The top floor has a master bedroom, the solarium, roof terrace, a kitchenette, full bathroom, and a sitting room that's illuminated by skylights. Every floor is filled with Pigozzi's massive collection of African art and is accessible via an elevator and/or an internal staircase. In total, there are three bedrooms, five full bathrooms, and three half-baths.
Pigozzi happily admits that the apartment is decadent in its use of space. “I took out one bedroom for the enormous closet,” he said. “You could put that back in, easily, and make it an en-suite bedroom.” The great room, he added, was where he threw legendary Christmas parties, which easily fit “more than 120 people,” he said. “When I couldn’t do the party one year, Michael Douglas and Larry Gagosian and Mick Jagger said,'Why aren’t you doing the party? That's crazy!'” (Pigozzi’s rule for entertaining: “My trick was to invite a lot of pretty girls and a lot of waiters and waitresses who are models; and the food was always unpretentious.”)
A Jewel of An Apartment
He is giving up the apartment, he said, because his business increasingly keeps him in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and he has fewer occasions to be in New York. And while he occasionally lends the apartment to his friends—“Mick Jagger stayed sometimes,” he said—it was empty for so long that he can no longer justify owning it. “I’m selling it with big tears in my eyes,” he said. “I spent 30 happy years in it.”
Prospective buyers, he added, can buy the house with the Sottsass interior. “If they like him, they’re getting a jewel, a complete jewel,” he said. “But if somebody wants to do something completely different, I’m more than happy to take the furniture with me and put it in my house in LA.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.