Matt Lauer gets more than asking price in Manhattan
After just four months on the market, #MeToo-ed former “Today” co-anchorMatt Lauer sold his smartly appointed apartment on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side to an as-yet unidentified buyer for above it’s $7.35 million asking price. (The apartment actually went into contract just a month after it was listed in April but the transaction was only completed more recently.) Lauer, whose estranged wife of 20 years, Annette Roque, left him in the humiliating aftermath of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct in the workplace that led to his late 2017 firing from “Today,” purchased the approximately 3,500-square-foot, 11-room pre-war pad in August 2004 for a smidgen more than $5.882 million. A private elevator landing opens to a not-quite square foyer that serves as a central hub between an elegantly proportioned enfilade of public rooms, the kitchen and service quarters, and a private, family wing that, including the multi-room master suite, provides three and potentially four bedrooms and a total of 4.5 bathrooms.
At more than 28-feet-long with dark, coffee-colored hardwood floors and chunky coved ceiling moldings, the graciously proportioned living room highlights a delicate, carved stone antique fireplace opposite a trio of deeply set sash windows. Perfectly aligned double doors open one end of the room to a carpeted library and the other to a formal dining room snazzily wrapped in snappy, teal-colored Chinoiserie-style wall covering while the service areas incorporate a sleekly equipped up-to-date if not especially spacious kitchen, an adjoining breakfast room, and a laundry room/home office. Two ample guest bedrooms have private, windowed bathrooms while the sprawling master suite comprises a gentleman’s study easily converted to a third en suite guest bedroom, a bedroom lined entirely in butterscotch velvet wall panels, two bedroom-sized dressing rooms, and two lavishly outfitted if perfectly average-sized marble bathrooms.
The handsome, 12-story brown-brick boutique co-operative apartment house on the bustling corner of East 64th Street and Lexington Avenue, infamously known as the former home of imprisoned Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff, offers its few well-heeled residents top-shelf services that include a doorman attended canopied entrance and a fully-staffed lobby.
Outside of his spectacular professional downfall — he once upon a time hauled in a reported $25 million annual salary, Lauer has been much in the Hamptons property gossip columns since 2016 when, all in that one year, he sold a modest if expensive bay front cottage in Southampton, N.Y., for $3.5 million, paid Richard Gere an eye-catching $36.5 million for an unquestionably picturesque, two-residence bay front compound in nearby Sag Harbor, and listed a secluded and, unfortunately for him, still for sale 8,000-square-foot mansion on 25 mostly wooded acres, also in Sag Harbor, that first came up for grabs with a too-aggressive $18 million asking price that has since plummeted to $12.75 million.
Launch Gallery: Matt Lauer Sells Swank New York City Apartment
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