David Millstone, co-CEO of Standard Industries, and his wife, Jennifer, who is the daughter of late shopping mall mogul Samuel Heyman and his wife, Ronnie, are serious shoppers.
The Millstones are the secret buyers of a $53 million apartment at 960 Fifth Ave., Gimme Shelter can reveal.
The Millstones loved their new third-floor digs so much that they got into a bidding war and ended up paying $18 million over the unit’s already eye-popping $35 million asking price.
“They have four kids and needed the space,” an insider says. The sellers, however, could have gotten an even higher price but the sale was “bungled,” our spies say. “This was a fabulous apartment in a fabulous building — one of the best that New York has to offer.
The sale shows that a prime property will fetch top dollar no matter how the market is doing. But the sellers could have gotten a lot more money if they had listed the property online.
A lot of potential buyers didn’t know about it. The sale was bungled,” a top broker tells us. The full-floor unit has 100 feet along Fifth Avenue, which is occupied by a dining room, pantry, living room and library.
The dining room, living room and library all have fireplaces. The four bedrooms and the library face East 77th Street.
Oh, there are also eight maids rooms and a “servants’ hall,” kitchen and pantry, five bathrooms and two powder rooms. Millstone declined to comment.
The 22-room apartment was home to the late Robert Ellsworth, known as the “King of Ming,” regarded as the world’s preeminent collector of Asian art.
More than 2000 works of art that he owned were put up for auction by Christie’s last year. Other residents of the building, over the years, included Claus von Bulow and Edgar Bronfman Sr., whose unit traded for $70 million, a “mere” $5 million over the asking price, to Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris in 2014.
When he died in 2014 at age 85, Ellsworth, who was childless, left a $100,000 tip to his two favorite waitresses, though he didn’t know their last names.
Most of his fortune went to his live-in chef and friend Masahiro Hashiguchi.