I’m sure many of you have seen this mansion going on the river view loop around the Mohawk river, on the Clifton Park side of the river, towards the river from the road.
CLIFTON PARK — It has a helicopter pad, 15 fireplaces, an indoor swimming pool shaped like a sailboat and ceilings gilded in 24-karat gold.
But the castle-like mansion known as Llenroc — one of the Capital Region’s most impressive and grandiose homes — has sold for a discounted sum that’s only a fraction of the original asking price.
The mansion at 708 Riverview Road in Rexford was once the pride and joy of disgraced insurance magnate Albert Lawrence, who built the home nearly 20 years ago and modeled it after the campus center at Cornell University.
In November, the mega-home was purchased for $1.87 million — far less than the $12.9 million asking price of two years ago and dramatically beneath the $30 million that an Albany-based hotelier sought for the property before he died in a plane crash.
The purchase price seems like a steal. After all, the home sits on 12 acres along the Mohawk River. It has Scandinavian marble flooring once valued at $3.5 million. The mansion also has 34 rooms, including 10 bathrooms; a five-story glass elevator; eight fountains; and underground parking for 20 cars.
To some, the house is a monument to greed and materialism. To Lawrence, the house was a monument to his financial success and to his alma mater. (Llenroc is Cornell spelled backward.)
But the man who headed Lawrence Group Inc., a Schenectady-based stable of insurers and underwriters, filed for bankruptcy protection in 1997. He lost his mansion to foreclosure that same year, but the mortgage holder allowed Lawrence and his wife Barbara to continue living in the home until its sale.
In 2000, Lawrence was sentenced to 20 years in prison for embezzlement, fraud and tax evasion in connection with the collapse of his business. He died in jail in 2002.
Joseph Costello, a commodities trader, and his wife bought the house in 2003 for $1.4 million, well below its $3.2 million assessed value.
Their real estate agent said the Costellos had become “empty nesters” and no longer needed a home so large, so they put Llenroc back on the market in 2007 for $12.9 million — on the eve of a real estate slump that made expensive real estate exceedingly difficult to sell.
Experienced Capital Region real estate agents rolled their eyes at the asking price.
“That seems like that was just fantasyland,” Scott Varley, a Saratoga Springs agent, said Friday.
But that didn’t stop Mathai Kolath George, a hotelier also known as George Kolath, from asking $30 million for the property earlier this year. George died in June, when the plan that carried him hurtled off a Mohawk Valley Airport runway and landed in the Mohawk River. His 11-year-old son also died in the crash.
It is unclear whether Kolath ever lived at Llenroc, but he marketed the property as the Kolath Estate and it seems he was planning to tak
e ownership of the property at the time of his death.
A cancellation of a contract of sale between Costello and Kolath is on record with the Saratoga County Clerk. In early November, a deed was filed marking the sale of the property from Costello to an entity called Power Angels LLC.
Power Angels listed its address as an Albany post office box, but no other information about the buyer was available Friday.
It is unclear whether Power Angels plans to use Llenroc as a single-family home, although Clifton Park Town Supervisor Philip Barrett said Friday that no plans have been filed with the town to change the mansion’s use.
Real estate agents say the $1.9 million purchase price seems low, considering the size of the estate and that less opulent properties can be bought for the same amount.
Bob Blackman, who was involved in trying to sell the property after the Lawrence foreclosure, noted that Llenroc’s view of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, across the river in Niskayuna, is a minus for some buyers.
And many potential buyers, he said, are turned off by the property’s more ostentatious and maintenance-intensive features, such as the indoor pool.
“You couldn’t rebuild it today for that price,” said Blackman, a vice president at RealtyUSA in Clifton Park. “But at the same token, all the amenities aren’t necessary things that people want.”
Some of you will also remember the recent Scotia plane crash where the occupants died. Well one of the occupants was the owner of this place and the other was his son.
http://shift518.gom-host.com/showthread.php?t=10235
Edit: Bingo found pics.
If a home was rumored to cost $32.5 million to build what should it sell for? The Llenroc Estate, which went on sale in Saratoga County in upstate New York this week is said to have cost that much when it was created by Albert Lawrence in 1992. The castle-like home sits on 12 acres on the Mohawk River. Lawrence, a devoted Cornell alum, modeled his home after the campus center. What is Llenroc? It’s Cornell spelled backwards. The five-bedroom home is made from Llenroc stone (the same stone used to create the Llenroc dorm at Cornell). As befits a modern castle there are all sorts of unique details such as Scandanavian marble flooring, hand-painted Portuguese tiles, a dining room with a gilded coffered ceiling and a five-floor glass elevator. Particularly eccentric touches include the sailboat-shaped indoor pool with separate hot tub, a four-story solarium, a mermaid bar with see-through views of the pool and dancing fountains.
