Five-time Grammy-nominated musician and Great American Songbook archivist Michael Feinstein and his spouse, Terrence Flannery, have listed their palacios, beige-colored house for $17.9 million.
A combination of two adjacent houses, the Lenox Hill townhouse contains 18 rooms.
Created from a pair of Upper East Side brownstones, 120 years after they were first constructed around 1886, the unusual property consists of two spindle staircases, seven baths, two powder rooms, eight fireplaces, and a 25-foot-wide backyard with ivy-covered brick walls. Plus, it also features two outdoor pagodas, one furnished as a living room and the other converted to a dining area.
The couple, who were married in 2008, purchased the first of the two houses, in 2004 for just over $3 million.
"It had high ceilings and grand rooms but not a sense of massiveness, and we thought, 'This is plenty for us,' " said Feinstein, a well-known cabaret singer and pianist.
The following year, they bought the neighboring house for $3.825 million, which included the cost of a gut restoration.
"The vision was to combine them into one grand house for entertaining," said Flannery.
In order to combine both the houses into one remarkable townhouse, Feinstein and Flannery demolished some walls on the first two floors to make way for connective archways between the two separate houses. The end result was a majestic and sociable home with double the space and width.
The new modified home consists of a fourth-floor master suite accessible by a private staircase, two kitchens, a home gym on the fifth floor and a huge walk-in closet, which can easily house '50 button-down white shirts'.
According to New York Times, the parlor has a concealed bar with herringbone wooden floors , a sitting room to the west, and a music room and living room in the back overseeing the garden.
However, the couple did preserve certain original details including ornate crown molding, floor-to-ceiling bay windows overlooking the garden and the wall-size Hirschfeld mural, featuring stars like Liza Minnelli, Fred Astaire, Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, the main attraction in the foyer.
