Mid-Week Pick Up Sticks: Reed and Delphine Krakoff

BUYERS: Reed and Delphine Krakoff
LOCATION: New York City, NY
PRICE: $28,000,000
SIZE: 12,551 square feet, 7-8 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: The New York Post was the first to report that high-end house flipping fashion world mover and shaker Reed Krakoff and his sophisticated, Paris-bred interior decorator wife, Delphine, paid $28 million in an off-market deal for a 25-foot wide red-brick Federal-style townhouse on one of New York City's more coveted, tree lined blocks on the Upper East Side.

The dignified townhouse once housed the offices of the New York Observer and was later used to house the Kips Bay Decorator Show House. Listing details from 2013 show the five-floor mansion spans more than 12,500 square feet with seven or maybe eight bedrooms—at least four of the quite small—and a desperately inadequate 3.5 bathrooms. The floor plan shows the uppermost floor, in addition to a small sitting room and a large den, has just one bathroom to service four petite bedrooms and the fourth floor appears to also have just one bathroom that is shared by the master bedroom at the rear of the residence and a pair of bedrooms that face the street.

The elegant house retains much of its original architectural detailing but is also fitted and kitted with modern technological conveniences for high speed and state-of-the-art voice, data and security systems. Listing photographs show a generous front hall leads back to a chandelier-lit foyer with fireplace and sweeping staircase. (There's a separate set of internal "back" stairs so staff can make their way through the house without disturbing its occupants as well as—the lazy and/or infirm will appreciate—a centrally-located elevator that services all five floors.

There are fireplaces in the front parlor and in the formal dining room on the ground floor as well as in the second floor library and thirty foot long living room, the former with original oak wainscotting and the latter with French polished paneled walls.

The very contemporary, Euro-style kitchen is located on the basement level where it gives out through a couple of barred windows and a single and also barred door to a small garden court. Also in the basement are a small office/staff bedroom, a three-quarter hall bathroom, several storage closets including a "vault" tucked up under the sidewalk.

The Krakoffs are the same couple, of course, who Your Mama first revealed shelled out $14.3 million for the never occupied New Canaan, CT, estate of the late (and idiosyncratic) copper heiress Huguette Clark. The Krakoffs also maintain a residence in Paris—natch—and in the Hamptons they own the legendary Lasata estate in East Hampton that was once the childhood summer residence of Jackie (Bouvier) Kennedy Onassis.

This is not, by far, the first townhouse on New York's Upper East side that Mister and Missus Krakoff have owned, worked over in their eclectic, art-centric signature style and sold at an impressive profit. In 2007 they sold a townhouse on E. 61st Street for almost $15 million to Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and in the fall of 2005 they paid $17 million for a 30-foot wide neo-Georgian beauty on E. 70th Street with more than 15,000 square feet on seven floors. The massive urban residence was devastated by fire in 2006 and subsequently renovated to the Krakoff's specific and exacting standards before it was published in the fawning, high-gloss pages of Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, Vogue and Elle Decor and sold in an off-market deal in early 2014 to an as yet unidentified buyer for $51 million.

NOTE: Listing photos and floor plan are from April 2013 when one mysterious LLC sold it to another mysterious LLC for $18 million.

listing photos and floor plan: Douglas Elliman