Adam Neumann has been doing some downsizing.
For several years, the maverick co-founder of what was once the most valuable American start-up, WeWork, has been offloading luxury estates almost as prodigiously as he once stockpiled them.
Gone is the 12,000-square-foot manse on 27 Marin County acres with the guitar-shaped living room and three-story water slide. Gone is the Greenwich Village townhouse. Gone, too, are at least one of the chateaux in Westchester County and at least one of the Hamptons getaways. Mr. Neumann owned the properties with his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann.
His wallet has shed some bulk as well. His Forbes net worth, adjusted for inflation, is down 54 percent since 2019 — despite Mr. Neumann’s receipt of a severance package worth hundreds of millions after he left WeWork, the co-working company he led to the brink of collapse. (He is still, however, worth a respectable $2.3 billion, up from $1.4 billion in 2022.)
Last week, he dropped a bid to reacquire WeWork, which had filed for bankruptcy reorganization last fall and whose stock price has tumbled more than 99.999 percent from its 2021 peak.
And now, for at least the third time, the Neumanns have listed their marquee New York City dwelling, a 6,630-square-foot, three-story-plus-rooftop perch atop a fortresslike apartment building that peers down at Gramercy Park. The asking price is $24,995,000.
The four-bedroom penthouse, on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of 78 Irving Place, is a testament to Mr. Neumann’s wealth and taste.
“We’re looking at essentially just a townhouse in the sky,” said Eleonora Srugo, one of the Douglas Elliman brokers handling the listing.
“It’s very Parisian-inspired, filled with a ton of quiet luxury, but then there are pops of a little bit more over-the-top magic,” said her colleague Jordyn Taylor Braff.
The nautilus-cious spiral staircase. The 30,000-watt starlight installation depicting the Milky Way, suspended above a custom bed so many light-years across that Ms. Braff abandoned the traditional mattress size hierarchy and decreed it “ginormous.”
The riotously pink kid’s bathroom. The other kid’s bathroom designed to resemble the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, complete with porthole windows. The playroom walls covered with embossed patterns of leaves and vines.
Most of the metal fixtures — faucets, doorknobs and the like — are made of silver. “There’s like marble wainscoting in the shower,” Ms. Braff noted.
The architectural redesign is by Pietro Cicognani. The interior is by Windsor Smith. The chandeliers are by John Rosselli and Associates. If you have to ask who any of these people are, you probably can’t afford it.
The 955-square-foot roof terrace, which already has a barbecue zone, has hookups for water and electricity so that the buyer can “create their little wonderland on a roof,” Ms. Braff said. Or go the other way and “make it this jungle oasis,” she added, expanding upon the existing boxwood plantings by Audrey in the Garden. Or both!
The penthouse may be a bit of a bargain. Adjusted for inflation, the price is 40 percent below the $27.5 million the Neumanns paid for the space in 2017 before doing extensive renovations. It has been listed in combination with either a duplex on the first floor or a carriage house next door for as much as $37.5 million. But according to Douglas Elliman, this is the first time the penthouse has been marketed separately. The taxes on it are $163,400 per year.
Mr. Neumann, 45, said through Douglas Elliman that he sought to part with the penthouse because his family had not lived in it since 2019.
If the penthouse finally sells, it will not leave the Neumanns and their six children homeless. They appear to be hanging on to Linden Farm, their 60-acre estate with a waterfall and a horse-riding ring in Pound Ridge, N.Y.
And sometime after 2021, The New York Post reported, the Neumanns moved into a “palatial new home” in “an exclusive private neighborhood in Miami” along 360 feet of waterfront with multiple marina slips, on property for which they had paid $44 million.
Mr. Neumann has further plans to rebuild his wealth, too. In 2022, he founded a real estate company called Flow. Its mission is to build rental developments that foster a feeling of ownership and community.
