Claude Wasserstein to list PH for $65M — $30M more than she paid in 2008

Ex-wife of late Lazard chair purchased the pad at 995 Fifth for $34.8M Art: listing, Claude

Claude Wasserstein, the third wife of the late financier Bruce Wasserstein, is poised to list her palatial Upper East Side penthouse for $65 million — more than $30 million more than she paid for the duplex in 2008, sources told The Real Deal.

The 7,000-square-foot condop at the former Stanhope Hotel will be priced at $9,285 per square foot. Located at 995 Fifth Avenue, it has 11 rooms, including five bedrooms, and overlooks the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The apartment’s crown jewel is a wraparound terrace and landscaped rooftop garden, at a combined 5,000 square feet.

Brown Harris Stevens and Sotheby’s International Realty will share the listing.

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The French-born Wasserstein, a former CBS news producer, purchased the penthouse in 2008 after divorcing Bruce — a former chair of investment firm Lazard, onetime owner of New York magazine and brother to the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Bruce Wasserstein died in 2009.

Property records show Wasserstein paid $34.8 million for the sponsor unit, which Extell Development delivered in “white-box” condition. The developer converted the Rosario Candela-designed building into 139 condos in 2005.

Wasserstein transformed the raw space into a home Vogue dubbed a “rooftop playhouse” in 2011. In addition to the apartment’s expansive terraces, its rooftop garden is landscaped with box hedges, birch trees, climbing roses and a vegetable garden. “I feel like I have a suburban house in the city with a cottage garden,” Wasserstein told the magazine. “I grew up in France, and I love flowers. I love that I can look out and feel I am in a garden with the New York landscape behind it.”

Wasserstein quietly shopped the pad for $65 million in 2010.