Artist David Salle’s Fort Greene house asks $13M

Artist David Salle’s massive Fort Greene townhouse is now on the market, asking a whopping $13 million, The Real Deal has learned.The four-story property at 81 Hanson Place, currently used by Salle as a live-work space, was originally two buildings, a 19th-century schoolhouse and an adjacent townhouse. Salle purchased the buildings for a combined $2.2 million in 2001 and 2002, and spent three years renovating the massive property.

Salle’s art has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.

Douglas Elliman’s Patty LaRocco has the listing.

In all, the house measures nearly 10,600 square feet, with a 4,500-square-foot artist’s loft on the first floor that has 12-foot ceilings and a separate entrance. It has five bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms, three terraces and indoor parking.

81 Hanson Place

“You can’t replace it for $13 million,” LaRocca said. “Yes, you could turn it into an enormous single-family home. If you’re a designer or artist, you have parking, you’re near transportation and you have this 19th-century building that’s also attached to a townhouse.”

LaRocco previously listed the home for Salle in 2012, asking $10 million. Salle pulled it off the market, though, because he “didn’t know where he wanted to go,” the broker said.

At $13 million, the house is now asking just over $1,230 per square foot. From a total price standpoint, 81 Hanson Place is Fort Greene’s priciest listing and among the most expensive in Brooklyn, according to StreetEasy. The second-priciest listing in Fort Greene is for a 5,000-square-foot townhouse at 193 Clermont Avenue, a new construction townhouse, which is asking $2.6 million.

Of course, 81 Hanson could fetch $40 million or more if it were located in parts of, say, the West Village. But Brooklyn’s rising sales prices are closing the gap; developers are increasingly asking $2,000 per square foot and up for new condos.

Brooklyn’s median sales price was $610,894 during the first quarter, up 17.5 percent year-over-year, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report. The median sales price in Manhattan during the same time period was $970,000, down 0.2 percent year-over-year.

LaRocco said prices have shot up in and around Fort Greene since the Barclays Center opened in 2012. The overall luxury market has matured, too. “The perception of the market has changed to the luxury buyer,” she said. “In 2012, we were still not there yet.”