The High Cost of Living? You Can’t Imagine

You ascend the black Belgian marble double staircase, gripping the upholstered rail, and finally reach the room you’ve come to see. The ceiling is 23 feet above, the fireplace 78 feet away, Fifth Avenue 42 stories below.

Your jaw hangs somewhere in between.

This is Lady Fairfax’s living room. For $35 million, it can be yours.

The “grand salon,” as it is known up here, is the centerpiece of the Australian heiress’ triplex apartment atop the Pierre Hotel. But it is more than that, your guide says.

“I’m very familiar with all the great apartments of New York,” purrs Hall F. Willke, “and I believe this is the most important room in private ownership.”

Willke is a broker who is trying to sell the place for more than twice as much as any American apartment has ever commanded.

Only six Manhattan apartments have sold for more than $10 million, including this one eight years ago. A record $15 million was paid in 1994 for a 26-room Park Avenue triplex once owned by Helena Rubenstein.

But Willke says there is nothing like the Fairfax apartment, a French cha^teau that sits right under the Pierre’s landmark copper mansard roof. It has 12,000 square feet (about eight times your three-bedroom colonial) and views of Central Park and virtually everything else in town worth seeing.

The apartment has six master bedrooms, six wood-burning fireplaces, four terraces, three kitchens, two powder rooms and eight baths. Most of the latter have refrigerators, and one also has its own fireplace, terrace and heated marble floor. The tub has a gold swan-shaped spigot.

The grand salon alone covers 2,800 square feet; everything in it is oversized, including the 18-foot-high fireplace and the 10-foot-long chandelier. Each of six stately windows is 20 feet high. One frames the eccentric tower of the Sherry Netherland Hotel next door.

The salon was once a ballroom that had sat empty from the mid-’60s until 1988, when Mary Fairfax bought it and the floor below for $12 million.

“She put four years of her life into creating this space,” says Willke, evoking images of the lady in overalls with her hair up, grasping a spackling tool. He won’t say how much money she put in, but many millions is a safe guess.

Lady Fairfax, whose husband, the newspaper magnate Lord Warwick Fairfax, died in 1987, never planned to spend more than two months a year here. But when she found she was spending only a few weeks, she decided to sell.

Willke, of the firm Brown Harris Stevens, has been escorting visitors through in recent weeks.

They get an eyeful: the gilded sink basins, the lights that switch on automatically when you enter the room, the walls covered with puffy upholstery, the hidden panel off the library that swings back to reveal a gleaming pantry.

The place isn’t perfect. The grand salon feels like the lobby of a grand hotel, and the rest of the apartment feels a bit like a submarine in comparison. The maintenance and taxes are $31,440 a month.

The Fairfax apartment is not alone on the block. Also for sale are Venezuelan industrialist Jose DiMase’s penthouse at 57th Street and Park Avenue for $14 million and Saudi arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi’s apartment atop Olympic Tower on Fifth for $22 million.

If Lady Fairfax gets anything close to her asking price, says Barbara Corcoran, who heads her own brokerage, “It would redefine what people are willing to pay for luxury. But you don’t know; a decision like that is half logic, half heart.”