Light fixtures are usually included in a multi-million-dollar house — but not in Marc Jacobs’ house.
“Million Dollar Listing New York” (MDLNY) gave an inside look on Thursday’s episode at what it took to sell the 58-year-old’s West Village townhouse — a gold-leafed, marbled $11.65 million masterpiece marred by a premature selloff of Jacobs’ art deco furniture, contemporary artwork and even the light fixtures.
“I didn’t know you were taking, like, the lights,” said Ryan Serhant, founder of SERHANT. brokerage, when he entered the house. “Where’s all the stuff? Where’s all the art and like the mirrors and the things from the photos? All the Marc Jacob-ness of his house is now removed.”
But after an aggressive off-market sales strategy, Serhant sold the three-bedroom, three-bathroom, two-powder-room townhouse owned by the former creative director of Louis Vuitton for $10.5 million.
“One of the big challenges about selling this awesome townhouse is that most of the awesomeness — all the fixtures and finishes, artwork and furniture — has been boxed up and sold at auction at Sotheby’s,” said Serhant in the episode.
The episode featured a tour by Jacobs’ husband Charly “Char” Defrancesco, 39, a former model turned candlemaker who sells “Hype,” “Rich,” “Lit” and Bae”-scented candles at his company “Get lit by Char.” He sported a 22-karat Ben Baller grill and a Cartier ring in the episode.
“Everything in here, every piece of furniture, every light, every everything is, you know, a work of art,” said Char. The Swiss model and Jacobs met at a party in 2015 and dated four years before they married last year and moved full-time to their Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Westchester.
Jacobs purchased the house for $10.5 million in 2009 with his then-fiancé, Lorenzo Martone, and spent $1.15 million renovating the 4,800-square-foot townhouse, according to MDLNY.
He hand-picked every doorknob and light, including $100,000 of gold-leafed ceilings, $300 light switches, $3,000 door handles, $100,000 in stonework and a $150,000 kosher kitchen, according to MDLNY.
The brick house with an elevator and a rooftop terrace was designed by famed late NYC architect Robert Stern in 2008. It is attached via the ground floor to the Superior Ink Condominium, where buyers have access to a fitness center, yoga room, children’s playroom, movie screening room and a lounge with a catering kitchen, according to the listing.
The ground floor has a living room with a wood-burning fireplace, where Neville, Marc Jacobs’ Insta-famous dog, sat on a couch. Jacobs had a giant sculpture of Dopey from Paul McCarthy’s “White Snow” — which had to be lifted in via crane — in the oak-paneled room, according to a 2017 Architectural Digest feature.
The lower level also has a $150,000 Kosher kitchen and a garden terrace outside with a spiral iron staircase.
“I wish you were here in the summer cause it’s so green,” said Serhant to a potential buyer in the show.
The second floor has a living and dining room with a Mica stone fireplace, an 18-karat yellow gold ceiling and walls covered in mirrors. The second-floor powder room also has a gold-leafed ceiling.
There is a second kitchen upstairs — a narrow galley kitchen where Jacobs’ private chef cooked for him. The kitchen has 1970’s marble, $15,000 in Miele appliances and a $4,000 Gaggenau range stove oven, according to Serhant’s description in the show.
The third floor has two bedrooms with triplet closets. One had a wall of mirrors, the curtains had been taken down, and it had been painted from trendy green to muted white, MLDNY showed.
The top floor is the double-sized primary bedroom suite with four large windows facing out over the garden. It spans 944 square feet, the length of the floor — it was converted into two bedrooms under the new buyers who had three children.
The primary bedroom has a custom-built mahogany walk-in closet with “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in millwork, and the primary bathroom is outfitted in floor-to-ceiling heated Emperador light marble, which Serhant calls “a little marble Mecca.”
“[The bathroom is] one of those details that will actually help me get this house sold,” said Serhant on the show.
![“[I] sold Mark Jacobs’ house for $10.5 million. Print that in the New York Post!” Serhant says at the end of the episode, referring to the Post’s coverage of the sale in February 2020 right before the pandemic.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/05/1232025722.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=2048)
Serhant sent out an email to 600,000 people and rustled up at least four potential buyers shown on the show, two of whom put in an offer.
“I think we sell this like a piece of art… Build up a little bit of a sense of urgency and say ‘The time is now if you wanna take this before anyone else has it.’ And try to sell it quietly like we’re selling a Picasso off-market,” he told Defrancesco in the show.
The buyer was represented by MDLNY’s first female broker Kirsten “KJ” Jordan, of Douglas Elliman, who originally came in with $9.5 million, which Serhant negotiated up to $10.5 million. Serhant and his co-star each scored a $315,000 commission, according to the show. MDLNY cast this year also includes Steve Gold, Tyler Whitman and Fredrik Eklund, who is slated to also appear on “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” later this summer.
“[I] sold Mark Jacobs’ house for $10.5 million. Print that in the New York Post!” Serhant says at the end of the episode of “Million Dollar Listing New York,” referring to The Post’s coverage of the sale in February 2020 right before the pandemic — thanks for the shoutout, Ryan!