From the air, it looks a little like a Cape Cod cottage, or at least the very rich version of such a thing, complete with 12-foot ceilings and a tower with three floors and a tiny cupola. But it’s not in Cape Cod, or anywhere else near the ocean for that matter, it’s on the roof of an apartment building in the East Village of Manhattan. Oh, and it’s listed for $9.5 million — or at least, the entire package is, which includes the top two floors of the building. The condo building is known as the Minthorne House, named after the family whose farm used to cover most of what is now the East Village in the 1800s. The farm was split up and one of the offspring built the five-story apartment building.
New York being what it is, of course, the building only has three apartments over five floors, and they are all worth north of $2 million at this point. The penthouse cottage was last sold in 2017 for $3.5 million, but that was before a wholesale, top-to-bottom restoration of the interior (here’s what it used to look like before). The previous owners were the artist Henry Merwin Shrady III and his family — Henry designed the cottage and had it built, and his son used it while he was going to college. Only possible downside: the Hell’s Angels clubhouse is just a few blocks away.