At first glance, Federico Pignatelli’s spacious West Broadway penthouse looks like the ne plus ultra of bachelor pads. The open, 2,800-square-foot space contains everything an international playboy could desire: minimal furniture, a luxurious wooden sauna, a dizzying amount of gadgets, and black-and-white photos of naked women hanging on almost every wall (including Richard Avedon’s famed 1991 portrait of a nude Nastassja Kinski with a serpent, which takes center stage above a white sectional couch in the living room).
But the 52-year-old Italian prince, investment banker, real estate developer and owner of Pier 59 photography studios — seriously, that’s not even the half of it — says what really attracted him to the apartment, back when he bought in 1991, was its peace and quiet.
“You don’t hear anything,” says the tanned noble (he’s just returned from Art Basel Miami Beach). He speaks in a lolling Italian accent as he sits at his dining room table facing the Avedon. “It’s like being in the countryside. It’s fantastic.”
Not that Pignatelli is exactly a recluse: the yachts, the occasional scandal, the coterie of famous photographers and socialites. The inside cover of his new coffee table book, “The Great Beauty,” which commemorates 20 years of Pier 59 and which Pignatelli shot himself on location at the famed Getty Villa in Rome, includes a list of names of the VIPs who have dropped by his studios, including Sting, both President Bushes, and even Monica Lewinsky. “Very sweet girl,” he recalls of the infamous White House intern. Of President Bill Clinton: “You could really have a conversation with the man.”
His loft has seen its fair share of action, too. “I’ve had parties here with 200 people. Ivana Trump came here. Donald Trump came here” — no word of what Pignatelli, a supporter of refugee causes, makes of the latter’s presidential bid. “But it’s been 10 years since I’ve had a party here. Now I just do it at the studio.”
You could say that Rome-born Pignatelli comes from a family of bon vivants. His mother, the Princess Doris Pignatelli, a fixture of iconic nightclub “Cafe Society” in her day, even appeared in “La Dolce Vita,” Federico Fellini’s cinematic ode to excess and decay. But the young prince was a bit of a rebel. “I grew up very independent, as my parents were separated and I did not see much of them,” he says. “I skipped school any opportunity I could. I was a bad student.”
Instead, Pignatelli had other talents. At 14, he was buying and selling used motorcycles. At 17, he was dealing in contemporary art. He somehow turned a hobby of photographing his beautiful girlfriend into a gig shooting new faces for an Italian modeling agency. Eventually, he transferred his hustling skills over to finance and real estate, working in Switzerland and London before ending up in New York City in 1987, and falling in love with SoHo shortly thereafter.
When he first saw the penthouse on West Broadway, he liked the location, and the fact that it was on the top floor, but not much else. Fortunately, his experience in art and real estate — he once bought an entire 15th-century village in Umbria and restored all 50 abandoned houses there — had him pretty confident that he could re-design the interior himself. He purchased the loft, moved into a hotel for six months. and completely gutted the whole thing.
“I wanted it to feel very New York,” he says. “This used to be a printing facility, and I like that industrial feel about it.”
One enters through a long corridor, with warm wood floors and glossy black-and-white portraits hanging on the walls, all gifts from his fotog friends. The main, open-floor space — where the living area, dining room, kitchen and bedroom all bleed into one another — includes white-brick barriers (which Pignatelli constructed inside the apartment’s original walls to block out sounds from his next-door neighbors), exposed pipes and a clean white couch and minimal coffee table that he designed.
But he’s offset that sort of modernism with treasures collected from his travels abroad: flat kilim rugs “woven in the Saharan desert,” a pair of antique Indonesian beds, embroidered Moroccan pillows, and a round mandala that can light up and change colors via a simple switch.
The only thing Pignatelli kept from the previous owner? A sculpture that stands next to the sofa in the living area. “It’s just a beautiful piece of stone, so I left it there in the corner,” he says. “Plus, it’s extremely heavy, so to move it would be a big undertaking!”
Pignatelli actually has two other homes: one in Rome, and one in Los Angeles, where his 12-year-old daughter lives with her mother, his ex-girlfriend.
“My daughter has been visiting me more and more,” he says proudly, pointing to a stuffed animal left on a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. “She’s an incredible swimmer, and she loves navigating my yacht, so we share that passion. Photography, too. She’s an excellent photographer!”
But Pignatelli considers his New York apartment his “hideaway,” for now at least. He’s actually converting the upstairs solarium into a bedroom for his daughter — she now sleeps in the Indonesian daybed (pictured above) near the entrance to the main room.
“I’ve slowed down a lot, and I realized that my place is very much a bachelor’s place,” he says. “I’m in the process of transforming it into less of a bachelor’s place.”