BUYER: Elie Tahari
SELLER: Fernando Chico Pardo
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $25,000,000
SIZE: 4,099 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 5 full and 2 half bathrooms (total)
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: The property gossips at 6sqft were the first to reveal that fashion designer Elie Tahari — an Israeli immigrant who worked as an electrician before he founded his eponymous luxury apparel company that does half a billion bucks in annual revenue — shelled out a total of $25.25 million for a pair of side-by-side condos at the storied and prodigiously pricey 15 Central Park West complex in New York City where, as it turns out, he’d previously rented a three bedroom spread for $30,000 per month.
The smaller unit, purchased for $9.75 million as per property records, has two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms in 1,862 square feet with 1,619 square feet of terrace area and the larger unit, acquired for $15.5 million, has three bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms in 2,237 square feet with 1,776 square feet of terrace space. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus show that the two condos, which encompass the entire 9th floor, have a combined 4,099-square-feet of interior space and 3,395-square-feet of contiguous terrace with south, east and west overlooks. We’re just going to assume without any knowledge and/or inside intelligence that Mister Tahari plans to spend another fortune to combine the two condos in to one.
The seller of both units, as identified in the Michael Gross real estate page turner House of Outrageous Fortune, was Fernando Chico Pardo, a long-time protege of Mexican multi-billionaire Carlos Slim. (Mister Slim, in case any of y’all somehow don’t know is one of the richest men on the planet with a staggering net worth of more than $80 billion. Seriously. $80-plus billion. But we digress…)
Mister Tahari is certainly no stranger to buying and selling high priced properties and pops up on the regular in all the property gossip columns. Way back in 2006 he sold a 5,541-square-foot, half-floor penthouse on the 51st floor at One Central Park West — a.k.a. Trump International — for $13.05 million and six or so months earlier, in December 2005, he coughed up $24.675 million for Rupert Murdoch’s 9,309-square-foot, Christian Liaigre-designed triplex penthouse in a trés chic boutique building in SoHo. He sold the mansion-sized penthouse in June 2010 for $27.5 million to Gateway Computers co-founder Ted Waitt, who — so the scuttlebutt goes — purchased the triplex for his girlfriend. Alas, the former lovebirds broke up only about a week after the closing and the tech tycoon turned big-time philanthropist flipped the penthouse at a $2.5 million loss in April 2011 to an unknown buyer.
As far as this property gossip can tell, Mister Tahari still owns two adjoining and presumably combined penthouse apartments atop an unassuming, 1950s beige brick edifice on Fifth Avenue. He picked up a 3,600-square-foot penthouse in 1979 for $325,000 and in January 2011 paid $4.2 million for the much smaller one next door that listing details from the time show had two bedrooms and two bathrooms plus a cell-sized staff room and bath tucked behind the kitchen.
Like many well-to-do New Yorkers Mister Tahari has long maintained a home in the Hamptons. Over the summer of 2010 he sold a contemporary 3,500-square-foot, ocean front residence in Amagansett for $6.5 million to prolific film composer Carter Burwell (“Twilight,” Being John Malkovich,” “Fargo.”) and he still owns a 2.3-acre estate that’s just a short walk to the beach in Sagaponack that he picked up in late 2004 for $12.1 million from the estate of pioneering advertising tycoon Jay Chiat.
Listing photos and floor plans: Brown Harris Stevens
