.

Other highlights include a bike storage room, a family room that spills out to the leafy backyard, and a landscaped roof terrace that offers a pergola-shaded dining terrace, a six-person hot tub and an outdoor shower.

The townhouse was listed with Carl Gambino of Compass.