Pierre New York triplex penthouse poised for new collector
Wall Street trader Martin Zweig, who purchased the penthouse apartment in New York City’s Pierre Hotel for a record $US21.5 million in 1999, has died, so the New York papers have this week suggested it will soon hit the market.
It's the penthouse decked out by our own Double Bay chatelaine, Lady (Mary) Fairfax as a project undertaken after the 1987 death of her husband, Sir Warwick Fairfax, the media mogul.
The latest speculation suggests $US100 million-plus for the Pierre triplex penthouse that sits some 150 metres above Central Park.
Of course, it has been for sale on and over the interim though never finding a buyer, with Title Tattle recalling it may have had something to do with extraordinary co-op owner's quarterly levies.
Title Tattle had the honour of visiting the penthouse in 1994 at the kind invitation of Lady Fairfax.
Set underneath the Pierre's distinctive mansard roof, it had been the talk of the town given the long-abandoned ballroom had been painstakingly restored after being bought in 1989. It had previously been little more than the dumping ground for the hotel's spare mattresses for two decades.
I wrote that its renovation left guests in wondrous awe.
Its four-passenger lifts dropped them off to the 41st floor foyer where Rodin's The Walking Man formed the centrepiece.
There was the Fairfax family crest and motto Lucem Fer Fax (Oh torch, bear light), displayed on the mosaic ceramic floor.
It was up the divided black Belgium marble staircase, past the magnificent Rothschild chest, to the ballroom. According to Lady Fairfax, the chest was one of five in the world, and she said she owned three at the time.
Overhead the imposing 14-foot, 130- year-old chandelier saved from Sydney's now demolished Prince Edward Theatre dominated the 80-foot-long, 45- foot-wide ballroom.
It had 28-foot-high vaulted ceilings and 15-foot arched windows.
I recall that despite the hectic pace of the New York street life below, only the six cockatiels twitting in the 18th Century Victorian birdcage broke the silence. And when excited they sent bird feathers fluttering throughout the room.
Through the ballroom, and past the sandstone French provincial fireplace, were the elevators to the bedroom wing, where the master bedroom suite came complete with fireside spa-bath and shag pile carpet. Lady Fairfax had trumped Ivana! Then there are the guest rooms, kitchens and staff quarters.
Lady Fairfax bought the 41st, 42nd and 43rd floors of the 1929 hotel for around $US12 million and spent an estimated further $US5 million decorating the space. The apartment decor was the work of Sydney decorator Frank Grill, who had collaborated with Martyn Cook.
Grill, who once gave his address as Laurina Avenue, Helensburgh, apparently came to Manhattan as a little boy and stared up at all the wonderful towers. "But now that I've scaled some of them myself, the view is much more reassuring if you're looking down," he once exclaimed.
Other Australians who held their heads high among the Manhattan gargoyles - almost side-by-side at Fifth Avenue's epicentre with Lady Fairfax - were Dick and Jeannie Pratt who kept a Sherry Netherland tower apartment. The 36th-floor duplex was once occupied by Cecil Beaton, the photographer who maintained a mysterious decade-long love affair with Greta Garbo. Later the apartment was the residence of the renowned movie mogul, Jack Warner. Grill collaborated on the Pratt project with New York's Sandra Nunnerley and when in the mid-1990s the entire 35th floor was isted, it was an opportunity too good to be forgone by the Pratt clan.
Of course, it was newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who set the New York benchmark in 1913 with his Riverside Drive quintuplex. The publisher, who then went on to build his San Simeon estate on the West Coast, even erected an iron walkway to an adjacent roof. But that was in order to avoid process servers often waiting outside the five-storey Clarendon apartment after the 1929 stock market crash. His financiers finally foreclosed in 1939 gutting the 12-storey Hearst-owned block into 60 apartments.
Zweig died in February this year at his South Florida home, on Fisher Island, aged 70. He had very different tastes to Lady Fairfax. Last year, he hired a crane to install a yellow, 1934 Packard convertible in their fifth-floor Fisher Island living room.
His Miami Herald obituary said his memorabilia collection includes the dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
Photo by Janine and Jim Eden, courtesy of Flickr
