THE Upper East Side town house where Andy Warhol created some of his earliest and most influential Pop Art is about to go on the market, giving Warhol scholars and fans a rare opportunity to explore the space where he painted his early Campbell’s soup cans, dollar bills and comic strips.
Andy Warhol in 1966.
The modest 16-and-a-half-foot-wide five-story house, at 1342 Lexington Avenue near 89th Street, is part of a row designed in 1889 by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect of the Plaza Hotel and the Dakota. Warhol bought it in 1959 and moved in with his mother.
He lived there until 1974, and in the early 1960s used the ground floor as his studio, propping his paint-by-number canvases against a large fireplace mantel in a wood-paneled room. The house is often regarded as the first in a series of Warhol factories in Manhattan.
In 1974, he leased it to Frederick W. Hughes, his business manager and later the executor of his estate. In 1989, Mr. Hughes bought it from the Warhol estate for $593,000 and kept a large Warhol portrait of Prince Charles in the foyer. After Mr. Hughes’s death in 2001, it was sold to Dennis Omar and Nancy Smith of Analytic Partners, a global marketing research firm, for $2.55 million.
The buyers updated the mechanical systems but kept the house mostly intact. They stripped marbleized blue paint from a wood fireplace in a front parlor and, using neutral colors, replaced glossy dark blue walls decorated with gold petals. But they also hung several authenticated Warhol prints on the walls, keeping the artist’s spirit alive there.
Soon after they moved in, Warhol’s nephew, James Warhola, wrote and illustrated a children’s book, “Uncle Andy’s” (Puffin Books, 2003), about a family visit to 1342 Lexington Avenue in the early 1960s. After arriving late at night, he recalled waking up in an upstairs bedroom and finding it stacked high with a tower of Campbell’s and Brillo cartons. There were 25 cats in the house named Sam, he recalled.
“I always thought the house should have been a museum,” he said in a telephone interview. “All those important early Pop paintings are in museums scattered across the world.”
Occasionally, some Warhol admirers knocked on the door and asked to look around, while others wrote more formal requests for a chance to study the house. But Lawrence Comroe, who is marketing the house with his partner Tony Oakley at the Corcoran Group, said the owners, valuing their privacy, routinely turned down these requests.
But now that the house is on the market, Mr. Comroe said, the owners agreed to show it to both potential buyers and Warhol scholars and admirers. The house has been emptied, and Mr. Comroe, using photographs from an old Sotheby’s auction catalog from Mr. Hughes’s estate sale, has redecorated Warhol’s studio with copies of some of the work once displayed on the walls.
The asking price is $5.99 million. The house has ornate wood moldings and paneling, and original mantels. But it is not as large as many Upper East Side town houses, and fronts on Lexington Avenue rather than a quieter side street. ( It is 48 feet deep on a 62-foot lot — while most town house lots on side streets are about 100 feet deep — and has just over 3,000 square feet, according to city tax records.)
“People will have a chance to view the private space of a very public man,” Mr. Comroe said. “The goal is that a collector will buy this house and respect it as it is.”