Much ink has been spilt this past week over the $9.85 million sale of 64 Perry Street, the West Village townhouse that supposedly stood in for Carrie Bradshaw’s stoop on “Sex and the City.” While the hoopla is somewhat misplaced – it was actually No. 66 that served as the famous façade – the circumstances of the sale do involve a love affair. At least, of the real estate variety.
The newest owners, known only as MMKK Perry Street Realty LLC, closed on the sale of the 20-foot-wide five-bedroom home between Bleecker and West 4th streets April 12 – about six weeks after the house went on the market for $9.65 million. (The sale showed up in public records April 23.)
That sales price was $839,000 more than the past owners, known only as 64 Perry Street LLC, paid for the home this past November, when they laid out just over $9 million to acquire the house, built in 1866. The property had been listed for $8.5 million with Robby Browne, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group.
The sellers behind the LLC are keeping their identities tightly guarded, but their broker, Joshua Wesoky, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s International Realty, divulged that they are New Yorkers from a “very prominent family.”
“My clients absolutely fell in love with the house [when they bought it in November],” said Wesoky, who also represented them in the purchase of the home, explaining they had been looking for more than a year before they purchased No. 64.
They were all set to start a renovation – going so far as to map out a design with an interior designer and submit the plan to an architect – when a “once in a lifetime” property hit the market, Wesoky said. It was the same home they had wanted to buy the previous January, but they had been too slow to submit an offer and they lost it, he said.
Wesoky declined to describe the home but said it was not a West Village townhouse like the home on Perry Street.
The sellers’ desire for privacy has been tested by No. 64’s association with “Sex and the City.” While Wesoky reiterated that No. 66 stood in as Carrie’s stoop – a fact that Browne has confirmed to The Real Deal in the past – he speculated that the source of the confusion may be that some believe No. 64 was used for some exterior shots early in the series.
Far from increasing the number of showings or the final closing price, the international attention was a hassle, Wesoky said, adding that the multiple offers came from individuals who were not interested in the home for its celebrity cachet. “The only thing I got was a lot of annoying calls from the press,” he joked.
No. 64 has its own celebrity pedigree: the style guru Tim Gunn was once a tenant, and the home’s longtime owners, the late documentary filmmaker Wheaton Galentine and the architect Harold Eliot Leeds, also deceased, were the subject of a New York Times profile this past September.
Wesoky, who handled the listing with Steve Dawson, also of Sotheby’s, declined to discuss the identity of the buyers or their broker, and when asked whether he represented both seller and buyer, he said he could not comment.