From the New York Times. A fun story about the most expensive loft in NYC.
October 13, 2005Turf
Make an OfferBy MOTOKO RICH
WENDI DENG is feeling bittersweet about leaving SoHo. Soon she'll be abandoning the apartment she loves for one on the Upper East Side that her husband has dreamed of owning for decades. One immediate change: "I'll have to get a better wardrobe," said Ms. Deng, who was wearing jeans, a white blouse and leopard print flats.
It sounds like any other marital dilemma in which the husband is ready to move and the wife would prefer to stay. Except that in this case the couple is
Rupert Murdoch, the media billionaire, and Ms. Deng, his third wife, and the home in question is a SoHo triplex loft that they are trying to unload for $28 million, a price that would make it the most expensive residence ever sold below 14th Street.
Now, if only they could sell it. Like an increasing number of people in Manhattan, they are finding that it's not so easy to do.
After paying a record-breaking $44 million for a Fifth Avenue penthouse previously owned by Laurance S. Rockefeller - the most expensive residence ever sold above 14th Street - the couple is trying to sell their SoHo home at a time when the market for residential real estate in Manhattan appears to be slowing and properties are generally lingering in the listings longer.
Only six prospective buyers have come to see the apartment since it was quietly put on the market in June, their broker says, and no one has made an offer.
So what's a media mogul to do? In this case, reach out to the competition. Although Ms. Deng, 36, normally shies away from interviews, the imperatives of New York real estate have driven her out of her domestic world as a stay-at-home mom to help sell the apartment she owns with Mr. Murdoch, the 74-year-old chairman of the News Corporation, owner of The New York Post and Fox News.
Before they married six years ago, Ms. Deng, who received an M.B.A. from Yale in 1997, was a vice president of Star TV, a News Corporation subsidiary in Hong Kong. Since marrying Mr. Murdoch, she has often been the subject of speculation and investigation about her role in his empire, but she has steadfastly refused to comment.
In this case, when their broker, Deborah Grubman of the Corcoran Group, suggested they talk to The New York Times about their apartment, they agreed. But if the couple obtained the publicity they desired in their joint interview, they also wound up giving a rare glimpse into the married life of one of the world's richest and most powerful couples at a time when the wranglings of the Murdoch family have been well-nigh Shakespearean.
In recent months, the clan - including Mr. Murdoch's second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann - has been in a tug-of-war over whether Grace and Chloe, the young children of Ms. Deng and Mr. Murdoch, will have a say and an equal share in the family trust that controls the News Corporation.
Ms. Deng declined to comment on discussions about the trust and her children's role in it; instead she focused on how sad she was to be moving them from SoHo. "I love downtown," she said. "It is casual and my children have all kinds of friends here."
Mr. Murdoch said he definitely had no interest in holding onto the SoHo apartment, despite the fact that Ms. Deng is clearly fond of it.
"We are trying to simplify our life," Ms. Deng said. Of course, these are people for whom simplification means going from seven homes to six. The others are in Los Angeles; London; Canberra, Australia; Carmel, Calif.; and Centre Island, N.Y. They are also considering buying property near Beijing.
Over the course of two hours on a recent afternoon that threatened, but never quite delivered, rain, the couple took this reporter on a tour of their lavishly renovated home.
Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Murdoch repeatedly dipped out of the interview to take several calls on one of the apartment's 20 telephones. When he returned from a call, Ms. Deng would urge him, "Rupert, you talk," but then quickly jump in to finish his sentences.
Ms. Deng said they had spared no expense on renovating the apartment, in fact spending more on the upgrades than they did on the apartment itself, a 9,300-square-foot space that had been cobbled together on the top three floors of a former candy factory in a landmark building. "I didn't know what I was doing," said Ms. Deng, who grew up as the daughter of a factory manager in Guangdong, a province in southern China, where, she said, "we don't have interior design."
It seems she was a quick study. Or at least she figured out how to hire the right people. The couple, who lived in the Mercer Hotel a few blocks from their apartment for a few months before and immediately after they were married in 1999, chose Christian Liaigre, the French decorator responsible for the hotel's interiors. "We just thought we want something like that style, but better," Ms. Deng said.
She showed off the apartment's Australian walnut doors, the sleek custom-designed furniture by Mr. Liaigre, a fully-outfitted gym and a large screening room with a 35-millimeter projector.
"Everything was expensively done because we thought we would be here forever," said Ms. Deng, who noted the renovation took two and a half years. "We were never looking for an apartment until the Rockefeller apartment came on the market."
They had ripped out walls to create a grand living and dining room, installed bathtubs and sinks carved from single slabs of Italian Carrara marble, and overhauled all the plumbing, electrical and mechanical systems. In the living room, Mr. Liaigre designed low-lying bookcases to leave large expanses of white wall space where Mr. Murdoch could hang his prized collection of Australian art, including paintings by his favorite painter, Fred Williams.
On the roof, a 2,700-square-foot split-level deck features an enclosed sunroom where Mr. Murdoch reads the Sunday papers, an old water tower (they had wanted to turn it into a meditation room, Ms. Deng said, but ended up using it as a storage place for stacks of light bulbs and Prada outdoor cushions) and views of the Empire State Building on one side and downtown on the other.
Ms. Deng said that Russell Crowe had attended a barbecue on the roof, while Mr. Murdoch noted that
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and Gordon Brown, the British chancellor of the exchequer, had had dinner at the custom-designed table set for 14 downstairs. Ms. Deng said the actor Hugh Jackman's children often came over for play dates with the Murdochs' preschool age daughters.
Mr. Murdoch said that the couple paid about $7.4 million for the top two floors of the apartment in 1999. As he started to talk about the price paid for the other floor, which was purchased in a complicated swap deal with a downstairs neighbor, Ms. Deng waved at him to stop talking. Mr. Murdoch declined to say just how much the couple spent overhauling the apartment. All he would say was: "Too much."
The budget even included the hiring of a feng shui master from London, Ms. Deng said. "It doesn't hurt," she said. "It's like chicken soup." She said the master had advised the couple to move the stove, which was directly under the spot where they wanted to put their bed.
Despite their considerable investment, Mr. Murdoch said he was not concerned about the softening real estate market. Sitting at a black teakwood table on the roof deck, he shrugged off recent reports of falling prices and rising inventories of properties for sale, including one in his own paper, which proclaimed: "the picture ain't pretty, especially at the top end of the market."
"We're not in a hurry," Mr. Murdoch said.
He could be in for a long wait. Three brokers who asked not to be named, because they did not want to appear to say anything negative about a competitor's listing, said they thought the $28 million price tag seemed high for a downtown apartment with a manually operated elevator and no doorman.
With characteristic broker brio, Ms. Grubman of Corcoran, who sold the Versace mansion on East 64th Street for $30 million in August, said there was no comparable apartment to the Murdochs' downtown loft. "There has never been anything available in SoHo ever with this kind of square feet that wasn't developer's finishes, and these are all incredible custom finishes," Ms. Grubman said.
Mr. Murdoch has had experience with the difficulties of selling property. Shortly after his divorce from Anna Murdoch Mann, his second wife and the mother of three of his six children, Mr. Murdoch tried to sell his ranch in Carmel and a house in Los Angeles. But when he received no offers for the ranch after six months, he said, he pulled it off the market. As for the Los Angeles home, he said, "I couldn't bring myself to sell the house."
In Manhattan, though, Mr. Murdoch is determined to sell. "We don't need two apartments," he said.
In some respects, the couple is trading Ms. Deng's dream house for Mr. Murdoch's.
Mr. Murdoch has had his eye on the Rockefeller apartment for three decades. Back in the 1970's and early 80's, he lived in the same building at 834 Fifth Avenue in a duplex for which he paid $350,000. At the time, Mr. Rockefeller was chairman of the co-op board, and Mr. Murdoch attended a few shareholder meetings in the penthouse. "I said if I could ever afford this I would love it," he said. Ms. Deng added, "It was your American dream."
The move back uptown reverses a decision Mr. Murdoch made just six years ago to move to SoHo, in part, he said, because both his sons, James and Lachlan, lived in the neighborhood then. (Of course, a young wife with modern tastes probably didn't hurt, either.)
But James is in London now, where he is chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite company that is 37 percent owned by the News Corporation, and Lachlan, until recently the heir apparent, left the News Corporation in a headline-making break with his father and has returned to Australia. Their sister, Elisabeth, 37, and half-sister, Prudence, 47, Mr. Murdoch's daughter by his first wife, live in London and Sydney respectively.
"All my children are spread around the world," Mr. Murdoch said ruefully.
Ms. Deng quickly interjected: "But he travels a lot. In November in Australia he'll see everybody."
She said, however, that she would not accompany him on that trip. "I'm too old and tired to travel," she said, mischievously referring to their 38-year age difference.
The couple have only just started to consider how they will decorate the uptown apartment, but they have again hired Mr. Liaigre. In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Liaigre said the interiors for the Rockefeller apartment would be in "more of an uptown spirit - more sophisticated" than the SoHo triplex. He said he was thinking of oak floors "like Versailles" and gold finishes on the walls. "There is a lot of Art Deco inspiration," he said.
But he figured the renovation of the 8,000-square-foot apartment on Fifth Avenue would not take as long as the one downtown. "Mr. Murdoch is in a hurry," Mr. Liaigre said.
The Rockefeller apartment is smaller than the SoHo loft, and Ms. Deng said it would not accommodate either a gym or a screening room. Grace and Chloe would share a room uptown as they do in SoHo, and will have a separate playroom.
When asked about news media coverage of the Murdoch family's recent upheaval or her role in it, Ms. Deng demurred. But, she acknowledged, "because I don't give interviews, I don't have a voice."
"What can you do," she added, throwing up her hands. "We have a pretty good life."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
