The grand Manhattan apartment that the fashion designer Herbert Kasper called home for more than four decades and filled with an expansive collection of museum-quality artwork and furnishings is being sold by his estate.
Kasper, as he was known, died in March 2020 at age 93 after a long career in the fashion industry. The Kasper brand, now owned by the private-equity firm Sycamore Partners, produces affordable women’s sportswear and dresses.
The sprawling co-op residence on the sixth floor of 32 East 64th Street, a.k.a. the Verona, has an asking price of $10 million, according to the listing broker, Meredyth Hull Smith of Sotheby’s International Realty, with monthly maintenance of $14,267.
Kasper bought the Upper East Side apartment in 1979 from the combined estates of Mary Cushing Fosburgh, a socialite and philanthropist, and her husband, James Whitney Fosburgh, a painter and art collector, paying around $400,000. He kept the prewar layout largely intact, though he renovated the kitchen and bathrooms and restored many of the original architectural features, including the moldings and fireplace mantels.
“He restored the bones of it,” said David E. Stutzman, an estate-planning attorney and one of the executors of Kasper’s estate, along with Michael Findlay, an art dealer and close friend of Kasper.
The unit has approximately 4,700 square feet, with 10-foot ceilings, several oversize windows and parquet wood floors. There are three main bedrooms, each with an en suite bathroom, along with a staff bedroom and bathroom, a small staff office and a powder room.
“The space is so large that you could easily turn it into a four- or five-bedroom apartment,” Ms. Smith said.
Entry into the home is through a private elevator vestibule with inlaid marble flooring that opens to a central gallery. Off the gallery, on the north side of the apartment, is a library/den, known as the brown room, anchored by a wood-burning fireplace and featuring an enormous Helen Frankenthaler painting, as well as numerous old-master drawings.
Mr. Findlay said that Kasper would often greet his guests in that room, before proceeding to the living room. “He loved sitting in the brown room,” Mr. Stutzman added. “He felt comfortable surrounded by all those works of art.”
A west-facing drawing room with classic columns and two Picasso drawings sits between the living room, also with a fireplace, and the formal dining room, which has a Léger painting above another fireplace and an ornate Chinese coromandel screen. The rooms are lined up enfilade style.
The windowed, eat-in kitchen nearby has an industrial-style, stainless-steel stove and a large pantry with a wine refrigerator.
At the end of an art-lined hallway off the gallery is a powder room and a guest bedroom suite. A longer corridor, with more artwork, leads to the other bedrooms toward the south end of the apartment. The primary suite features a large bathroom, a gas fireplace and a roomy walk-in closet.
The apartment was decorated by the Belgian interior designer Axel Vervoordt, who mixed in an assortment of modern furnishings and his own custom couches and coffee tables with antique pieces — though they all seem to play a supporting role to the multitude of drawings, photographs, sculptures and other works by Picasso, Léger, Matisse and Mapplethorpe, to name a few, found throughout the space. Some of these works appeared in a major exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum 10 years ago, entitled “Mannerism & Modernism.”
Many pieces are slated to be auctioned off sometime in the fall by Christie’s, according to the executors, while others will be donated to museums, including the Morgan Library and Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bulk of the proceeds from the sale of the apartment and the artwork and furnishings, they said, is expected to go to several charities, including ones that provide education in the fine arts, aid to the homeless, and medical treatment and research.
The Verona, a 10-story, Italian-Renaissance-style apartment house with 20 co-op units, was built in 1908. It sits at the corner of 64th Street and Madison Avenue, a block from Central Park. Among the more recent transactions there, Jeffrey Zucker, the president of CNN who previously headed NBCUniversal, and his wife, Caryn Zucker, last month closed on the sale of their third-floor, five-bedroom unit for $15.4 million.
For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
