It was Vanity Fair magazine that dubbed Robert Stern, who has died aged 86, “the king of Central Park West”, following the phenomenal success of his 2008 condominium at 15 Central Park West. Conceived as a homage to the grand and gracious Upper East Side apartment blocks so beloved of old money, it was a calculated retort to the anomie of New York’s modern glass towers.
Like its 1920s predecessors, it was clad in creamy limestone (85,000 pieces of it) and while this added a couple of million dollars to the budget, it turned out to be a mere bagatelle. The luxurious apartments were eagerly snapped up by the new money of hedge fund managers and celebrities, including Sting and Denzel Washington. Total sales of around $2bn made “15 CPW” the most commercially successful apartment building in the world at the time. Its developers, Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, scions of an American real estate dynasty, effectively recouped the cost of the limestone from the sale of a single apartment.
