{"id":33098,"date":"2025-11-08T14:46:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T14:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/33098\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T14:46:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T14:46:17","slug":"tory-burch-sues-over-the-sale-of-the-pierre-hotel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/33098\/","title":{"rendered":"Tory Burch Sues Over the Sale of the Pierre Hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Things are getting tense at the Pierre Hotel. In a suit filed Wednesday<\/a> by designer Tory Burch and a few other wealthy residents, a contentious and, per the complaint, secretive deal to sell the building and evict them has begun. \u201cThe sale process is underway,\u201d a source close to the situation tells me.<\/p>\n

To catch you up: The Pierre is a storied hotel on the Upper East Side with co-op residences \u2014\u00a0and they are fancy (the building\u2019s neo-Georgian design was inspired by the Palace of Versailles, and the residents enjoy the same perks as hotel guests, including daily housekeeping and room service and other amenities). Plenty of rich and famous people have kept apartments there, among them Disney\u2019s Michael Eisner and Paul Simon\u2019s son, Harper. So this is not your usual story of a building being sold out from under its residents\u2019 noses; rather, it\u2019s that but for people who can afford tens of thousands of dollars in monthly maintenance fees alone.<\/p>\n

The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, asks a judge to force the co-op\u2019s board of directors to turn over its books and records. And the details are juicy: At a September 17 shareholder meeting, the suit alleges, the board revealed it had a few days earlier\u00a0signed a term sheet for a $2 billion sale with an LLC believed to be owned by an affiliate of the Khashoggi family. Per the suit, the term sheet stated that the building would become part of the Dorchester Collection, a luxury-hotel group owned by Brunei, and that the residents would have to leave their apartments within a year after the sale\u2019s completion or else \u201cforfeit their share of the proceeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more: According to the suit, the board not only \u201cadmitted that it did not know who the Purchaser was\u201d or whether it actually could finance the purchase, but it also, the residents allege, rebuffed a competing offer from Taj Hotels, which has operated the building since 2005. The suit goes on to claim that the Indian luxury-hotel chain offered \u201csubstantial\u201d building renovations and, importantly, allowed residents to remain in their homes. \u201cThe Board has refused to provide the most basic information about the mystery buyer and the status of negotiations, declining to even provide a copy of an exclusivity agreement it signed with the proposed buyer or confirm when that agreement was signed,\u201d per the suit. \u201cThis course of conduct is fundamentally at odds with Board members\u2019 fiduciary obligations.\u201d (Since the shareholder meeting, the board has insisted the term sheet is, in fact, \u201cnon-binding and subject to shareholder approval,\u201d per the suit.)<\/p>\n

So why is the Pierre for sale? According to the New York Times, the hotel apparently isn\u2019t in the best shape<\/a>; by 2023, \u201cits stately carpets were fraying, the elevators were breaking down, and the front desk often stood empty.\u201d (One resident reportedly had a conniption when she couldn\u2019t get change for a $100 bill at the front desk.) According to the paper, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump\u2019s Commerce secretary who owns the co-op\u2019s penthouse, played a significant role in swaying the board to sell. He reportedly urged the board to hire a new manager, and it wound up tapping the real-estate firm Newmark Group \u2014 Lutnick was its CEO at the time \u2014 for guidance to help improve the property before eventually pivoting to selling the hotel.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been quite a fight ever since. The board, per the suit, may \u201chope that by keeping a tight lid on the sale process, they can ram a sale through by presenting it as a fait accompli to shareholders.\u201d Not on Tory Burch\u2019s watch.<\/p>\n

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Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Things are getting tense at the Pierre Hotel. In a suit filed Wednesday by designer Tory Burch and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[810,2850,75,84,83,9,24,63,9842,19131,461,466],"class_list":["post-33098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-hotels","tag-lawsuits","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-luxury-market","tag-the-pierre","tag-the-real-estate","tag-upper-east-side"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}