Almost a year after top-earning 1980s supermodel Paulina Porizkova announced, via social media, that she and veteran New Wave rock star Ric Ocasek of the Cars had “peacefully” split up a year earlier, following almost three decades of marriage, the erstwhile couple’s Manhattan home, a handsome townhouse on a pretty, tree-lined block in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, has come up for sale at $15.25 million. The former couple — he inducted last year into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and she a Czech-born and Sweden-raised two-time Sports Illustrated cover model — stand to reap a fortune on the 23.5-foot-wide townhouse they acquired for $2.5 million a few months before their August 1989 marriage. Originally built in the mid-1800s, re-built in 1919 and subsequently extensively updated, the four-floor, elevator-equipped Federal-style residence offers four and potentially more bedrooms and three full and two half bathrooms in almost 5,800 square feet.
With funky, wall-to-wall cheetah-print carpeting, the grandiosely double-height living room stretches almost 35-feet-long with a massive, minimalist fireplace and a towering wall of windows that open to a south-facing garden. A mezzanine level family room and office area with built-in desk space overlooks the living room while the finished basement unsurprisingly houses a recording studio. Wrapped in cloying, hot pink-on-bubble-gum pink striped wallpaper with riotously floral carpeting, the master bedroom opens to a private terrace and shares the third floor with a spacious en suite guest bedroom. Two smaller bedrooms are joined on the uppermost level by a small, skylight-topped library/office along with an airy art studio under a vaulted glass ceiling.
Property records indicate the amicably split couple continue to co-own a nearly 5.5-acre country estate about 90 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, in beautifully bucolic Millbrook, N.Y., they bought in 1997 for $650,000.
listing photos and floor plan: Sotheby’s International Realty