There’s an apartment for sale in the Fifth Avenue building that was home to New York’s first penthouse — oh, and Ralph Lauren lives there too
1107 5th Avenue is a pre-War cooperative with a storied history and starry list of residents, past and present.
‘Carnegie Hill is one of my favourite neighborhoods,’ says illustrator Tug Rice when I WhatsApp him with the news that I’m writing about an apartment for sale at 1107 5th Avenue. ‘[It is] very, very close to three major museums (The Met, Guggenheim, Neue Galerie) and great restaurants. It’s a little less lively than Fifth Avenue further south, but I think that’s why people prefer it.’
The apartment in question is, well, this one: a ninth floor ‘architectural masterpiece’ overlooking Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir — listed with John D. Wood for $12.5 million. And the specifications are nothing short of jaw-dropping: Ten-foot ceilings; a private lift and hallway that opens onto an impressive 24-foot gallery space; a corner master bedroom that stretches 27 feet down Fifth Avenue on one side.
The 14-storey building on the corner of East 92nd Street was built by the George Fuller Construction Company in 1925 and is famous for housing New York’s first-ever penthouse. To bring the brick and stone neo-Renaissance-style edifice to life, Fuller had to convince cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post Hutton — the wealthiest woman in the USA for much of her life (1887-1973) — to give up her mansion then located on the site. Post Hutton agreed on one condition: that Fuller recreate much of her 54-room home inside the new building’s top three floors. (Incidentally, around the same time, Post Hutton and her then husband, Edward Francis Hutton, were building a vast complex in Palm Beach, Florida, called… Mar-a-Lago — which was completed in 1927, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1980 and purchased by Donald Trump in 1985 for a rumoured $10 million.)
Today, 1107’s most famous resident is Ralph Lauren — an arbiter of taste whose fashion designs have influenced what we wear for decades. (If the barnstorming success of his most recent menswear show in Milan is anything to go by, the 86-year-old shows no signs of taking his foot off the pedal.) Ralph and his wife Ricky have reportedly lived in the building for more than four decades and, in 2022, purchased a secondary unit from the estate of Nancy Norman Lassalle, a patron of the School of American Ballet. A 2010 spread in Elle Decor, off the back of a gut renovation of the first property, shows an all-white apartment decorated with white lacquer tables and canvas sofas, bamboo armchairs and a lot of plants — seemingly at odds with Ralph Lauren the brand’s Americana-meets-British-heritage, all colour, texture and pattern look. ‘It was such a relief to come back to after a long day of looking at endless swatches, patterns, and colors,’ explained the designer, later on, in his book Ralph Lauren A Way of Living (Rizzoli, £60).
Ironically, this apartment is currently closer to the Ralph Lauren ‘look’ than his own home. Details inside the four-bedroom, five-bathroom complex include ornate, floor-to-ceiling wood doors, a commanding, carved wooden fireplace surround and cornicing in a myriad styles. More modern additions include air conditioning, a laundry room and a home gym; building amenities include a ‘first-class’ resident manager, full-time doormen and lift operators, bicycle storage and a ‘spectacular’, fully-furnished rooftop garden.
‘Residences of this caliber seldom come to market,’ says the agent, so we recommend you move quickly. Who knows, you might find yourself watching the sun set behind Central Park from the roof, right next to Ralph.
The apartment at 1107 5th Avenue is for sale via John D. Wood for £12.5 million (about £9.3 million) — see more details.
