In 1986, French-born entrepreneur/photographer/art collector/playboy Jean Pigozzi was wedged in a “small apartment with a fabulous view” in Hampshire House on Manhattan's Central Park South. “I’m a big man, I’m six-foot, four-inches, I need big spaces,” he said in a recent phone interview. “Otherwise, I get kind of claustrophobic.”
Pigozzi set about finding an apartment—technically a pied-à-terre, given that his primary residence is in Switzerland—and after looking at a few apartments on the Upper East Side, he walked into the Hotel Des Artistes building on West 67 Street, right off Central Park West.
“It took me about 12 seconds to say, 'This is the one I want,” he said. “The proportions of the apartment were so fabulous."
When Pigozzi bought the apartment, it was two-story home owned by “a guy who was a painter and also, maybe, a scientist?” Pigozzi said quizzically. “Also, I think he collected old stones. It was really weird.”
The man, Pigozzi added, “was not a great painter, either.”
After purchasing the apartment, Pigozzi asked Ettore Sottsass, a designer and founder of the influential Memphis Group, to look at the apartment and decide if he’d be willing to redesign it. At the time, Sottsass was at the height of his fame—he died in 2007, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a retrospective of his work in July—and “he fell in love with it,” Pigozzi said.
Sottsass threw himself into the design, meeting with Pigozzi multiple times in Milan to work out a floor plan and a design scheme. “He designed 100 percent of everything,” Pigozzi said. “Every table, every sofa, every book shelf, every sink, every doorknob.”
When the penthouse above Pigozzi's duplex came up for sale a few years later, Pigozzi bought it and got Sottsass to integrate the penthouse into his existing design; most prominently, Sottsass added a glassy solarium with curved walls. With the addition of the third floor, the apartment comprises 5,377 interior square feet and an 827-square-foot terrace.
Now Pigozzi, who also has homes in the southern France and Los Angeles, is selling the apartment for $19 million, co-listing it with Roberta Golubock and Mark Thomas Amadei of Sotheby’s International Realty and with Deborah Grubman and David Adler of Corcoran Group.
An Extravagant Use of Space
The first floor of the apartment is composed of a 55-foot-long “great room” with a 19 foot high double-height ceiling, a 24-foot-wide dining room (also with double-height ceiling), a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. The second floor contains a mezzanine, another bedroom, two bathrooms, and two walk-in closets that together take up more than 560 square feet.