The developer behind Lower Manhattan’s “Jenga tower” is making a play for a buyer for his Upper East Side home.
Izak Senbahar, the president of Alexico Group, which created the stacked-boxes-style condo 56 Leonard St., has listed his four-bedroom co-op for $24.5 million.
The art-filled, full-floor unit, which has four and a half baths, a living room with a fireplace and a library, as well as a sleekly minimalist look that recalls a modern condo more than the prewar building in which it sits, cost Senbahar and his wife, Sarah, $12.2 million in 2012, so the couple stands to double their money in about a decade.
Still, the couple seems to be gaming out what the so-so city housing market can bear. The Senbahars first listed the co-op in March with Sotheby’s International Realty for $27 million before delisting it two months later. On Monday the apartment resurfaced with a different price and a new brokerage, Compass.
Monthly maintenance fees for the home, which comes with a pair of storage units, are $12,620.
Founded in 1993, Alexico was a skyline-shaping force during the condo boom of the mid-2000s, cranking out eye-catching creations such as the glass-and-steel-walled 165 Charles St., a 16-story, 31-unit building in the West Village designed by architect Richard Meier.
But the firm’s signature project is probably 56 Leonard, a 60-story, 145-unit Tribeca tower whose facade is layered with protruding concrete slabs of different lengths that give the impression the building is actually a loose grouping of toy blocks. Architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron styled the high-rise, which also sports a shimmering squashed-orb sculpture by Anish Kapoor tucked under a cantilever by its front doors.
The condo was approved for marketing in 2008 but hit serious headwinds during the Great Recession. It didn’t completely sell out until 2017 with the sale of a $47.9 million penthouse and has nabbed $1.3 billion in sales overall, according to its offering plan.
But Alexico has been quiet on the development front in recent years, though the firm had planned to buy shuttered St. Francis College for $180 million and redevelop the Brooklyn Heights campus before Rockrose Development swooped in and purchased the site itself, according to a lawsuit Alexico filed last summer.
The Senbahars also own the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street, which has battled foreclosure attempts on a couple of occasions.
The co-op 2 E. 88th St., which is across from the Guggenheim Museum and faces Central Park, is a boutique building by city standards, with just 13 homes across 14 stories.
Past residents have included Jacqui Safra, a billionaire heir to the Safra banking fortune, and movie producer Jean Doumanian, a couple who unloaded their triplex penthouse in 2021 to an unnamed buyer for $60 million.
A message left for Izak Senbahar at Alexico’s Midtown office was not returned. And Sophia Elghanayan, the Compass agent marketing the home, did not respond to an email for comment by press time.
C. J. Hughes , 2024-06-11 19:26:54
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