Madonna, the original Material Girl, sold her 6,000-square-foot co-op apartment on Central Park West to one of Wall Street’s more successful material men: hedge fund manager Deepak Narula, brokers say.
The sale of the vast duplex apartment in Harperley Hall—a 1911 Arts and Crafts-style building on the corner of West 64th Street with large banks of windows facing Central Park—closed last week, after lingering on the market for six months, listing records show.
It was listed in November for $23.5 million, with a rush of celebrity publicity. But the price was cut by 15% in February to $19.995 million, and brokers said Mr. Narula, who built a fortune as an investor in mortgage-backed securities, paid considerably less.
Mr. Narula, a former mortgage-bond trader at Lehman Brothers Holdings, is the principal and managing partner of Metacapital Management, which oversees more than $10 billion in assets under management, according to a company filing. Last year, one of Mr. Narula’s funds was ranked fifth on a Barron’s list of top 100 hedge funds, and Bloomberg Market Magazine said the fund’s performance ranked it first among hedge funds managing $1 billion or more.
Madonna assembled her vast apartment by combining sponsor-owned units into a single sprawling unit on the fifth and sixth floors of 41 Central Park West many years ago. It has 15 rooms, including six bedrooms, and two large living rooms with Juliet balconies and French doors opening onto the park, according to a listing by Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group, and Arabella Greene Buckworth of Brown Harris Stevens.
Judging on the evidence of listing photographs, the apartment is quite orthodox for a performer known for her glittering costumes and extravagant spectacles. It has dark-wood floors, a stainless-steel and marble kitchen, and a large marble bathroom with old-fashioned pedestal sinks and a claw-foot tub. (It has a total of eight bathrooms.)
In 2009, Madonna paid $32.5 million for what were once three adjacent townhouses on East 81st Street near Third Avenue that had been listed for as much as $45 million. She then spent years renovating those spaces, which she still owns.
For many years, Harperley Hall wasn’t considered to be one of the more desirable buildings on Central Park West, but partly as a result of the spotlight brought to the building by Madonna herself, the building’s prices and reputation have been going up, brokers say.
Mr. Narula didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did a spokeswoman for Madonna.
Madonna put her just-sold apartment on the market once before, for about $6.8 million in late 1996, according to Jonathan Miller, an appraiser and president of Miller Samuel Inc.
At the time, her brokers said a celebrity listing can add an extra kick early in a marketing campaign. But it was then taken off the market without a buyer, Mr. Miller said.
