Ivana Trump’s townhome that just hit the market for $26.5M was purchased on the heels of a messy divorce and reflects the opulence of Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal’ era
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It’s 1992. Ivana Trump finalizes her tumultuous and very public divorce from Donald Trump that followed two years of finger-pointing and accusations of “fraudulent” prenuptial agreements and slander.
The newly divorcée goes on a press run, speaking to Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey about her split. She even publishes a novel, “For Love Alone,” which Donald Trump’s lawyers would argue is a thinly veiled account of their relationship and violates a gag order that bars her from discussing their marriage.
On the heels of this messy divorce, which came with a hefty settlement worth about $25 million, Ivana Trump also decides to purchase a new home: an 8,725 square-foot townhouse in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for nearly $2.5 million.
That home, situated in Lenox Hill, was just put on the market, a few months after Ivana’s death earlier this July, with an asking price of $26.5 million.
“She was so comfortable there,” her son Eric Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “It was the last possession in the world she would ever have gotten rid of.”
Everything about the home, from its French neoclassical facade to the gold fabric ceiling, harkens back to a bygone era of the couple’s heyday in the 1980s.
Before he was president and announced his third White House run on Tuesday, Donald Trump was molding into his new shell as the real estate tycoon and celebrity businessman. In the 80s, he began to fill the pages of tabloid papers and gossip columns and graced the front cover of TIME magazine in 1989 — all of which gave people an early taste of Trump’s bombastic personality that persisted throughout his presidency.
Trump would also publish his famous memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” in 1987, which peddled the idea of a man of savvy entrepreneurship.
Ivana Trump reaped the rewards of auxiliary fame as well when she was married to Donald Trump. In one account from Vanity Fair, Ivana received so much publicity that she began to hand out press kits with favorable clips about her to interviewers.
Attached to this success — or at least the image of success — was the couple’s show of material wealth, in particular their fixation on gold.
It’s a running motif on all things stamped Trump, from the hotels to the bathroom sinks of Donald Trump’s private jet.
Ivana Trump’s New York City townhome, which public records indicate she purchased through a corporation the year she finalized her divorce, also bled with gold.
Inside, there are gold curtains, moldings, chandeliers, and other fixtures. In one room, gold fabric drapes from the ceiling.
“Ivana has always embodied the Trump brand,” The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote in her review of the Czech-American’s 2017 memoir, “Raising Trump.” “She is keen, in the book, to seem dominant, invulnerable, new-money deluxe.”
There are other lavish displays of wealth that run throughout the five-bedroom, five-bathroom home.
The house is decorated with leopard print, Chinese murals, and, in one room, pink marble, and comes with what Ivana Trump described as a seemingly endless closet.
“I call it Indochine because by the time you get to the end of it, you might as well be in another continent,” she wrote in “Raising Trump,” per the WSJ.
Her ex-husband also shared Ivana’s taste for gold inside the house.
Donald Trump’s apartment in New York similarly comes with gold furnishing and embellishments, according to House & Garden magazine.
Years after their split, the ex-couple’s penchant for gold has endured.
During the Republican Party’s nominating convention in 2016, Trump was flanked by gold columns, along with gold staircases that led up to a gold-outlined lectern. His Mar-a-Lago resort, where Trump announced his 2024 campaign, is also festooned with gold.
Ivana Trump died inside her townhome on July 14. Her funeral was held a about week later at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in the Upper East Side, where pallbearers carried out her coffin — a gold-hued casket.
In his remembrance speech, Eric Trump spoke of Ivana’s fierce nature as a woman and as a mother.
“She ruled the three of us with an iron fist but also a heart of gold,” he said.