AN EMPTY NEST
For the serious diy fan: upper east side townhouse shell is yours for $65m Filling in a $65m blank
This is bespoke living taken to the extreme.
Extell Development is trying to break a record for the most expensive “white box” townhouse ever sold in the city.
It’s listing a nearly 10,000-square-foot, five-floor, 35-foot-wide, unfinished limestone townhouse at Madison Ave. and 61st St. for a whopping $65 million.
That’s quite a chunk of change for a completely raw unit — no walls, no paint, not even a toilet (though there will be a grand spiral staircase linking the floors). The upside: Prospective buyers can design their dream home from scratch. This home is their personal castle.
“A buyer’s needs are always unique, so we decided to leave the building as a white box,” said Elida Jacobsen Justo, the director of sales for the home. “This way, the buyer has the opportunity to decide to configure all the rooms the way he or she wants.”
The naked townhouse also has 5,000 square feet of outdoor space. No less important, the buyer can use the amenities of the Carlton House cond-op next door, including a 65-foot indoor pool, a state-of-the-art fitness center and a game room, as well as a 24hour doorman and concierge.
This is certainly not the first time a
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townhouse with nothing inside — but it is the first time one has done so at such a high gp price point.
The Related Cos., which built a series of f townhouses on n Bethune St. in the West Village next to its Superior Ink development in n 2007, decided to leave some of those homes as raw space after designer Marc Jacobs bought one of them for $10.5 million yet asked for it to remain empty. He later brought in architect Andre Tchelistcheff to build out the space according to his specifications.
“That was the first time we had the idea,” said Leslie Wilson, a Related executive. “If you’re paying that kind of money, you’re paying a lot for someone else’s taste.”
It seems there is a whole population of buyers who feel similarly.
“They literally want a blank slate,” said David Salvatore, a broker at Town Residential. “When I got done buying my apartment, I stopped at Home Depot and bought a sledgehammer. I wanted it to tear it apart so I could put it back together.”
In case the townhouse buyer’s imagination is not nearly as unlimited as his or her wallet, Extell has sketched out a floor plan. The help will come in handy, because it can sometimes be hard to sell homes this way, said Wilson, who struggled to sell a townhouse at Superior Ink after the sales office for the development closed.
In the end, she built out the unit herself — and sought the same price: $14 m million.
““Even if the buy buyer thinks the they want a raw spa space, you sometim times have to still spo spoon-feed them a li little bit,” Wilson said.
Sometimes buy buyers will bite wh when they see the finis finished space — only to tear it out and start over. “The developer will have a star architect come in and design something spectacular and then a buyer just comes in and rips it right out,” Salvatore explained. “It’s a shame, but I guess it keeps the economy going.”