SELLERS: Venus and Serena Williams
LOCATION: New York City, N.Y.
PRICE: $2.1 million
SIZE: 1,800 square feet, 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: With the U.S. Open scheduled to get under way at the end of the month, superstar tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams have quietly unloaded a spacious loft apartment in New York City’s Garment District for $2.1 million. (Hats off to the celebrity property gossips at 6sqft for being the first to turn up the transaction.) The four-time Olympic gold medal-winning siblings, who have an astonishing 41 Grand Slam singles and doubles titles between them, paid $1.335 million in 2005 for the approximately 1,800-square-foot loft apartment on the 10th floor of the 12-story Wheeler Building, designed by the department store specialists at Goldwin, Starrett & van Vleck — who designed the New York flagship stores for Saks and Bloomies, erected in the early 20th century — and converted the building to a boutique co-operative in the mid-1980s.
According to digital marketing materials we dug up, the floor-through loft has honey-toned oak floors, 11.5-foot ceilings and three massive windows on both ends with another four on the 85-foot long East wall. Easily converted to a two- or three-bedroom spread, the loft was configured at the time of its sale with just one bedroom and one positively puny and windowless bathroom. There’s a roomy walk-in closet kitted out with a washer and dryer off the lone bedroom, and the centrally situated, all-white kitchen is seriously compact but, according to listing details, expensively kitted with a fancy-pants Sub-Zero fridge/freezer. Monthly maintenance for the loft runs $3,244, per listing details, and the buyers, per property records, are Nina Mitchell Wells, a former secretary of state of New Jersey, and her husband, high-profile attorney Ted Wells Jr., the fella hired by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer to handle salacious allegations that stemmed from his alleged involvement with a prostitution ring and, more recently, the guy brought in by the NFL to investigate Super Bowl’s “Deflategate” brouhaha.
The Williams sisters still own a nearly 9,000-square-foot mock-Med mansion in the sprawling BallenIsles country club community in Palm Beach Gardens where they’ve famously co-habitated well into adulthood. However, it would appear the sisters eventually plan to uncouple their Floridian domesticity with a couple of custom-built mansions, Venus on a one-ish-acre lot in a gated golf-course community in Palm Beach Gardens that she picked up in late 2013 for $825,000, and Serena — who’s hauled in more than $72 million in prize money over her long career, not counting her numerous and lucrative endorsement deals— on a 2.4-acre parcel just down the block from Michael Jordan’s mega-mansion inside the guarded gates of the prestigious Bears Club community in Jupiter.
Bilingual Francophile Serena keeps a four-bedroom apartment in the swanky eighth arrondisement in Paris — her coach and unconfirmed but much speculated about boyfriend, Patrick Mouratoglou, is a rather fetching Frenchman, in case you didn’t know — and the sisters have long owned homes in Los Angeles. Serena kept a luxuriously appointed if quotidian two bedroom and three bathroom condo in a high-toned high-rise along the Wilshire Corridor that she sold in early 2013 for $1.755 million, and in March of 2014, Venus sold a low-slung contemporary high above Nichols Canyon — at a loss — for $1.701 million to Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page. Serena continues to own a gated residence in Bel Air’s Stone Canyon that she bought in early 2006 for $6.612 million and, Venus owned a secluded Stone Canyon estate just half a mile away from her younger sister’s that she acquired in 2009 for $5.3 million and sold it in June of this year in a hush-hush off-market deal.
Listing photos and floor plan: Douglas Elliman
