SELLER: Rupert Murdoch
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $28,900,000
SIZE: 4,920 square feet, 4 bedrooms, 4 full and 3 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Though he only acquired it five months ago for a not-exactly bargain-basement $25 million, we received a late night digital communiqué from an anonymous canary who let us know international media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has caught a classic case of The Real Estate Fickle and somewhat surreptitiously flipped a triple-mint New York City townhouse back up for sale with a substantially higher asking price of $28.9 million. (Kudos to the beaver busy kids at Curbed who had their own tipster on the high-priced listing and got their brief on the matter out before this under-the-weather property gossip was even out of bed this morning. Anyhoo…) Online resources indicate the 25-foot wide red brick Greek Revival style townhouse was originally built in 1853 for accomplished silversmith William Bogert and current digital marketing materials show the thoroughly, expensively, and pristinely renovated residence spans four floors plus a finished basement and a roof terrace, measures in at a healthy but hardly humongous 4,920-square-feet, and has four bedrooms and four full and three half bathrooms.
A petite parlor floor vestibule connects through to a spacious and glitzy black marble floored central reception gallery with a convenient if windowless powder room and a four-passenger elevator that efficiently lifts and lowers the lazy, the infirm and/or the laundry-laden to all floors, excepting the roof terrace. A surprisingly small dining room overlooks the charming, tree-lined West Village street and a far more grand, full-width living room at the rear features a sensational ziggurat-shaped carved marble fireplace, chatoyant herringbone pattern wood floors, jumbo-sized dentil ceiling moldings, and — booze lovers will rejoice — a wet bar with wine fridge. An entire wall of multi-paned floor-to-ceiling windows open the living room to a wide but supermodel slender Juliet balcony that overlooks the little known and exceedingly exclusive Bleecker Street Gardens that are shared by just thirteen 19th-century townhouses on Bleecker and West 11th Streets. The partially subterranean garden floor includes an under-the-stoop service entrance, a guest/staff bedroom with marble bathroom, and an open-plan eat-in kitchen/family room with Siberian white marble fireplace and another full wall of multi-pane windows that lead to a tree-shaded and fully landscaped tri-level garden. The basement is finished with a small gym, screening room, temperature-controlled 1,200-bottle walk-in wine cellar, and laundry facilities.
A sensuous, elliptical stairway ascends from the reception gallery to upper floors where the entire third floor is given over to a spacious master suite with a wardrobe lined dressing room that somewhat awkwardly doubles as the suite’s entry vestibule, a full-width bedroom with another marble fireplace, an above the treetops garden-side terrace, and a travertine and marble slathered bathroom decked out with a twin vanities, a free-standing soaking tub and a massive, multi-head steam shower. Two more guest/family bedrooms on the fourth floor — one with one walk-in closet the other with a study nook — each have attached marble bathrooms while the fully planted roof terrace has Indiana Buff limestone pavers, a Spanish cedar pergola, and unobstructed views of the Empire State Building to the north and the One World Trade Center to the south.
Avid real estate watchers well know Mister Murdoch, now in his mid 80s with an elephantine fortune estimated at more than $13 billion, has been on a bit of a real estate tear the last few years: In 2011 he sold an elegant waterfront estate on the prestigious North Shore of Long Island for $9.1 million; Over the summer of 2013 — right about the time he filed for a divorce from his preposterously younger third wife Wendi Deng — he shelled out $28.8 million for a 13-acre vineyard property in a discreet but very rich gated enclave in L.A.’s Brentwood area; And, earlier this year, he sold a sprawling hilltop estate with a spectacular horseshoe-shaped residence high above Beverly Hills for $30 million to his youngest son James, the newly appointed CEO of 21st Century Fox. In early 2014 the scandal tarnished but still tremendously influential media mogul shelled out $57.25 million for four floors at the top of the skinny, glass-walled One Madison tower but soon changed his mind or perhaps saw an opportunity to make an easy ten million bucks and flipped the top three floors — about 7,600-square-feet with five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms per listing details — back on the market a few months ago with a stupendous $72 million price tag.
Listing photos and floor plan: Dolly Lenz Real Estate
