A fabulously wealthy Chinese billionaire named Zhang Xin with a net worth of more than $3.6 billion, according to Forbes, has just purchased a townhouse for $26 million at 45 East 74th St. that had been ogled by the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, the Post has learned.
The price may sound steep but it could be considered a steal – it was originally asking a whopping $33 million.
Zhang Xin, the glamorous 48-year-old self-made billionaire CEO of Beijing’s real estate firm Soho China, is known for developing office buildings in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
The Upper East Side townhouse that captivated her was owned by a group of Italian investors headed by film producer Valerio Morabito. He bought the townhouse for $10 million in 2008 and had it last listed with Town Residential for $30 million. Pitt once hosted a private dinner for the board of his Make It Right Foundation there. Other celebrities that toured the five bedroom, seven and a half bath townhouse included Steve Madden, Facebook’s Matt Cohler, the ambassador of Qatar and a Saudi prince, as the Post previously exclusively reported.
Sources say the buyer’s broker was townhouse expert Paula Del Nunzio, of Brown Harris Stevens, who did not return calls.
The mansion comes with two pools – one in the basement and one on the roof. It was built in 1879 and currently done in Italian Renaissance style, but with a modern twist. The over-the-top details include hand-crafted bronze and leather banisters, a marble façade from Italy and “honed millwork panels.”
There’s also several wood-burning fireplaces, a wine cellar, state-of-the-art chef’s kitchen and ten foot ceilings.
No expense was spared in the space that includes Doric columns and pediments cut from solid blocks of cream-colored limestone – but the interiors are strikingly modern. There’s also four terraces and a terrace “spa” that, according to a listing, comes with the opportunity for “a midnight starlit soak.”
That is a world away from the poverty and chaos in which Zhang grew up during the launch of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which destroyed so many lives and families. At 14, Zhang was working in a factory. She ended up moving to London, learning English, and eventually studying at Cambridge University. By 1992, a year after graduating from Cambridge with a master’s in economics, she had moved to New York to work for Goldman Sachs.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Zhang then moved back to Beijing, met her husband Pan Shiyi, launched Soho China, and is now the seventh richest self-made woman in the world, worth an estimated $3.6 billion. While she is still relatively unknown in New York, Zhang is a glamorous celebrity in China—and has a whopping 5 million followers on Weibo, a Chinese social media site similar to Twitter.
In a June interview with CNN, Zhang said she avoids the trappings of wealth and is “very, very tight” with her children about money – although that philosophy apparently doesn’t extend to the purchase of a New York City trophy mansion.
In the CNN interview, Zhang said she advised one of her two sons to get a job at a fast food joint like McDonald’s when he was 14 – the year she began to do factory work — but that it turned out he was too young to be hired.
“It’s not easy to be my sons because we’re very high profile. We try so hard to give them a normal life,” Zhang said.
“I’m very, very tight with them about money,” she added.