Jeff Sutton and Sandeep Mathrani are moving forward with plans to convert the lower floors of the Crown Building entirely to retail.
Their firms, Wharton Properties and General Growth Properties, paid $17 million to buy talent agency ICM Partners out of its 52,000-square-foot sublease on the third and fourth floors of the Midtown office building.
The sublease, from Playboy Enterprises, was set to expire in 2019.
Sutton and GGP bought the 390,000-square-foot property at 730 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street, for $1.8 billion from Eliot Spitzer’s Spitzer Enterprises in late 2014. The partners immediately resold the fourth through 24th floors to luxury developers Michael Shvo and Vladislav Doronin, who planned to create an Aman Hotel and 23 condominiums there, for about $500 million.
Luxury goods retailer Bulgari signed a 15-year lease to take 3,000 square feet at the property late last year, paying about $5,500 per square foot, a city record. In March, another Italian firm, Ermenegildo Zegna, took 9,000 square feet there paying about $4,000 a foot. [NYP] – Ariel Stulberg