The suburban McMansion-sized Baltimore penthouse of late novelist Tom Clancy is now listed at $7.9 million after first coming to market more than 1.5 years ago with a pie-in-the-sky $12 million price tag.
The spy-fiction specialist, many of whose action packed espionage novels were turned into blockbuster films, including “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” and “The Hunt for Red October,” bought three of the four units that comprise the penthouse in 2009 for $12.6 million, a substantial fortune more than the current asking price. The Baltimore native, at the time of his death in October 2013 at 66 from an undisclosed illness a part owner of the Orioles baseball team, later acquired three more adjacent units, one of which was incorporated into the penthouse while the other two were reportedly used as rentals and are not currently for sale.
Rigorously minimalist with mostly white-on-white interiors and expansive walls to showcase artwork, the penthouse has enormous, open-plan living, dining and entertaining spaces plus four bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms that include a super-sized master suite with dual bathrooms and dressing rooms. Additional features include a gym, a plushly appointed state-of-the-art home theater, a couple of offices, including one with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, half of a dozen terraces and deeded parking for at least three cars in the valet-serviced on-site garage.
Since the late 1980s Clancy and his widow, Alexandra, have owned a bucolic and epic estate, part of which was once a children’s summer camp, with an approximately 12,000-square-foot mansion and a couple of sizable guesthouses on several hundred scenic and mostly undeveloped acres with thousands of feet of pristine frontage on Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County, Maryland.
listing photos: Cummings & Co.
