Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Apartment

Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Co-op By , an Emmy Award–winning Curbed writer who has reported on New York City for four years Beth Rudin DeWoody has owned at 10 Gracie Square since 1987. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty Images, Google Maps The collector Beth Rudin DeWoody has bought, often on impulse, everything from a Benny Andrews drawing to a miniature poodle. She owns around 10,000 works of art, enough to justify two full-time curators and a private museum in West Palm Beach. She seems to pick up real estate with the same ease, having acquired three homes on adjacent lots on the Intracoastal canal in the early aughts and recently grabbing a duplex in Billy Wilder’s old co-op building in Los Angeles, where she already owned a unit on a lower floor. “It’s hard for me not to buy,” she told Artnet. “Even when I run out of money.” It’s also hard to justify $13,000 a month in maintenance fees for a 5,000-square-foot pied-à-terre in New York when your life is centered in Los Angeles. Hence, perhaps, the decision to list her longtime home on the Upper East Side for the second time since 2018 at the same price: $12 million. A listing shows a 32-foot-long living room stuffed with art and backed by views of the river. Photo: Douglas Elliman Apartment 4G takes up 5,000 square feet on the fourth floor of 10 Gracie Square, a 1929 doorman co-op at the far eastern end of 84th Street seemingly designed for 2026 celebrities ducking the paparazzi. A driveway that cuts beneath the building goes all the way through to 83rd Street and leads straight to three elevator lobbies. The Obamas were once rumored to be moving in, and Brooke Astor did. Gloria Vanderbilt raised a young Anderson Cooper upstairs. DeWoody arrived in 1987, when she had two young children. She hired the architect Alan Wanzenberg, who’d worked for I.M. Pei, to renovate. He typically does so using classic pieces, but DeWoody’s tastes are more eclectic: The Wall Street Journal once compared her Florida compound to a “Tim Burton film come to life” (there are topiaries trimmed to resemble poodles and chess pieces). A listing photo shows figures inspired by African art and a cabinet that seems to date to the 19th-century Gothic revival. DeWoody’s tastes are extremely eclectic; she collected Joe Brainard drawings when she began and made smart bets on the work of Amy Sherald, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Wong. Photo: Douglas Elliman Details: Price: $12 million ($12,778 in monthly maintenance) Specs: Four bedrooms, five bathrooms Extras: Two bedrooms “for staff,” four wood-burning fireplaces, 32-foot-long entrance gallery, river and open city views. Ten-minute walking radius: Carl Schurz Park, Nica Trattoria, the Five Lamps Listed by: Martha Kramer, Mary L. Fitzgibbons, Brown Harris Stevens DeWoody came from a prim Upper East Side world — raised a block away in a building run by her father, the real-estate executive Lew Rudin — and only with her marriage to the artist James DeWoody did she settle downtown, in Tribeca, where she mixed with the art world and discovered a taste for the avant-garde. The Gracie Square apartment is a funny combination of the two, as if a waterfront Miami mansion has been squeezed down into a space with paned windows and herringbone floors. In a 34-foot-long room with little use beyond serving as a show-stopping entryway, those floors are painted a creamy white. The paint extends over the floors of the 32-foot living room, whose windows look east over the river and north over Carl Schurz Park. In that room, there are zebra-print chairs, a grand piano, and a whole lot of odd art: a little geodesic dome over the piano, a tiny gold-plated piece of construction equipment on a mantel, a figure of a woman with coils of Medusa-like black hair. A Charles Lutz Brillo box in a room staged to look a bit like a home office seems to have found use as a side table. There’s so much art that framed pieces overlay the library’s built-ins. A Tony Matelli figure of some ancient goddess balancing slices of honeydew marks one end of the long entryway, where stairs lead up to four bedrooms — two for family and two marked “staff.” When DeWoody listed the apartment in 2018, she told the Journal that she wanted to sell to spend more time in Los Angeles, near her children, the designer Carlton DeWoody and the curator Kyle DeWoody. But the kids have always been bicoastal, and DeWoody may just have decided she could use the cash. In the past, she’s flipped a Matthew Wong painting that “paid for my divorce,” she said. The 2017 sale of her Stanford White home in Southampton for $3.4 million must have helped to cover the renovation of the museum, which opened the same year. Otherwise, “I don’t like to sell,” she told Apollo magazine. “Every once in a while I have to, because I run out of money buying things.” A listing photo shows a Tony Matelli sculpture at the end of a long entryway that leads upstairs to several bedrooms. The doors to the right open to another bedroom, currently furnished as a library. Photo: Douglas Elliman Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her UES Apartment Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.