Buying two penthouses in a luxury condo building and connecting them with a slide is the kind of move that makes a home hard to resell (though it makes day-to-day living way more fun). Even in the East Village’s A Building, which is basically party central, it took pro poker player Phil Galfond months to find a buyer for his combo penthouse play place with slide, which he listed in February for $3.99 million. (He paid $3.2 million for the uncombined units, each a 2BR, in 2008.) An in-building tipster tells us, and reps for the listing confirm, that the sale closed yesterday. The rumor among residents is that the final sale price was $3.2 million. We’ve reached out to the broker and we’ll update when we know more. UPDATE: The broker tells us the final sale price was actually $3.3 million.
The new owner purchased the apartment under an LLC, but broker Elizabeth Kee tells us he is a young guy who recently sold his software company and decided to relocate to the East Village. He’s promised many friends a chance to use the slide, but once they’ve had their turns, he plans to renovate the apartment and donate the slide, which was custom-designed by Turrett Collaborative Architects, to a good home. Anyone want?
Here’s how the architects described their work on the slide:
The half-tube stainless steel slide starts on the top floor near the office, and lands below near both the living and dining areas. The sculptural slide is housed in a newly created 18′ tall double-height space, which includes custom designed glass railings. The image of the stainless steel curves in front of the oversized window to the city beyond, to say nothing of the irrepressible glee of grown adults on the slide, is surprisingly poetic; with careful detailing, the playground element is an unexpectedly elegant addition to the space.
Seller Phil Galfond—who is giving up the apartment because he had to leave the country due to the Justice Department’s online poker crackdown—included a number of other fun goodies in the apartment, like a rooftop putting green. But it turns out, Kee says, that Galfond didn’t actually own the rooftop, and used it only thanks to an agreement with the developer. Confusion over rooftop rights led to some price negotiations during the sale, so the final price was a bit lower than the most recent $3.699 million ask.