SELLERS: Lauren and Andrés Santo Domingo
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $7.25 million
SIZE: 4,713 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: It was our trusted, property obsessed gal on the ground in Manhattan, Polly Wannacracker, who let us know that international socialite and fashion world über-insider Lauren Santo Domingo — a well-born and bred contributing editor at Vogue and entrepreneurial co-founder of Moda Operandi, an online retailer that makes high-end runway fashions available before they hit the stores — and her even more fortunately born husband Andrés Santo Domingo — an indie record label owning multi-billionaire heir to a South American beer, media and airline fortune — have made their spacious and casually soigné New York City loft condo available with an asking price of $7.25 million. Property records show Mister Santo Domingo acquired the Flatiron District loft in September 2006, a couple of years before the stylish couple were married in a spectacular matrimonial extravaganza in the Colombian capital of Cartegena that was — natch — featured in a fawning, 10-page spread in Vogue. Not surprisingly, the loft was also featured in the fashion bible, but in 2011.
Listing details show the sprawling loft, on the third floor of a discreet and somewhat surprisingly doorman-less building, spans 4,713 square feet with three bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms. A key-lock elevator opens directly into the loft’s massive main living, dining and entertaining space that stretches the full 50-plus-foot width of the building and that all by itself spans nearly 2,000 square feet that’s divided into numerous seating areas anchored by a plethora of plush sofas. The Santo Domingos’ sleekly appointed and less than ideally window-free kitchen, adjacent to but completely out of view of the living and dining space, has stainless steel countertops and a colossal walk-in pantry barely smaller than a typically teeny lower Manhattan studio apartment. Private quarters located at the rear of the apartment are accessed by a U-shaped hallway that wraps around a central core that, along with the kitchen and a privately placed powder room, contains a small hall bathroom and a windowless den/office where open floor-to-ceiling shelves hold a large collection of cartoon-like collectible figurines and, on the diagonally striped carpeting, sits a replica of the Santo Domingo’s pooch fashioned from Legos by artist Nathan Sawaya. One of the guest bedrooms — done up as a media lounge with walls covered celebrated designer David Hick’s decoratively renown and terrifically chichi Hicks Hexagon wallpaper from Cole & Son— has a fitted walk-in closet and en suite bathroom, while the roomy corner master bedroom offers extensive closets plus a fitted dressing room, and a spare, spa-style bathroom provides two sinks, a two-person soaking tub set in to a marble faced pedestal, and a shower space lined with opaque, pale turquoise glass tiles.
A quick spin through public property records and other online resources reveals that some of the other notable residents of the 11-unit boutique building include mega-successful comic book writer and artist Joe Quesada, former and first chairman and CEO of EMI Music Worldwide Bhaskar Menon, and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who not only owns the 6,009-square-foot duplex penthouse he picked up in early 2011 for $14.6 million — it was famously used as the sexy home of Shia LaBeouf’s character in the “Wall Street” sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” — but also the 4,713-square-foot unit directly below that was scooped up in an off-market deal in late 2014 for $8.9 million.
With their Flatiron District loft for sale this property gossip assumes the Santo Domingos will finally move — if they haven’t already — to an impressive, red brick Georgian townhouse in the Gramercy Park ‘hood that they bought in 2009 from telecom mogul and nightlife entrepreneur Michael Hirtensten for $18.5 million and subsequently spent many years and untold millions on an extensive renovation and expansion that included drilling a 1,600-foot geothermal well so they can heat and cool the place without use of the city’s power grid and reportedly annoyed a lot of their neighbors. The international jet setters also maintain a magnificent, art-filled apartment in an elegant, 18th-century hôtel particuliar in Paris’s fashionable 6th arrondissment. The Santo Domingo’s Paris pied-à-terre, also prominently featured in — you got it, kids — Vogue in 2012, sits directly above another, no-doubt equally if not far more grand apartment long owned by Mister Santo Domingo’s parents, late enormously successful businessman Julio Mario Santo Domingo and his widowed wife, Beatrice Santo Domingo, who also, just in case you’re curious, also maintains a humongous, high-floor duplex at the outrageously exclusive 740 Park Avenue in New York.
Listing photos and floor plan: Douglas Elliman
