"With 27 rooms over three floors, the maisonette at 660 Park Avenue is one of the most remarkable prewar apartments in all of New York. Designed for a Vanderbilt who never moved in, its monumental rooms were plucked from European manors and have somehow remained more or less unchanged for nearly a century. For decades, we've had to be content with scant photos and a few descriptions hidden in decades-old newspaper articles to piece together what it actually looks like inside."
"But after its latest owner, Dame Jillian Sackler, widow to Arthur of the Sackler family, passed away at the end of May, it's possible that the home will switch hands or be listed publicly for the first time in 44 years. It all began, as with many major real-estate moves, with a divorce. In 1927, when Virginia Fair Vanderbilt finalized hers from William K. Vanderbilt II, she was living in the family's Stanford White-designed mansion at 666 Fifth Avenue and needed a fresh start."
The 27-room maisonette at 660 Park Avenue occupies the first three floors of a 14-story neoclassical building and features monumental rooms inspired by European manors. Virginia Fair Vanderbilt commissioned the palatial ground-floor apartment in 1927 after her divorce, purchasing three floors from York & Sawyer and giving the maisonette a custom address, 666 Park Avenue. Each floor measures 60 by 100 feet and permitted 13 rooms per floor, with some rooms duplex in character. The maisonette offered full building staff benefits plus a private street entrance. The recent death of owner Dame Jillian Sackler raises the possibility of a public sale or transfer.
Read at Curbed
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