Joan Rivers described her Manhattan home with characteristic economy: it was, she said, what Marie Antoinette would have done if she had money. The apartment justified the line. It was a triplex penthouse occupying the top of a 1904 limestone mansion on the Upper East Side, with a two-storey gallery, a Louis XIV-style ballroom under 23-foot ceilings, restored parquet-de-Versailles floors and gilded antique woodwork. She lived there for roughly a quarter of a century until her death in September 2014.
What happened afterwards is a story about how hard it is to sell a home that specific. It was bought within a year by a member of the Saudi royal family, and then spent much of the following decade being listed, cut, delisted, and listed again.
This guide covers the penthouse, the Connecticut estate she sold shortly before she died, and where the property stands now.
Joan Rivers’ properties at a glance
| Property | Location | Key figures | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Triplex penthouse, ballroom for about 125 guests | Upper East Side, Manhattan | Listed February 2015; sold that year, reported at $28 million, with property records cited elsewhere at $24 million | Sold by her estate in 2015 |
| Country estate, 5,730 sq ft on 75 acres | New Milford, Connecticut | Sold for $4.4 million | Sold about a year before her death |
Who was Joan Rivers?
Joan Rivers was an American comedian, writer, actress, and television presenter whose career ran from the New York club circuit of the early 1960s to Fashion Police five decades later. She was the first woman to host a late-night network talk show in the United States, wrote a string of bestsellers, and built a substantial second business selling jewellery and clothing on television shopping channels.
She died in September 2014. Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, inherited her estate, including the Manhattan apartment.
The relevant point for a property article is that Rivers earned continuously and independently for fifty years, and put a great deal of it into one apartment that she treated as a life’s work rather than an asset.
The Manhattan penthouse
The building is the Spencer, a seven-storey limestone mansion designed by the architect Horace Trumbauer in 1904 for the financier John Drexel, and divided into twelve apartments in the 1930s. Rivers had the top three floors.
The apartment is 42 feet wide, which in Manhattan terms is extraordinary on its own. A two-storey entrance gallery leads to a Louis XIV-style ballroom with 23-foot ceilings and a wood-burning fireplace, sized to hold around 125 people. Beyond that are a music room, a dining room opening through French doors onto a south-facing terrace, a wood-panelled library looking over Central Park, a mezzanine, a principal suite with its own terrace, and a separate two-bedroom guest wing.
Rivers restored rather than modernised. The parquet-de-Versailles flooring, the gilded woodwork and the columns were all brought back rather than replaced. She summarised the effect as Louis XIV meeting Fred and Ginger, which is a more precise description than most professional copy manages.
Manhattan has a small number of apartments of this scale and period, and they trade rarely; the market for them behaves very differently from the market for a large modern duplex such as Tina Fey’s Upper West Side home.
The sale after her death, and the conflicting prices
Melissa Rivers listed the penthouse in February 2015, and it sold the same year to Prince Mohammed bin Fahd Al Saud.
Two different figures appear for that sale. Most coverage reports $28 million, which was also the asking price. Other accounts, citing property records, put the recorded price at $24 million. Those cannot both be the closing figure, and no source reconciles them. The likeliest explanation is that one number is the ask and the other the recorded transfer, but since that is inference rather than reporting, both figures are given here rather than one being presented as fact.
What happened to it afterwards
The buyer did not keep it long in practice. The penthouse returned to the market in 2021 at $38 million, a substantial premium over what had been paid six years earlier.
It did not sell. There was a $10 million price cut, and by 2024 it was listed at $34.5 million. At one point it was withdrawn after nearly three years of marketing. By 2025 the asking price was back at $28 million, effectively where it started a decade before. Melissa Rivers has spoken publicly about the apartment sitting empty, and about how much that would have bothered her mother.
The pattern is instructive. A 42-foot-wide triplex with a ballroom is a magnificent thing and a very difficult thing to sell, because the buyer pool consists of people who want a period Manhattan apartment at that scale, can pay eight figures for it, and do not want to gut it. Highly specific grandeur narrows a market rather than widening it, which is the same dynamic that has affected other landmark properties, including Grey Gardens.
The Connecticut estate she sold before she died
Rivers also had a country property in New Milford, Connecticut, close to the Washington town line, which she referred to as a sanctuary. The house ran 5,730 square feet with ten rooms, four fireplaces and a custom swimming pool, on roughly 75 acres.
She sold it for $4.4 million about a year before her death, so it did not form part of the estate. The buyer was not publicly identified. Connecticut’s northwest corner has drawn New York performers looking for land within driving distance of the city for generations, a tradition that also produced Katharine Hepburn’s Old Saybrook estate.
Where the properties stand now
Rivers died in 2014, so the question of where she lives does not apply. What can be said about her homes is this.
The Connecticut estate left her hands in 2013 and has no continuing connection to her. The Manhattan penthouse was sold by her estate in 2015 and has been owned since by a private buyer who has repeatedly tried and failed to resell it, with asking prices ranging from $38 million down to $28 million across the decade. Reporting indicates it has spent long stretches unoccupied.
The apartment remains substantially as she restored it, which is unusual. Most homes this closely identified with one person are stripped or rebuilt within a few years of a sale, as happened with Brittany Murphy’s Los Angeles house. Rivers’ has survived largely because nobody has bought it.
Sources
- 6sqft on the building’s architecture and history, the apartment’s rooms and features, the 2015 sale, and the later listings.
- The Real Deal on the 2021 relisting at $38 million and the recorded sale price.
- Robb Report on the penthouse’s later marketing.
- NBC Connecticut and SFGate on the New Milford estate and its $4.4 million sale.
