New York City Apartment To Sell For Nearly $90 Million
A new construction penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has gone into contract.
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A new construction penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has gone into contract for approx. $89 million, according to the developer.
The buyer is combining the top two units at the Bellemont condominium at 1165 Madison Avenue, according to Miki Naftali, chairman and CEO of Naftali Group, the building’s developer. The completed unit will comprise four full-floors spanning roughly 1200sqm, plus approximately 200sqm of outdoor space, he said.
Mr. Naftali declined to disclose the identity of the buyer, but said the purchaser is a New Yorker.
The larger of the two units, designed as a seven-bedroom, was originally listed for around $52 million. The smaller, designed as a four-bedroom, was listed for approx. $35.5 million. Mr. Naftali said the buyer is paying slightly more than the full asking price for the developer to deliver a combined unit with its own elevator. Alexa Lambert and Alison Black at Compass are marketing the project.
The deal is among the most expensive above 59th Street on the Upper East Side. The current record was set in 2015, when a Fifth Avenue co-op sold for approx. $103.5 million, according to research and appraisal firm Miller Samuel. A townhouse on East 67th Street traded for approx. $103.3 million in 2019, records show.
“That kind of price point in this neighbourhood is rare,” said Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel. “Within the condo market itself, the only activity north of that number has been in one building: 520 Park Avenue.” In 2018, two units in that building sold for $98.8 million and $90.9 million, records show.
Like 520 Park, the Bellemont was designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and it will have a hand-laid limestone facade, Mr. Naftali said. He said he expects to start closings by the end of 2022.
Sales at the building, which has about 12 units, officially launched in late October, and Mr. Naftali said there are two other units in contract. The least expensive unit is asking $8.6 million, he said.
Manhattan luxury sales more than tripled during the third quarter of the year, compared to 2020, according to Miller Samuel.
Reprinted by permission of Mansion Global. Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: November 3, 2021.
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Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities
2 min
Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.
This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.
“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real.
“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”
Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.
He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.
“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes.
“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”
Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.
Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.
“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said.
“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?
“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.”
At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.
“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”
And there’s no AI option for that.
Consumers are going to gravitate toward applications powered by the buzzy new technology, analyst Michael Wolf predicts
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
