The Swedish gallerist Per Skarstedt dropped $17.3 million on 115 East 73rd Street, a handsome townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was formerly used as a residence by Burkina Faso’s representative to the United Nations. According to the Real Deal, the purchase has been in the works for two years already. The property hit the market back in 2012—the same year Skarstedt expanded his gallery to London—and was on the market for a mere 18 days before the dealer made an offer.

“Per really wanted it,” Brown Harris Stevens’s Lynda Wiggins, the dealer’s real estate broker, told the Real Deal. “We spoke like every two weeks for like two and a half years. Then the broker called me and said it was back on.”

The 10,000-square-foot house, which was made a landmark in 1982, was purchased by the West African nation Burkina Faso—then known as Upper Volta—back in 1975.

Skarstedt, whose Upper East Side gallery is just six blocks north—plans to gut-renovate the house and use it as his primary residence, according to Wiggins. He’ll be in good company, as fellow megadealer Larry Gagosian lives just around the corner on East 75th Street—where he has a killer rooftop pool.

[t/h Art Market Monitor]