It’s a fashionable get.
A 35-foot-wide Neoclassical limestone property formerly owned by the late Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace has listed for $70 million, according to its listing brokerage and a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Not only does that price buy a lasting piece of Versace’s legacy, but it also gets a grand East 64th Street spread with 17 rooms, six stories, some 14,175 square feet of interior space and 3,025 square feet on the outside.
Versace, who launched his eponymous fashion house in 1978, purchased this home for $7.5 million in 1995 — or about $14.34 million in today’s figures. Two years later, in July 1997, 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan murdered Versace, 50, on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion — the events of which most recently appeared in the 2018 FX series “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”
(That Miami Beach property, meanwhile — located on Ocean Drive and tucked away from the tourist-trap locations of South Beach — now operates as a high-end hotel named Villa Casa Casuarina.)
The current owners of the New York property are Swedish hedge-fund manager Thomas Sandell, 61, and his 46-year-old wife Ximena Sandell. The Journal notes they purchased the home in 2005 for $30 million from the Versace family.
To this day, four floors of the property still feature finishes installed by Versace himself — among them marble floors, painted ceilings and walls, and classical columns. The Sandells have restored a number of these touches.
“We pursued extensive restorations and renovations with an incredible team of artists and artisans honoring the magnificent legacy left by Gianni Versace,” the couple told the Journal in a statement.
For instance, the great room has a ceiling with restored 19th-century panels that Versace sourced from a Florentine palazzo.
“It’s like going into the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ of Gianni Versace,” Nikki Field, of Sotheby’s International Realty — who shares the listing with her daughter, Amanda Field Jordan — told the Journal. She added that the couple are “Versace devotees” and they “have been custodians of this piece of art.”
“It’s going to be purchased by someone who has that same reverence,” Field added.
The top two floors, however, come redesigned. The fifth level has a Moroccan-style media room, as well as a game room that includes arcade games.
Other perks of the home include French-style windows that look out to a trellised garden below. A balcony that runs along the full length of the rear of the property also overlooks that green space. Up top, a roof deck has a gazebo with views of Fifth and Madison avenues, and a new owner can fit up to nine bedrooms inside. The eat-in kitchen comes newly renovated, the listing notes, and Versace-inspired furnishings are also available for purchase.
The mansion had previously been on the market, but for rent, according to the Journal. It once asked a cool $100,000 per month. One renter, city developer Joe Chetrit, sued Thomas Sandell, and alleged there were maintenance issues with the home. But Field told the Journal the case was “amicably resolved.”
The Sandells have another property now on the market: an approximately 10-acre piece of land on Meadow Lane in Southampton that asks $75 million.