From left: Tina Knowles with her daughter Beyonce, the interior of Tina’s former apartment and the exterior of One Beacon Court
Fashion designer Tina Knowles, the mother of pop singer Beyonce, is moving into her daughter’s apartment at One Beacon Court, an inside source told The Real Deal.
Knowles, known for designing outfits for her daughter’s former pop group, Destiny’s Child, now heads up Miss Tina by Tina Knowles, a women’s clothing line sold at Walmart. As the New York Post recently reported, Knowles signed a contract to sell her Beacon Court condominium unit, at 151 East 58th Street between Third and Lexington avenues, for $5.6 million.
Beyonce owns an apartment on an upper floor of the 105-unit building, developed by Vornado Realty Trust and designed by architect Cesar Pelli, but does not live there, the source said.
Tina decided to sell her unit “because she got top-dollar for it, and she has another option in the building, so she took advantage of it,” the source said.
Tina bought the 1,729-square-foot apartment for $2.9 million in June 2005 through an LLC, according to property records. She first listed the 42nd-story condo for just shy of $6 million in May, but has cut the price twice since then, most recently in August, according to Streeteasy.
Lenny Sporn and brothers Ariel and Yair Tavivian, all agents at Prudential Douglas Elliman, handled the listing, which described the apartment as having a “loft-like” living room and views of Central Park. They declined to comment.
Other notable residents at One Beacon Court have included NBC newsman Brian Williams, baseball star Johnny Damon and two fraudster attorneys, Scott Rothstein and Marc Dreier.
Also known as the Bloomberg Tower, the 800-foot building houses the offices of Bloomberg LP on its lower floors.
In July, a two-bedroom apartment down the hall from Tina’s unit — and formerly owned by Rothstein, a South Florida attorney who confessed to running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme — went into contract. Rothstein’s apartment went on the market in late April with an asking price of $5.4 million.
Drier, a corrupt New York attorney who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for bilking investors out of $400 million, also called the building home. His condo was auctioned off in 2009 for $8.2 million and bought by Berkshire Hathaway executive Ajit Jain.
Jain, a rumored frontrunner to succeed Warren Buffett at the helm of Berkshire, added to his holdings at One Beacon Court in February, reportedly buying the four-bedroom unit next door to Dreier’s former unit, for $14.6 million.
Giancarlo Giammetti, the business partner and longtime companion of fashion designer Valentino, paid $18.5 million for a four-bedroom penthouse at the building in October 2010.