His nickname is now “The Queen of Real Estate of New York”, but Barbara Corcoran was still under the budget of a homelessness the day the Penthouse that would become her home.
It was 1992, and Mrs. Corcoran, the founder of Corcoran Realty, was pinching cents. To get to the end of the month, she had collected hustle delivery letters for a messaging service. In a message, she took an envelope to the upper floor of a building on Fifth Avenue and 97 Street. When leaving the elevator to the apartment, she glimpsed, she adjusts to a French couple or doors to see an exuberant terrace with sweep views or Central Park.
“I thought, my God, I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” said Mrs. Corcoran, 76.
In a story, he has now told enough to make it a tradition of real estate (even in the New York Times), Mrs. Corcoran handed her the envelope to the owner of the house and asked her to call her should put the house in the market.
More than 20 years later, your phone is classified.
In 2015, Mrs. Corcoran, a star investor in the reality show “Shark Tank” and now in a much more comfortable financial position, paid $ 10 million for the unit. It was a price that I was happy to pay, he said in an interview, due to his two best features: his location and his views.
“Any house I bought, I bought the place, not the space,” he said. “You can control the space, but you can’t control the place.”
For interiors, she had a new vision, and immediately drifted her posts. Eighteen months and at least $ 2 million more later, Mrs. Corcoran had turned the plant plans above and down, turned a greenhouse into an impressive interior/exterior dining room and added a complete chef kitchen adjacent to the terrace. Through renewal, Mrs. Corcoran and her daughter, Kate, who was 10 years old at that time, sometimes slept in sleeping bags on the terrace under the stars.
Everything left of the interiors of the original duplex is its curved ladder, that Mrs. Corcoran said she has become difficult for her husband, Bill Higgins, 80, a captain of the Navy withdrawal, to climb.
“And I’m not running those stairs either,” he said.
Having accepted the fact that she and her husband would feel more comfortable in a house on a floor, Mrs. Corcoran is saying goodbye to the place of dreams.
It is a sentimental goodbye. The Penthouse has been the site of wells cars under the sparkling lights of their parties on the roof of Solarium-Pajama, the October theme holidays of the dead and even a milestone birthday celebration where he planned a simulated funeral.
Visitors of the 4,600 square feet apartment leave the elevator to a great lobby. The unit has five bedrooms, five full bathrooms and two half bathrooms, plus a library with a firewood fireplace, a butler pantry and that kitchen outside the terrace, with a French sink, personalized white cabinets and Ilve range.
“She is a genius of real estate and the way she has designed this house repeats her genius,” said Scott Stewart, a Corcoran corridor, who is quoting the apartment of Mrs. Corcoran with her companion of Corcoran Carrie Chiang. “The apartment is presented as a multilevel jeweler.”
The initial price is $ 12 million. Monthly maintenance is around $ 11,000.
He thought that Mrs. Corcoran is going on, stays in the neighborhood. One leg is a brief search.
In December, Mrs. Corcoran read in the New York Times that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are the views of a few blocks from Paul and Joanne Woodward a few blocks away and with her own windy blow views from the park of the park for sale for $ 9.95 million. She liked the price and location. And she really liked that the unit was just a floor. She put a sacrifice, but was overcome.
“It’s always about money, honey,” he told me.
In January, he received more bad news: his precious mobile house by Pacific Palisades burned in January in forest fires, a loss that he described as destruction. But shortly after, Mrs. Chiang, Corcoran’s broker, called her with good news: she had found a new Manhattan Penthouse of a floor that was sure of Mrs. Corcoran would love it, one that would also allow her to stay in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood. She made a sacrifice in the place, which was accepted.
As for the price of $ 12 million of the attic, he knows that he is asking for less than he spent buying and renewing it. But she said she believes that the price is fair and that buyers will be offered if the market takes it.
“I never thought I would ever leave,” Corcoran admitted. “It’s easy to spend money when you’re building a dream for life. For me, real estate are emotional.”
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