Shonda Rhimes Purchases Plush Penthouse on New York City’s Park Avenue
By Mark David
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Powerhouse primetime showrunner turned exceedingly well compensated Netflix content creator Shonda Rhimes has splashed out $11.75 million for a posh penthouse atop a discreetly elite co-operative apartment house that presides over a busy yet plum Upper East Side intersection along New York City’s prestigious Park Avenue. Almost completely wrapped in a contiguous, newly resurfaced terrace, the essentially L-shaped aerie has two bedrooms and two full and two half bathrooms in what rudimentary calculations based on measurements shown on the floor plan indicate to be somewhere in the area of 2,300-square-feet. As was noted by the eagle-eyed property gossips at The Real Deal, who first turned up record of the transaction, the five-room penthouse sits atop a quietly aristocratic Rosario Candela-designed building and first came to market in mid-March (2018) with a too bullish asking price of $14.75 million that by early June had plummeted by 15% to $12.5 million.
Balancing understated architectural details with exuberantly opulent décor, the apartment underwent a bespoke two-year renovation and restoration by the seller, Regina “Gigi” Mahon, an interior decorator and author (“The Last Days of the New Yorker”) married to international financier and former Citicorp Vice Chairman Thomas C. Theobald who several years back landed herself in the property gossip columns when she turned an impressive, multimillion dollar profit on a pair of neighboring apartments on the fifth floor of The Plaza that she snatched up in early 2008 for just over $14 million and sold in mid-2011 for $19 million.
An always coveted private elevator landing leads to an ample but still warmly intimate foyer furnished by Mahon with a gilt-trimmed commode topped by a glitzy array of gilded and presumably pedigreed antique this and thats. Painted a gutsy deep navy, the living room stretches grandly to nearly 29-feet-long with an antique fireplace and sunny south and east exposures while the separate dining room, painted Tiffany blue and furnished as an informal lounge with a second fireplace, opens to a small loggia fitted as a home office. Lined with jet black lacquered cabinets with pristine white countertops and toile pattern window shades, the high-glam eat-in kitchen was designed to accommodate at-home entertaining with a huge center island and a pass-thru wet bar and pantry equipped with a second dishwasher.
Both bedrooms, along with a powder room described in marketing materials as “fanciful” with “a marble floor that is a copy of a garden at Versailles”, are clustered away from public spaces in a private wing off the foyer. The guest bedroom offers two closets and a windowed an en suite bathroom while the somewhat larger master bedroom opens to a private wrap-around terrace and includes two closets, one of them a custom-fitted walk-in, plus an only average-sized but lavishly finished bathroom. Marketing materials indicate the penthouse transferred with an in-building storage unit and a double maids room on the second floor was also available for purchase at an additional price but it’s unclear if Rhimes acquired the suite.
Property records show Rhimes joins a white-shoed collection of fairly low profile but unquestionably high net worth neighbors, a variety of whom are physicians and financiers, several with deep-pocketed ties to the Palm Beach social scene.
Recently listed at No. 74 on Forbes’ list of this year’s most powerful women on the planet, the thrice Emmy nominated “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal” creator, writer and executive producer maintains a currently in flux portfolio of residences in and around Los Angeles’s historic and historically prosperous Hancock Park neighborhood. In 2010 she paid mononymic indie-pop maverick Beck $5.6 million for an almost 8,300-square-foot Hancock Park mansion she now has up for sale at just under $10 million . And, in addition a comely Spanish duplex in a neighboring neighborhood that she’s owned since 2007 when she bought it for almost $1.7 million, last year Rhimes shelled out not quite $4.6 million for a five-bedroom English Country manor house that’s just around the corner from a stunningly restored and substantially larger 1920s, Elmer Grey designed Mediterranean mansion in the heart of Hancock Park that was purchased by Rhimes in early 2014 for $8.8 million and was once owned by sitcom superstar Patricia Heaton .
Listing photos and floor plan: Brown Harris Stevens
