A 19th-century townhouse, the setting of a 20th-century murder, is now the site of a near-record 21st-century sale.
The house, at 4 East 79th Street, sold for $56 million to an undisclosed buyer, according to public records. The sale is the second most expensive townhouse sale this year and tied for the seventh priciest sold in the city’s history.
The estate of the late business magnate Aso Tavitian listed the six-bed, six-full-bath property in August 2023 for $65 million with Sotheby’s International Realty’s Serena Boardman and Susan Baker. Tavitian passed away in April 2020 at the age of 80.
Tavitian, who immigrated from Bulgaria in 1961 for college and made his fortune founding a software company, was one in a succession of businessmen to hold the prime property near the corner of 79th and Fifth Avenue.
Wholesale grocer James Nichols commissioned the limestone mansion in 1898 after buying the property from railroad magnate Henry Cook, who had purchased the entire block and more several years earlier in an attempt to preserve the value and quality of the area (Cook had commissioned his own mansion on 78th Street and Fifth Avenue in 1883).
Nichols passed away in 1914, and the opulent mansion was beset by tragedy after his widow, Elizabeth, was murdered in the middle of the night by burglars the year after.
The house’s macabre history did not deter Tavitian, who purchased the home in 1997 and commissioned a gut renovation from architects Peter Pennoyer and Theodore Prudon that was finished in 2004.
“If he didn’t think it was the highest quality, he would rip it out and start again,” attorney Carole Beinecke told the Wall Street Journal last year.
Beinecke, one of the estate’s executors, did not respond to a request for comment.
The 35-foot-wide limestone spansion covers over 15,000 square feet across its six stories. Because of a small strip of land on its western edge, the townhouse has exposures and three sides and looks out onto Central Park through its large western windows.
The first three floors hold entertaining spaces, including a reception room, living room and formal dining room, and the building features solid mahogany doors and windows, bespoke marble paneling and floors, English brown oak paneling, and parquet de Versailles and herringbone white oak floors, according to the listing.
Boardman and Baker did not respond to requests for comment.
A deed transfer last week recorded the property trading hands from the Tavitian estate to the Tavitian Foundation, which also lists Beinecke as its president. Beinecke had told the Journal that many of the proceeds would be donated to charity.
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Tavitian’s other property, an estate in the Berkshires, is currently listed for just under $10 million.
The sale would have had a shot at the most expensive townhouse of the year, if not for a West Village townhouse that went for $72.5 million in January. The title of priciest townhouse ever in the city belongs to an Upper East Side home that went for $77.1 million in 2019.