$50 MILLION APARTMENT | Weekly World News

The daughter of a Russian billionaire is selling a superluxury Manhattan apartment.

Anna Anissimova, a 27-year-old actress and daughter of Vasily Anissimov, a Russian who made a fortune in aluminum and iron ore, has put her 3,900-square-foot apartment on the 75th floor of the Time Warner Center on the market for $50 million.

The condominium, extravagantly finished by the designer Noel Jeffrey, with silver leaf ceilings, Venetian plaster, curvy walls and floor-to-ceiling views of Central Park, is also available for rent for $60,000 a month.

Affluent Russians often buy property in New York, London and South Florida as a way of putting a share of their wealth in hard assets outside the reach of the Russian government, and therefore they tend to buy and hold.

Selling is rare, said Edward A. Mermelstein, a real-estate lawyer who represented many clients in Russian and the Ukraine for their real-estate purchases in New York.

He said only a few have sold real estate and only ?because of financial issues and that happens rarely.?

?While all of this uncertainty is still happening in Russia,? he said, buying a Manhattan apartment ?is almost like having a diamond in your pocket. ?

Ms Anissimova, a former model and socialite in New York and the Hamptons, bought the apartment for $9.86 million in 2004 in the south tower of the Time Warner Center soon after it was finished.

At the time, she was 19 years old. She was dubbed Manhattan?s first ?Russian It Girl? in a profile of the new Russians in New York.

Now Ms. Anissimova said she has put her apartment on the market for the most American of reason: to go west to Hollywood and pursue her film career, with her husband, Peter Schafer, a film producer and chief executive at Sunrise Pictures.

?New York will always be home to my husband and me because that?s where our families are,? she said in a statement. ?But Los Angeles in where work is now so we have to stay here for a while.?

Ms. Anissimova has appeared in a number of mostly independent films, and plays the lead role in a film, ?Flutter,? a dark comedy due to open at the Beverly Hills Film Festival later this month. Mr. Schafer is listed as an executive producer on the project.

If Ms. Anissimova gets her asking price of $50 million, that would make her apartment, the second most expensive apartment, on a per-square-foot basis, after the purchase by another daughter of a Russian billionaire at 15 Central Park West in January.

That record-setting $88 million purchase was by a trust for Ekatarina Rybolovleva, the 22-year-old daughter of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian who made his fortune in potash fertilizer and now lives in Monaco. The 20th-floor penthouse had been owned by Sanford I. Weill, the former head of Citigroup Inc.

Lauren Muss, a broker at Corcoran Group who has the Anissimova listing, said that she expected to find a buyer who is wooed by the fine finishes?from oak paneling to the limestone floors to the custom-designed curtains with hand-sewn matching pearls.

In contrast, many buyers of expensive apartments routinely bring in their own architects and designers to tear up spaces and start all over again.

?If they don?t like it that much, they won?t buy it and it will be rented out,? she said.

Ms. Anissimova?s apartment has 10 rooms, and three bedrooms, including a huge master bedroom that was carved out of two already-large bedrooms.

Elizabeth Sample, a broker at Sotheby?s International Realty who lives in the Time Warner building and often lists apartment there, said that recent sales at Time Warner had sold for far less than Ms. Anissimova?s asking price, but that prices were increasing.

Ms. Sample has listed a larger, 4,400-square-foot apartment down the hall for more than a year, at increasing prices, from $38.5 million to $44.95 million and now at $60 million. That works out to $13,470 a square foot.

?The owner turned down offers for more than $10,000 a square foot,? according to Ms. Sample.

She said that the 75th-floor apartments had unusually high ceilings of 14 feet and views ranging from the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge to the Statue of Liberty.

Ms. Anissimova?s father is listed by Forbes as the 30th most wealthy Russian with a fortune of $1.34 billion.

Josh Barbanel
Wall Street Journal

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