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Actor Jessica Chastain is selling her Midtown apartment steeped in artistic history with an ask of $7.45 million, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Located within the historic Osborne building, the four-bedroom co-op unit was previously home to the late composer Leonard Bernstein while he crafted the score for West Side Story in the 1950s.
The apartment was also previously home to composer Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza), from whom Chastain purchased the home in 2015 for $5.1 million. Guettel is the grandson of famous composer Richard Rodgers, who is known for his prolific career working with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. Cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short is yet another illustrious former tenant of the unit, adding to the apartment’s robust history of artist residents.
The Osborne itself dates back to the 1880s, and Chastain’s 3,000-square-foot unit contains several original features that have been restored from that time.
A bay window contains Tiffany Studio-created leaded glass transoms that echo leaded glass found in the building’s lobby. Pocket doors, leaded transoms, oak flooring, and interior shutters are all original to the apartment. In addition, the home features plaster crown moldings, 14-foot ceilings and five wood-burning fireplaces.
During their tenure in the apartment, Chastain and her husband, fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, refurbished the home with AD 100 designers Carrier and Company. The home now also features bespoke Ralph Lauren fabrics as wallcoverings.
Cathy Taub and Ellen Kapit of Sotheby’s International Realty – Downtown Manhattan Brokerage are listing the property. Kapit told The WSJ she believes Chastain is selling the home now because the family — Chastain and her husband have two children — needs more space. The Zero Dark Thirty star bought a brownstone on the Upper West Side in 2019 for $8.875 million.
The Osborne is one of the oldest luxury apartment buildings in Manhattan, and its lobby features marble, mosaics and gilded surfaces in addition to leaded glass. The building has attracted musicians for many years in part because of its close proximity to Carnegie Hall and other cultural institutions, and in part because of the building’s thick walls, which help block sound from one unit to the next, according to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The Osborne was designed with Romanesque Revival architecture in mind, with its stone exteriors and deeply set windows, the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted.
In addition to Chastain’s unit, Bernstein also owned a smaller unit in the Osborne on the second floor, which he used as a studio. That unit was reportedly darker and less susceptible to providing distractions, which made it a good place to work, according to Working with Bernstein by Jack Gottlieb. That second-floor unit is reportedly where West Side Story was written.
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