A Little Floor Plan Porn For the Weekend

SELLER: Estate of Araxia M. Buckhantz
LOCATION: Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
PRICE: $30,000,000
SIZE: 2 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama needs to interrupt our fine and lovely weekend in order to bring the hungry children some serious New York City floor plan porn. The highly anticipated listing for a full floor unit at the posh (and restrictive) building at 834 Fifth Avenue has hit the internets with an expected but still breath taking asking price of $30,000,000...for a two bedroom apartment with monthly maintenance charges of $9,538 according to listing information.

The 13th floor unit is offered for sale by the estate of the fabulously named Araxia M. Buckhantz,. Although Your Mama would like to offer the children all kinds of biographical details about Miz Buckhantz, a cursory search of the internets turns up very little 411 other than that she's the cuzzin of monocled "playboy oil magnate Nubar Gubkian" and that she passed on to the big oil man in the sky in the fall of 2008 at the ripe old age of 101.

The floor plan shows the sprawling 2 bedroom and 3.5 bathroom co-operative apartment has one private elevator landing, 12 rooms, four exposures (north, south, east and west), four fireplaces, 12 foot ceilings, two or three terraces depending how one counts, at least 11 closets including four walk-ins and one cedar lined walk-in, and a staff suite located, natch, behind the kitchen that includes three prison cell sized bedrooms that share a single bathroom and a small servants hall where the live-ins surely kicked off their shoes and gossiped about and mocked the mistress of the house and all her filthy rich friends. That's right. All you rich folks are just fooling yerselves iffin you think your staff ain't talking shit behind your couture and bespoke suit clad backs.

A 27-foot long entrance gallery leads to a 37-foot long living room which listing information indicates features pulchritudinous paneling from the George III period and access to a narrow terrace that positively hangs over Fifth Avenue and Central Park. A solarium–a somewhat silly architectural folly Your Mama finds is typically reserved for the unusually rich–sits adjacent to and beyond the living room and a guest terlit that offers visitors a soo-blime Central Park view while they do their dirty bizness.

Listing information indicates the library is wrapped in 18th century George II pine (whatever that is) and the dining room, with French doors leading to two terraces, is "castle-like" which Your Mama thinks could either be really good or a complete decorative disaster. The kitchen, which may or may not be renovated and/or up to date, is large enough to eat in (as if people this rich eat in the kitchen) and can be accessed either through a closet lined hallway off the entrance gallery or through the large, windowed butler's pantry adjacent to the dining room.

Each of the two bedrooms have large and private poopers, as they better have for thirty million clams, okay?

Current residents of the obscenely uppity Rosario Candela designed building include Alfred Taubman, the owner of the Sotheby's auction house that recently did a little time in the big house, Harry Crosby, the fifth son of Bing, billionaire banker Mark Rachesky and his wifey Jill who prop records reveal paid $33,444,500 for their dee-luxe doo-plex digs in October of 2007, legendary Broadway producer Harold Prince, and former CEO of Salomon Brothers John Gutfreund whose wifey Susan once famously, pompously and dare we say wisely said, "It's very expensive to be rich." Well, indeed it is Missus Gutfreund.

Other past (or perhaps present) residents of 834 are said to include Charles Schwab, Elizabeth Arden, Leslie Wexner, John DeLorean, Robert (Woody) Johnson IV, and Loida Nicolas-Lewis, widow of food and grocery tycoon Reginald Lewis who were the first–and as far as we know the only–people of color (he was African American, she Filipino-born) to live up with the otherwise very pale-skinned residents of 834.

However, perhaps the king of the money mountain at 834 is the multi-billionaire media mogul who owns the tremendous triplex penthouse in which Laurance Rockefeller resided for some 50 years. Prop records and multiple reports from the time show that back in 2005, Mister Rupert Murdoch and his much younger wifey Wendi Deng scooped up the triplex building topper for a stomach churning, teeth chattering, bone chilling and, at the time, record setting $44,000,000. The couple then proceeded to give the three floor and multi- terraced aerie a massive makeover which reportedly includes a home gym with construction costs estimated at $400,000.

All the New York City real estate gossips with surely be burning up the phone lines and chomping at the bit to get the inside scoop on who tours at the high priced pad and, of course, which mega-moneyed magnate will pass muster with the notoriously persnickety board.