Kermit and Big Bird Slept Here

An Upper East Side townhouse that was home to Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Big Bird is going on the market for around $28 million.

 

Edgar Bronfman Jr., head of Warner Music Group and an heir to the Seagram liquor fortune, is the current owner of the neo-Georgian house on East 69th Street. He is putting it on the market because he is spending most of his time in London, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

But it's a former owner, Muppets creator Jim Henson, who is most closely associated with the property. Mr. Henson bought the townhouse in 1977 for $600,000 from the New York State Pharmaceutical Association, and for several years it served as headquarters for Henson Associates.

 

During that time, the house was known as the Muppet Workshop, where a group of designers created the Muppet characters. Office employees often gave tours of the building. A favorite stop was the lobby, which featured a large mural of the entire Muppet cast from the mid-1980s.

 

Thirteen years after Mr. Henson died, the estate put the townhouse up for sale in 2003. It was bought for $12.4 million in 2005 by Brian Brille, a Bank of America executive, and his wife. Three years later, the couple put the townhouse back on the market, where it was picked up for $28.5 million by Mr. Bronfman.

 

The former chief executive of Seagram and vice-chairman of Vivendi Universal took over the gutted, 40-foot-wide townhouse around the same time he sold another property on East 64th Street. He initially had a three-year renovation plan for the 69th Street house but changed his mind after relocating to London, according to a person familiar with the matter. He's been renting an apartment on the Upper East Side when staying in New York.

 

He is preparing to list the townhouse with Brown Harris Stevens and Corcoran at a time when sales of elite townhouse properties are showing renewed vigor after falling hard during the downturn.

 

The townhouse was completed in 1929 for Beekman Winthrop, a former governor of Puerto Rico. It was acquired in 1951 by the Pharmaceutical Association, which converted it to lecture rooms and offices.

 

Mr. Henson converted it for personal use and a workshop. The 12,000-square-foot building has the original red brick facade, while the second-floor windows have keystones and iron guardrails.

 

The East 69th Street listing is Mr. Bronfman's first New York real-estate transaction since the downturn. But he is no stranger to the market. In recent years he has been involved with a number of the city's most expensive sales.

 

In 2007, he sold the nearby East 64th Street townhouse to Russian oil mogul Len Blavatnik for $50 million, or about 10 times what Mr. Bronfman had paid for it a decade earlier. That trailed only the $53 million that private-equity heavyweight J. Christopher Flowers paid for an East 75th Street townhouse in 2006 for Manhattan's largest residential sale ever.

 

In 2008, he purchased and sold shortly afterwards a co-op apartment at 1040 Fifth Ave., the building where Jackie Kennedy Onassis once lived. Mr. Bronfman also bought and sold a 10-room duplex at the Carhart Mansion on East 95th Street.