Sotheby's snares US$125 million Pierre Hotel New York penthouse listing
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 penthouse has now been officially listed at $US125 million through Sotheby's.
It's the triplex 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 new images of the internals show some decor changes although the dominate ballroom feature remains the imposing 14-foot, 90- year-old chandelier saved from Sydney's now demolished Prince Edward Theatre.
The penthouse sits some 150 metres above Central Park in what was a 714 room highrise built at an estimated $US15 million cost in 1930 by a syndicate including Wall Street investors including E.F. Hutton and Walter P. Chrysler and Charles Pierre Casalasco, the son of a Corsican restaurateur.
Ever since the world's first celebrity chef, Auguste Escoffier, prepared the gala dinner for the opening celebrations, its been the hotel and then home for the international social set. High dining continues to this day with the Italian Sirio Ristorante – helmed by Sirio Maccione, of Le Cirque fame – opening in late 2012.
After the 1930s depression, the complex was bought by John Paul Getty for around $US2.5 million. Then in the late 1950s, some 75 apartments within the hotel were sold as private residences. It still has elevator attendants in white gloves. The hotel contains 189 guest accommodations, including forty suites, and thirteen grand suites.
The penthouse has been for sale on and over recent years 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 chandelier saved from Sydney's now demolished Prince Edward Theatre dominated the 80-foot-long, 45- foot-wide ballroom.
It has 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.
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.
The Sotheby's listing agents are Elizabeth Sample, Serena Boardman and Brenda Powers.