Inside a Composer's Grand Upper East Side Townhouse, Now Offered at $15.5 Million

There is a grand piano on the parlor floor of 163 East 64th Street, beneath a Venetian chandelier and walls of hand-painted Fragonard murals, and for more than three decades the man who lives there has sat down at it to write songs about the city outside his windows. Kenneth Laub is a composer with more than 150 to his name, and the house he built around that work is one of the most remarkable private residences on the Upper East Side. It has just come to a new price. The James Weiss Team is now offering it at $15,500,000, down from $17 million, which brings a house that was always singular within closer reach.

The parlor floor is where it makes its case. Versailles-pattern hardwood runs underfoot, the ceilings rise 13.5 feet, and the rooms open one into the next with the ease of a home built for company. The library still wears the pine paneling milled for it in 1872, lit by a bronze chandelier from the late 1800s. Further along, the formal living room holds the piano, the Venetian chandelier and the Fragonard-style murals. The showpiece is the bar, a run of Belle Époque American walnut detailed in marble and set beneath a Lalique glass ceiling, its floor the work of designer Steven Puzzi. In the dining room, tall windows frame an 18th-century Provençal tapestry, hand-painted in the 1750s and brought back by conservators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What makes all of it possible is the shape of the house. At twenty feet wide and ninety feet deep, roughly 8,000 square feet across five floors, it runs nearly twice as far back as most townhouses on the block, the result of construction that predates the city's zoning. John Prague designed it in 1872, R.D. Graham later gave the front its Neo-Georgian character, and the limestone and brick were restored by the same craftsmen who worked on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

For years the house did more than hold Laub's music. It performed it. He built the second floor for sound, with the wiring, the microphones and the recording equipment to gather as many as 150 guests for an evening that could turn into a concert. The people who filled it read like a New York guest book: Bob Hope, Alan Thicke, the singer Clint Holmes, former Mayor David Dinkins, and Liza Minnelli, who held her engagement party there. Laub's own catalog runs from the show New York, Old Friend to the musical Priceless, and his latest, a song for the Statue of Liberty performed by the legendary Marilyn Maye, arrived this summer for the country's 250th anniversary. The house and the music have never been separate things.

The rooms above hold five bedrooms and eight fireplaces, reached by a sweeping staircase or a private elevator. There is a French country eat-in kitchen, a gym and a cellar for 300 bottles. The fourth floor opens onto a terrace laid in bluestone and marble, wired for surround sound and warmed by a snow-melting system, with a lit fountain and lantern-lit trees that turn it into an outdoor room after dark. Even the approach was considered: the bluestone at the entrance is heated against the winter.

The setting is the heart of the Upper East Side, a short walk from Central Park. The block itself is unusually well kept, looked after by a street association and lit by eleven bright streetlamps that set it apart after dusk, and it counts the late David Rockefeller among its former residents. For a buyer thinking even bigger, the townhouse next door has also been available, opening the rare option of joining two houses into one.

Laub is stepping back now to give his full attention to his music, and at its new price the house is a rare kind of offering: a working piece of one man's New York, its rooms tuned over decades for art and company. View the full property gallery, video, and listing details presented by the James Weiss Team.