A Sutton Place penthouse with a storied past and a onetime $45 million price tag is back on the market at $19 million, a reality check for even the most ambitious sellers in New York’s ultra-luxury tier. The full-floor co-op, owned by fashion designer Lisa Perry and her husband, financier Richard Perry, crowns a Rosario Candela-designed building and is known for its sweeping East River views and gallery-style interiors. Even at the newly reduced ask, brokers say the listing is still testing what trophy-level buyers are actually willing to pay.
Listing returns at a steep discount
The penthouse quietly resurfaced in mid-June with a $19 million price and Serena Boardman of Sotheby’s International Realty as the listing agent, according to a Sotheby’s entry mirrored on JamesEdition. Marketing materials bill the residence as the building’s sole penthouse and play up gallery-caliber lighting along with dual private elevator landings that keep public and private spaces separated. The refreshed listing marks the unit’s return to broad public marketing after a recent stint off the open market.
What the unit includes
The full-floor home occupies the top level of the building and is listed at roughly 6,900 square feet of interior space, with terraces totaling in the multiple-thousand-square-foot range, an unusually generous amount of private outdoor space for Manhattan. Floor plans and photos on Compass highlight lofty primary ceilings of about 15 feet, while public property records on Zillow show wraparound terraces that link nearly every major room. Large-scale rooms, long sightlines and terrace access from multiple exposures are central to the pitch for collectors and privacy-focused buyers.
A long, bumpy price history
The Perrys first floated the penthouse at an aspirational $45 million in 2020, a number that made the rounds in luxury property coverage when it debuted. Over the following years, the ask came down in stages: listing histories show a $37.5 million price in mid-2022, then roughly $26 million in 2023 before the property went off market. Those moves, compiled by major property trackers and industry outlets, chart how the apartment has been repositioned multiple times in search of the right buyer at the right number.
The Koons diamond and the view
The terrace has its own claim to fame. It once hosted a large metallic-green “diamond” sculpture by Jeff Koons that drew plenty of attention and, reportedly, some neighbor complaints about glare. Coverage of the piece and its visibility from around Sutton Place dates back more than a decade and is now part of the penthouse’s public identity, according to Gothamist. Listing notes indicate that the Perrys’ wider art collection is not expected to convey with the sale, so a buyer would be acquiring the setting, not the headline-grabbing sculpture.
Why brokers say it may still be too much
Even after the drastic cut, one unnamed agent told the New York Post that the unit remains overpriced and might trade closer to the mid-teens in reality. Market trackers show that Manhattan’s luxury sector has seen a pickup in contract activity this year, but the buyers who can write eight-figure checks are increasingly choosy. Trophy properties tend to move only when price, timing and comparable sales line up. Weekly luxury reports such as the Olshan tallies and similar market roundups consistently show that the very top of the market is active yet more selective about which marquee listings warrant top-dollar bids and which merely generate buzz.
For now, the Perrys’ full-floor Sutton Place perch is back in play at $19 million, and the coming weeks will reveal whether that number is sharp enough to pull in serious showings or whether another reset is waiting if a seller’s desire to preserve value runs into the realities of a disciplined high-end buyer pool.
