For years, neighbors complained about the noise generated by construction of a Manhattan megamansion for a wealthy overseas couple. Now work is nearing completion, but it seems like the owners may never live in their Upper West Side home.
The nearly 20,000-square-foot home on Central Park, a combination of two Renaissance Revival row houses built in the 1890s, is coming on the market for $85 million, according to listing agent Jim St. André of Compass.
If it fetches that price, it would be among the most expensive townhouses ever sold in New York City. The current record of $90 million was set in 2018 by the sale of the Wildenstein mansion on the Upper East Side.
The Upper West Side house was designed to be the New York residence of Paris-based businessman Pierre Bastid and his wife, jazz singer Malou Beauvoir.A limited liability company linked to the couple bought the first of the two properties for $11.5 million in 2011 and the second in 2012 for $13 million, records show.
St. André declined to comment on the couple’s reasons for selling, but a source close to the situation said that they are no longer together.In an emailed statement, Bastid said he had planned to make the house his primary residence, but that “world and personal events” have shifted his attention to Europe.Beauvoir didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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Bastid made his money in the energy industry and is an investor in real estate through his private office, Zaka Investments. Beauvoir is a singer-songwriter and actor, according to her website.Bastid said he was drawn to the neighborhood for its proximity to Central Park and to Lincoln Center; he is a former trustee of the Juilliard School and has produced musicals on Broadway.
The eight-story, five-bedroom house, which includes two underground levels, has a sense of scale far beyond what’s typical even in New York’s most high-end houses. During roughly seven years of construction, the historic facades of the two houses remained in place while everything behind them was rebuilt and expanded.
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The home’s dramatic centerpiece is a double-height living room with 24–foot ceilings, an overhead gallery and two wood-burning fireplaces. A wall of tall, arched windows overlooks the garden. “I wanted the house to feel classical in terms of elements, scale and proportions, yet less formal for a nonchalant open living style,” Bastid said.
A limestone staircase, designed to look as though it is floating, took eight months to construct, St. André said.Bastid said he saw the staircase as the “main visual feature” of the home, since it allows natural light to flow through multiple levels. “Townhouses can sometimes be a bit dark, so a bright space was critical,” he said.
The house also has a dining room with double-height ceilings, as well as a kitchen with a dining nook. The primary suite, which measures more than 2,000 square feet, has dual dressing rooms and a wood-burning fireplace. There are four guest bedrooms, an elevator and two private offices. The pièce de résistance is a 55-foot-long indoor lap pool on the ground level, which extends into the garden.
The project involved significant excavation for the two subterranean levels, which have been left unfinished but could be used as a home theater or sports court, St. André said.
The excavation work in particular fueled noise complaints from nearby residents, who plastered notes about the noise on the construction fencing. Neighbors “awaken each morning to the jolting sounds and vibrations of jackhammers,” they wrote in a 2019 Change.org petition to local authorities asking them to stop the work. “We do not envision a megamansion or a swimming pool. Instead, we hear the steady digging of graves. Figuratively and literally, we see our graveyards because of the various toxic fumes entering our homes and our bodies; as well as the death of our block, our street, and our neighborhood as we know it.”
In his statement, Bastid said he considered issues with the neighbors to be “a major concern.” His team was in contact with local block associations, he said, and he hired a third-party acoustic-and-noise-mitigation consultant and followed their solutions.
“Once the foundation phase was over, the project team has remained in very good relations with neighbors,” he said.
Given the blowback from the community, “it would have been pretty awkward” for couple if they had moved in, said Carol Xianxiao Liu, an attorney who used to live in the area.
Write to Katherine Clarke at Katherine.Clarke@wsj.com
