Pier Guerci, the former president of the U.S. division of Loro Piana, wasn’t ready to give up his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment.
He’d bought a warren of nine maid’s rooms on top of a prewar building in 2000, gutted the original layout, and then spent eight years building a duplex overlooking Central Park.
The finished apartment, for which he had to extend the building’s elevator and buy the building’s air rights, has three bedrooms and three and a half baths spread across 3,790 square feet. Just as important, it has another 2,760 square feet of landscaped terrace that features mature trees, bushes, and flowers.
“It’s kind of an oasis,” Guerci says in a phone interview. “Like being in the country, except you’re in New York. It’s a very unique place.” The apartment, he notes, has three outdoor showers.
But when he left his job at Loro Piana and “took a sabbatical for a couple of years from [his] working career” to travel around the world, instead of leaving his apartment vacant for several years or selling it, Guerci decided to rent it out last August through the broker Leighton Candler at Corcoran.
The price? An even $100,000 a month, or $1.2 million a year.
“It’s not a replaceable property,” he says. “There’s a lot of different penthouses in the city, but to have something in this location,” he says, “is unique. It’s not like your 60th floor, helicopter-views kind of place. It’s a different kind of feeling completely.”
A Willing Tenant
For all that, though, the apartment hasn’t found a tenant willing to spend more than a million dollars on annual rent since it was listed. There’s been interest, Guerci says, but prospective renters wanted to do short-term leases and couldn’t agree to the year-long minimum that the building prefers.
Its vacancy is not, he emphasizes, a consequence of its price.
“If you look at some of the high-end rentals at the top hotels, they’re substantially higher and not even comparable,” Guerci says. “But also, this house has a daily housekeeper, it has fresh flowers every week, and a gardener that takes care of the roof.”