For decades, a quiet door on East 64th Street led into one of Manhattan’s busiest private rooms. The guests who passed through included Bob Hope, the actor and television host Alan Thicke, the singer Clint Holmes and former New York Mayor David Dinkins. Liza Minnelli celebrated her engagement there. Many evenings brought a wider circle still, figures from the city’s real estate, theater and art worlds, who arrived for dinners that often slid into live music and, on occasion, a recording session.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Corcoran / The James Weiss
All of it was orchestrated by Kenneth Laub, a veteran of New York commercial real estate who turned his home into a working salon and now devotes himself to writing music. Roughly 35 years after he moved in, Laub has decided to sell and trade down to something more manageable, freeing his time for composing. The home is listed for $17 million with the James Weiss Team at Corcoran, which has launched a dedicated website for it.
Neighbors know the place as the Versailles Townhouse, and it ranks among the most theatrical private residences on the Upper East Side. What strikes anyone who steps inside is less any single object than the sheer reach of the house. It measures close to 90 feet from the entrance to the rear wall, an interior nearly double the length of the standard 50-foot homes lining the street, a scale that was possible only because the building predates the city’s zoning code. An owner standing in the front library can see clear through the middle of the house to its farthest room, an unbroken run that no architect could legally lay out on this block today.
The house first took shape in 1872 under the architect John G. Prague, and a later renovation by R.D. Graham gave it the Neo-Georgian character it carries now. Inside, the designer Ronald Bricke assembled rooms that borrow freely across eras and traditions. Visitors enter through a hall hung with floral wallpaper, move past arched openings and marble underfoot, and climb a staircase that curves through all five stories of the roughly 8,000-square-foot home. The limestone-and-brick front was brought back to life by an artisan who had also helped restore the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The parlor level is the home’s showcase, a five-room stretch that doubles as a gallery. The bar there sits on a floor of antique Pusey woodwork and is fronted by a counter of Belle Epoque American walnut, while two floors overhead, a glass atrium ceiling by Lalique depicts the cosmos and sends colored light down into the room when the sun is out. The adjoining music room, which Laub designed expressly for performance, holds a grand piano and walls finished with reproductions of the Fragonard panels kept at the Frick. In the dining room hangs a Provencal tapestry from the 1750s, since returned to condition by specialists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the library retains the pine paneling fitted when the house was built.
The contents rival the architecture. By one estimate the residence contains roughly $3.5 million worth of antiques and decorative pieces, all of it beneath ceilings that reach 12.5 feet. The chandeliers on the parlor floor are valued at upward of $1 million on their own, and four more antique examples, of French, Venetian and Russian origin and dating to the 18th and 19th centuries, hang in other rooms.
The level above was engineered for entertaining on a grand scale. Laub ran audio throughout the floor and gave it room for as many as 150 guests, complete with microphones and the means to record, so an ordinary gathering could become a concert that did not have to vanish once the night ended. This is the stage on which the names that open this article appeared, season after season.
Higher up, the home offers five bedrooms, four of them with private baths, along with eight fireplaces and an elevator that reaches every floor. The most memorable space, though, sits in the open air. The fourth-floor terrace is finished in bluestone and green marble and warmed by a heating element set beneath the surface, melting snow as it falls and letting Laub grill outdoors in the depths of winter. The view takes in the rooftops of 64th and 65th Streets, among them the house once owned by David Rockefeller.
There is also a second act available to the right buyer. Directly beside it, 165 East 64th Street has come up for sale at $18.5 million, raising the unusual prospect of buying the pair and merging them into a single oversized residence, a move that both Madonna and Michael Bloomberg have managed in this same neighborhood. Two grand houses side by side, both for sale at once, is a coincidence the Upper East Side rarely produces.
The listing surfaces just as buyers are rediscovering the private townhouse, after years of gravitating toward Manhattan’s high-rises.
