Heated Battle: Ralph Lauren Wins Bidding War, Agrees to $132M Deal for SOHO Bldg

Ralph Lauren has paid a hefty $132 million to buy the condominium building in SoHo store where it has been a renter since 2010, edging out a competing offer from the fashion giant LMVH. Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a well-heeled Swiss-American financier and arts investor that bought 109 Prince St. for a $3 million in 1991, made the sale.

According to the Commercial Observer, which reported on the mammoth April 16 sale and has dubbed it the end of a “bidding war,” LMVH, which owns luxury brands in fashion and liquor, had hoped to relocate the Tiffany & Co. location on Greene St. to the building. It is unclear how much they offered in their losing bid. LMVH has also apparently failed to lease two other storefronts on the same street over the past year, which are now occupied by Ferrari & Apple, respectively.

On Ralph Lauren’s end, the sale was handled by Lisa Parmelee, the company’s chief financial officer for North America. Lehmann signed his end of the bargain himself. Ralph Lauren, one of the most famous American luxury clothing brands, is known for its “Polo” line and affiliated preppy image. Ralph Lauren, the 85 year-old Bronx native who founded the company in 1967, remains its chief creative officer & executive chairman after stepping down in 2015.

After initially buying the five-story building, which once housed both silk merchants and chemical merchants, Lehmann rented it out to artists as a “live-work” building until 1997. The three lower floors were for commercial use, while the three top floors were residential.

This is fitting, given Lehmann’s extensive background as an arts collector; according to a 2006 profile by the blog Art Observed, he owned “early works” from famous contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney. In fact, his wife co-founded the prominent gallery Lehmann Maupin, which currently has multiple open locations ranging from W. 24th St. to London.

”One of the problems artists today are going to face is that life, in general, is much longer than it used to be. You don’t have artists dying of tuberculosis or alcoholism when they are thirty-five or forty and leaving very interesting works – but very limited quantities, because their lives were limited,” he told the blog, when asked about the quality of contemporary art.

Interestingly, Lehmann had filed a fascinating suit against a contemporary gallery called Project Worldwide Inc. not long before that interview. New York magazine called the legal battle the “first lawsuit ever to come to court over a collector’s thwarted access to contemporary art.” He argued that he should be given dibs on sales from the gallery, after he had lent the gallery $75,000 in 2001. A judge agreed that Lehmann had been promised a “right of first refusal,” awarding him $1.7 million in damages in 2005.

Outside of his art dealings, Lehmann’s private investment work has included “venture capital projects, hotels, and commercial and residential real estate.” This is according to a profile provided by Cibus, an agricultural gene-editing company that lists him on their Board of Directors.

Lehmann is not to be confused with another European business man that shares his same name, who was a professor of international political economy but who passed away in 2017.