It’s a good thing to be Martha Stewart’s daughter, especially when your mogul mother is feeling generous.
A few months ago, Alexis Stewart learned that her domestic-diva mom would not be moving into $35 million worth of apartments she bought earlier this year at the glass-encased 165 Charles St. condo building. (Plans for just one of Martha’s three floors called for five bedrooms, six baths, a 53-foot-wide great room and two terraces.) And the best part was that Martha was handing the keys over to Alexis.
Martha apparently had second thoughts about residing in the Richard Meier-designed building. She told one magazine last July that she was looking for a townhouse rather than partaking in apartment living.
“If you know of any [townhouses], let me know,” she said last summer. “I want to walk to work.”
Alexis, 41, the Sirius radio talk-show host, has spent the summer working on her sprawling dream home. And while the single divorcee has been dealing with contractors, she’s also been shelling out about $27,000 a month to a Manhattan fertility clinic to possibly help fill the apartment with Martha’s first grandchild.
So clearly she needs all the extra space.
Now that the apartment is nearly finished, Brown Harris Stevens broker Kathy Sloane (who has nearly sold out the ritzy new 823 Park Ave. building) is listing Alexis’ very accommodating (and very bright white) three-bedroom, nearly 4,000-square-foot duplex penthouse apartment in TriBeCa for $12.4 million.
$8.5M Harlem hot spot
The “ultimate bachelor apartment” has just been purchased by a married couple.
Sources tell us the Esquire magazine-sponsored triplex apartment at 111 Central Park North in Harlem has just gone to contract for approximately $8.5 million. Located on floors 19 through 21, the four-bedroom condo overlooking Central Park – with the gleaming Midtown skyscrapers beyond – includes 4,000 square feet of interior space and 1,700 square feet of balconies and terraces.
Focal points include a living room with 22-foot ceilings, a $200,000 glass kitchen, a frosted-glass central staircase and an outdoor fireplace.
No doubt the designers, who include David Rockwell, Campion Platt, Dean Maltz and Christopher Maya, gave the unnamed buyers, who will be moving there from Fifth Avenue, some ideas on decorating.
For those who can’t make it up that way, the apartment can be seen in the music video for Jay-Z’s “Blue Magic.”
Grammer see
We were surprised to see that Kelsey Grammer had listed his elegant Bridgehampton mansion so soon after buying it. (As mentioned in this column last week, Grammer bought the Joseph Farrell-built custom 8,000-square-foot home for about $8.5 million in January 2006.) But the serial real-estate investor and his wife, Camille, seem to be merely testing the waters for the summer home with a $16.1 million asking price.
“We are just not sure,” the “Back to You” co-star tells us. “If the show goes well, it may shift our expectations for New York, but right now just think of it as exploratory in nature.”
Grammer was a recent seller of a Los Angeles homes to new mother Salma Hayek and her fiance, Francois-Henri Pinault.
Milstein’s moving
Real-estate heiress/Democratic fundraiser Connie Milstein has made the successful switch from Park Avenue to Fifth Avenue, now that’s she’s sold her 15-room duplex at 770 Park Ave. The prewar pad on the 16th and 17th floors has sold for $20 million, according to city transfer records, to hedge-fund big Robert Niehaus, chairman of Greenhill Capital Partners.
Milstein first put the five-bedroom co-op on the market in July 2006 with a $20 million price tag after she got word that the co-op board at 998 Fifth Ave. had finally accepted her as a resident. She went to contract on her 12-room Fifth Avenue pad in December 2005.
Milstein made headlines during the 2000 presidential election when she was caught on camera bribing homeless potential voters with cigarettes.