Annie Leibovitz pays $17M for West Village duplex

Annie Leibovitz has been on a selling streak, but switched gears to pick up a West Village condominium.

The celebrity photographer purchased a duplex penthouse at 495 West Street for $16.5 million, according to public records reported by the Wall Street Journal. The seller in the off-market deal was another artist, Helen Marden, who has owned the unit since 1999.

The deal for the 7,400-square-foot unit breaks down to $2,230 per square foot. The nine-unit, 11-story doorman building was developed by Cary Tamarkin’s Tamarkin Co. in 1998.

The building is familiar to Leibovitz; the photographer owned a full-floor unit until October, when she sold it for $8 million, a $1.5 million premium on what she paid for the 3,200-square-foot condo in 2022. Leibovitz used the space as an artist’s studio and listed it last February for $8.5 million.

Elsewhere in Manhattan in late 2024, she sold her duplex at 88 Central Park West for $10.7 million. About 20 percent above the unit’s asking price, the sale still represented a $650,000 discount from what the renowned photographer paid for the unit in 2014.

The deed listed Kim Cooper, a general counsel at Apple, and Gregg Zehr, the creator of the Kindle, as the buyers of the 3,500-square-foot unit.

In December, she sold a 65-acre farm estate in the Bay Area for $8.45 million. The farm in the coastal Marin town of Bolinas was previously a longtime retreat for financier and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival founder Warren Hellman.

She previously sold a three-townhouse spread at the corner of Greenwich and West 11th streets for $28.5 million in 2014.

Leibovitz maintains a 228-acre family home upstate in Rhinebeck.

— Holden Walter-Warner