Mica Ertegun’s East 81st Street Townhouse Is for Sale
The living room in Mica Ertegun’s Upper East Side townhouse, as seen in the listing, displays the simple, refined style the designer was known for.
Photo: Leslie J Garfield & Co Inc.
For decades, Mica Ertegun was the doyenne of interior design, decorating the homes of financial titans like Sandy Weill and rock stars like Keith Richards. Her firm, MAC II, which she started alongside Chessy Rayner in 1967, became known for its elegant, restrained style. But it was her own home on the Upper East Side, a pair of conjoined townhouses where she lived with her second husband, the music mogul Ahmet Ertegun, that was perhaps her most famous calling card. (The couple owned multiple homes: in Southampton; Paris; and Bodrum, Turkey.) Ertegun died in December, at age 97, and now her townhouse at 121 E. 81st Street has hit the market, asking $12.995 million and listed with Leslie J. Garfield’s Lydia Rosengarten and Douglas Elliman’s Lauren Muss.
Mica and Ahmet Ertegun were known as a glamorous couple with sophisticated taste.
Photo: Pierre Venant/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
Ertegun, whom Vanity Fair once called “the virtual definition of sophistication,” was known for her simple designs that incorporated modern paintings, ancient art, Turkish textiles — kilims as tablecloths and chair covers — with antiques and clean-lined white-upholstered furniture. It was an approach that never went out of style and, give or take a few mirrored screens and straw-covered walls, has barely even aged in the ensuing decades. Her townhouse, in listing photos, looks remarkably unchanged from the late 1960s. (An Ellsworth Kelly painting, for example, has been shifted from one side of the curved staircase to the other.)
The kitchen, as shown in listing photos, is functional and, like most of what Ertegun designed, hard to date. The home has been immaculately maintained.
Photo: Leslie J Garfield & Co Inc.
The Erteguns purchased 121 E. 81st Street in 1966, city records show; a decade later, they bought 125 E. 81st. The home, in archival photos, has a pared-down, chic aesthetic — a minimalist black desk with an anglepoise lamp sits beneath a sloped skylight and large, open rooms are furnished with Persian carpets, white-upholstered furniture, antiquities, and modern paintings. (“I hate clutter,” she once said.) She also, apparently, disliked superfluous walls and pulled them down in three rooms of her townhouse to create a dramatic salon.
The five-story townhouses, used by the couple as home and offices, are conjoined on the third and fourth floors, according to the listing, but remain on two separate tax lots (the annual tax bill comes to around $147,000). Together, the homes have 20 rooms, spread out over 9,200 square feet, with 15,000 square feet of unused air rights — as they’re not landmarked in a historic district, the next owner, the listing notes, has “endless opportunities for reimagining and reconfiguration.”
The home, as shown in listing photos, is actually two townhouses conjoined on the third and fourth floors. Ertegun often used antiques but was averse to clutter.
Photo: Leslie J Garfield & Co Inc.
During their long lives together, the glamorous pair entertained influential friends — a dinner party hosted by the couple, her obituary in the New York Times notes, might have included Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, Jackie Onassis, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, and Oscar de la Renta. Ertegun decorated apartments for Bill Blass and Alice Walton and was friendly with Kid Rock. The designer, who was born into an affluent and powerful Romanian family (her father served in the King’s cabinet) before the second World War, fled with her first husband, an aristocrat she married at 16. (They eventually ended up living on a Canadian chicken farm.) She met Ahmet Ertegun in the late 1950s on a trip to New York to try to free her father, who’d been imprisoned by the Communist regime. The couple were married in 1961. She outlived him by several decades and continued her design work into her 90s. Ertegun was also a notable philanthropist who gave $41 million to Oxford University for humanities scholarships. At the time of her death, she had no immediate family members, according to the Times. The Upper East Side houses, to be delivered vacant, have been “immaculately maintained,” according to the listing, and are “priced to sell.”
