The Manhattan residential real estate market has a pricey new single-family listing…even if the current asking price is significantly lower than when it was initially marketed earlier in the year.
The unit in the Sherry-Netherland is owned by controversial Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. Guo is currently living in exile in the U.S., being a fellow certain high-ranking officials in his home country’s law enforcement community would very much want to meet with face-to-face; last year, he went very public with a lengthy series of accusations about corruption in China’s ruling elite. At one time, Guo was the 73rd richest individual in China.
The unit is correspondingly dazzling, and now priced at $67 million; that’s down from its initial ask of $86 million. The unit is a treat for the eyes, and contains many a surprise for the curious designophile; the accumulated effect is more than a little overwrought, but marvelously extravagant.
Gilt trim, spectacular panoramic wallpaper, magnificent inlaid floors, art nouveau bronze, bookmatched hardwood paneling, crown moldings, and a magnificent terrace bordered by the building’s beaux-arts flourishes which surveys knee-bucklingly beautiful Central Park and city views all combine to define this roughly 10,000 square-foot home.
The PH unit is the full-floor crown jewel of a building constructed at the height of 1920’s delirium, a building that features a lobby with a buttressed fresco-rich ceiling out of a loggia in the Vatican; even 1920’s chutzpah rarely ascended such heights as co-opting Vatican iconography and design for residential living.
