Real estate company Milan Associates has purchased Frank Stella’s former home and studio for $22 million, reports the Real Deal. The Beaux-Arts carriage house, at 138 East 13th Street, was built in 1903 by architecture firm Jardine, Kent, and Jardine.
A number of other art world figures have been linked to high-priced real estate sales in recent years. Pop artist Andy Warhol‘s former Hampton’s estate went on the market in June for $85 million, Jackson Pollock‘s old apartment was listed at $1.25 million in 2014, and art dealer Larry Gagosian sold his Upper East Side apartment for $18 million in October. Earlier this month, a Nolita apartment featuring an original Jean-Michel Basquiat tag became available for $29,000 a month.
Artist Frank Stella stands next to the BMW, that he painted in 1976, at a display in Grand Central Terminal March 24, 2009 in New York.
Photo: Courtesy DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images.
Stella, who is the subject of an ongoing retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through February 7), owned the East Village property between 1978 and 2005.
In 2006, the building was in danger of being demolished and replaced with a seven-floor condo. A group of preservationists spent the next six years lobbying the Landmark Preservation Commission to grant the building landmark status. After being listed on the State and National Register of Historic Places in 2007, it received official landmark status in 2012.
Prior to Stella’s residency, the property was home to Van Tassell & Kearney, the city’s last-surviving horse and carriage auction mart, and a machine shop where women trained to work on assembly lines during World War Two. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation‘s website described the building’s unusual architecture, noting “a once-common building type in New York, these marts are distinguished by their high central halls, where horses were paraded around on rings for potential buyers to review.”
Since December 2009, the property has been home to the Peridance Center, a dance studio, with a lease through 2028. It was sold by the owner, Infinity Real Estate LLC, along with the back half of the lot at 123 East 12th Street.