BobGuccione

The pictures of the listing of Bob Guccione's New York townhouse a few years ago are burned into my brain so some of the pieces listed in the recent auction weren't a surprise to me. Still the sheer volume of marble on display at the Braswell Galleries auction of the contents of Guccione's former New York home on Monday must have made a pretty impressive scene. The Penthouse magazine publisher's Manhattan townhouse was sold by creditors to hedge funder Phillip Falcone for around $49 million last year. Guccione's taste was a bit outré and so Falcone has gutted the home. The pieces ended up in Norwalk, Connecticut for what seems to have been a very eclectic aution.

Many of the pieces up for auction look like sets from Guccione's Caligula epic. There were a multitude of marble commodes for sale along with a whole host of marble columns, mantles, busts and full length statues. That's not to say it was all dross though, Guccione's goods included a selection of vintage silver, paintings and engravings, 17th and 18th century furniture and even an antique English telegraph booth (which went unsold). And it looks like some deals were had, most of the items appeared to sell within or below estimate. Proceeds from the sale will go to Green Demolitions, a nonprofit group that supports programs for people recovering from addictions,.

From the NY Post's Gimme Shelter:
--Kenneth Cole and his wife Maria Cuomo Cole, have just paid $14.5 million for a five-bedroom, five-bath prewar co-op apartment at One Sutton Place South.
--Real-estate investor/enthusiast Michael Hirtenstein has added even more space to his TriBeCa bachelor pad at One York taking it from a huge 6,600 square feet to a gargantuan 11,000 square feet of interior space plus 6,000 square feet of exterior space.
--So far Andie McDowell, Christie Brinkley and Rosie O'Donnell have all checked out the nine remaining residences at 10 West End Ave.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
--The former Guccione townhouse sold for just $49 million to hedge fund titan Philip Falcone. Amazing considering it was once listed, albeit briefly and foolishly for $99 million.
--TV home renovator Bob Vila spent $4 million on a townhouse in 2004. He has now renovated and is asking $11.5 million. The renovation was filmed for season 15 of the TV show Bob Vila's Home Again. The house is now two duplexes plus a full floor apartment as well as rear half-floor apartments on the first and fourth floors, which Mr. Vila couldn't touch because there are still rent-stabilized tenants there. The penthouse is being rented for the year at around $15,000 per month, and the duplex downstairs is rented at around $10,000. The listing is here.
--Estée Lauder CEO and president (and grandson) William P. Lauder has gotten in at snooty 778 Park Avenue, despite a scandal with a love child. Lauder paid $27,5 million for his apartment.
--A trader named Ping Jiang, managing director at billionaire Steven Cohen's hedge fund SAC Capital, paid $16.5 million for a 4,000-square-foot co-op at the Dakota and was accepted by the coop board even though a former trader at SAC filed a lawsuit alleging that Mr. Jiang had forced him to take black-market female hormones.
--The most expensive co-op listing ever on Central Park West listed at $36 million by music mogul Steve Gottlieb, is no longer listed. Sold or is Gottilieb looking for a little less publicity since his label TVT Records has filed for bankruptcy protection.

From Berg Properties Big Time Listings:
--Actor Malcolm Gets has sold his three-bedroom house in Los Feliz for $1,069,500.
-- via the NY Observer, "Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe has paid $4.9 million for a three-bedroom condo unit in Manhattan's Morton Square development.
--One of my all time favorite estates of the day, the Ursus Major home in Bel-Air, shown above, that belonged to Wilt Chamberlain sold for $6.555 million. It was listed for a whopping $11.5 million when we made it an estate of the day in December 2006.
--The Malibu beach house that Paris Hilton rented last summer can be yours this summer for $80,000 a month for a minimum of two months. The listing is here.

From the Real Estalker:
--The Real Estalker Mama checks out Sidney Kimmel's $81.5 million pleasure palace in Palm Beach.
--Author and radio host Garrison Keillor has put his seven-bedroom Minnesota home on the market for $1.65 million. He bought in 1998 for $710,000. The listing is here.
--Actor Chris O'Donnell has put his Pacific Palisades home on the market for $5.395 million.
--Fleur de Lys, the $125 million Saperstein home in Holmby Hills just may have found a buyer.
--Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis has put his Beverly Hills Post Office area home on the market for $15 million. It is our estate of the day later today.
--Kanye West has sold the Beverly Hills teardown house he purchased a year ago for $7,150,000 and then listed for $8,699,000. The purchase price isn't known.
--via the NY Post's Page Six, Nicole Richie and Joel Madden have purchased a million dollar apartment on The Bowery in New York City.
--Cher has put her Malibu mansion on to the market as a "pocket listing" and is looking for a rumored $40 million for the place.

From the LA Times Hot Properties:
--Mary Lynn Rajskub, an actress seen on the TV show "24" has placed her Venice, CA bungalow on the market for $1,299,000. The listing is here, it's as cute as she is.
--Mixmaster Mike, a 37-year-old DJ with the Beastie Boys, has purchased a home in the Sunset Strip area for $990,000.
--Stacey Bendet, the designer-owner of the women's clothing boutique Alice & Olivia, has bought a John Woolf home in the Sunset Strip area for close to $3 million. She plans to used the home as a style salon and party pad and Moby will be using the guest house as a recording studio.
Alicia Piazza, wife of baseball catcher Mike Piazza, has listed a loft she owns in downtown Long Beach at $689,000. She and Piazza recently bought a home in the Miami Beach area for $10 million.

From AOL Real Estate:
--Home deals under $250,000.

From the NY Post's Gimme Shelter:
--The double-wide, 22,000-square-foot Upper East Side mansion at 14-16 E. 67th St. which belonged to Bob Guccione has been on and off the market for the past six years for prices over $50 million finally has an accepted offer. The reported buyers are edge-fund manager Philip Falcone and his wife, Lisa. The final price is unknown but the home's $59 million listing figure is well above the current record of $53 million for a 25,000-square-foot townhouse on East 75th Street purchased by investment banker J. Christopher Flowers nearly two years ago. Guccione was forced out of the townhouse in early 2006 after he failed to pay off a high-interest loan in a last-ditch effort to avoid foreclosure a few years earlier. Even with the high price the home is said to need work.
--European soccer star Robbie Elliott's two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 205 E. 59th St. is now listed for $1.9 million. The listing is here.

From the NY Observer's Manhattan Transfers:
--The independent news program Democracy Now! has paid $6 million for a raw loft at 217 West 25th Street. Records show the group took out a $6 million mortgage paid for by the literary Lannan Foundation, run by J. Patrick Lannan Jr.
--More news on the homes billionaire Ira Rennert bought for his daughters. He bought two apartments, each over $30 million, for his two daughters, Tamara and Yonina. The first daughter's duplex at 740 Park Avenue closed for $32 million and the latter daughter and her husband closed on designer Vera Wang's old 14-room apartment at 778 Park. The closing price was $33.6 million. There are no mortgage records filed for either deal, which suggests that Mr. Rennert not only spent $65,600,000 on his daughters' apartments last month, but he paid $65,600,000 in cash.
--Actor Frank Langella closed on a $2.1 million, fourth-floor condo at 336 Central Park West this week.
--The old Stanhope hotel which was turned into multimillion dollar apartments was stalled for sales for a couple of years but now all but five of the 26 units have gone to contract since April. Cristina Carlino, the founder of Philosophy cosmetics, paid $11.97 million for the first unit and so far wo other buyers spent about $13 million each with the the second spending part of that amount on an $848,000 one-room, first-floor maid's studio. The biggest listing at 995 Fifth, the custom-built, five-bedroom penthouse, still sits on the market for $47.5 million.
--Steven Feder, the man once known as the Psychic Hotline King and his partner, Lou Thomas Trosclair, sold off for a massive profit the Time Warner Center apartment that they bought from Ricky Martin. They paid $9.75 million in September 2006 for the 3,050-square-foot space and sold it for $15.85 million to a neighbor. They bought a combined-unit apartment exactly 10 floors up, paying $24.48 million. Their seller at the $24.48 million apartment paid just $12.5 million in 2006.
--Trump SoHo, the 46-story glass tower at Spring and Varick streets, has already sold a slight majority of its units-53 percent, even though sales began just in September, and the building isn't scheduled to open until 2009.
--Robert Toll, the CEO of Toll Brothers Inc. the largest luxury home builder in the U.S. reportedly had his compensation cut from $19.2 million in 2006 to $8.4 million for the last fiscal year, as his company's net income fell 95 percent. Toll was planning to move into the three-unit penthouse at One Ten 3RD, Toll's rectangle-paneled new condo on Third Avenue, but his wife vetoed that idea. Instead, the Robert & Jane Toll 2002 Children's Trust, "for benefit of" their 27-year-old son, Jacob, paid $2,235,672 for just one of those three penthouse units.

From the Wall Street Journal's Private Properties:
--Kanye West sold his Beverly Hills teardown for around $8 million, less than a year after he bought it for $7.15 million. As I've mentioned in previous columns there is a house on the property but the home was sold for land value and includes plans for a two-story contemporary home.
--The former home of Joseph Hirshhorn, who gave his name to a renowned Washington art museum, has sold for $30 million in Greenwich, Connecticut.
--Jet-charter company owner Todd Rome has agreed to sell his Southampton, N.Y., home, fully furnished, for $11.5 million which is lose to double what he paid for the 1.8-acre property in 2005.


From the Real Estalker:
--Rumor has it that Nancy Daly, the estranged wife of Los Angeles' really rich ex-mayor Richard Riordan, has very quietly sold her Carbon Beach Malibu compound to a young hedge fund honcho and his wife for somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-$55 million.
--Actress Michelle Johnson has put her Buddha-themed modern home on Blue Jay Way in West Hollywood on the market for $6.35 million. Check out the gorgeous view at the property website here.
--In 2007, actress Diane Keaton spent $9,100,000 for the Lloyd Wright (the son of Frank Lloyd Wright) designed Alfred Newman Estate on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. The six-bedroom home sits on a 2.625 acre property. Keaton, who is a famous property flipper in Los Angeles, has put the property back on the market for an undisclosed amount.
--I think I saw a billboard in Los Angeles advertising this one, 138 acres of Hollywood hilltop including Cahuenga Peak, shown above, for $22 million.The listing says that the land can be developed into one massive estate with 360 degree views or that five large estates can be constructed.
--Screenwriter Naomi Foner and television director Stephen Gyllenhaal (yes, parents of Jake and Maggie) have put their modern Runyon Canyon adjacent house on the market for $4.2 million. The listing for the five-bedroom home is here.
--DJ Paul Oakenfold has put his Los Angeles home on the market, it's our estate of the day later today.
--Actress Beverly D'Angelo has purchased the allegedly haunted home in the Hollywood Hills that belonged to Donna Dixon and Dan Aykroyd for $3.8 million (it was listed at $4.2 million).
--Singer Dido may have already found a buyer for her charming home which is listed at $4.6 million.
The Beverly Park mansion belonging to property developer Robert Bisno and his wife Jeanette appears to be headed into foreclosure. The scuttlebutt is that they are in default on a $4,000,000 mortgage and February 29th auction date has been set.
--CSI: Miami star Khandi Alexander has but her home in the Hollywood Hills on the market for $4,495,000. The listing is here (no pictures yet).

From Lexis-Nexis:
----Russian star tennis player Maria Sharapova has purchased a luxury penthouse apartment worth $ 2.1 million in the beach city of Netanya in Israel. (Thanks, Lana)

From the LA Times Hot Property:
--Former baseball star Mike Piazza and his wife, the former Alicia Rickter, a 1995 Playboy Playmate, have bought their second property in the Miami Beach area for $10 million. It had been listed at$12.5 million.The seller is Sophia Marcovitz, ex-wife of Marshall Marcovitz, the founder of the Chefs Catalog.
--Jaime Pressly has re-listed her Tarzana home at $1.299 million. Check out the pictures at the virtual tour here.
--Rick Caruso, developer of open-air shopping malls including the Grove in Los Angeles, has purchased a Malibu home for just under $12 million.
--Lisa Hollingshead, a producer who worked on Madonna's "Truth or Dare" movie has listed a Malibu house she owns near the Getty Villa for close to $3 million.
--Before his death in 1982 at age 84, car designer Howard "Dutch" Darrin had planned to develop eight acres he owned in Beverly Hills, the undeveloped residential land was sold and is now available again. The asking price is $5.75 million.




From AOL Real Estate:
--Best American cities for bargain hunters.
--Top improvement projects by cities.