Real Housewife Sonja Morgan Auctions Her Townhouse

“During the hedge-fund times, I was serving $500 bottles of wine from the basement and the hedge funders were coming over here, drinking with Shakira,” Sonja Morgan tells me as she poses next to her koi pond, sticking a tanned leg out of her red gown. She’s referring to the nine or so years in the early 2000s, when she still shared her Upper East Side townhouse with her ex-husband, a great-grandson of J.P. Morgan. Then there were the “gay parties” she threw after she became a Real Housewife in 2010. “I’m embarrassed to say who else was there, they’re so famous,” she says, though before our afternoon together is over, she will have named Fergie, Henry Kissinger, and the Churchills as luminaries she has entertained. It was a legendary party palace: There are stories about finding one of the koi fish in the toaster at the end of the night, or the time a certain head of state was stuck in the elevator.

Now the party is over. After 27 years in the five-story, six-bathroom Gilded Age townhouse at 162 East 63rd Street, Morgan is leaving. A sign affixed to the fence out front reads “LUXURY PROPERTY AUCTION.” Starting bid: $1.75 million. When I arrived, most of the furniture was packed up, a few stray boxes of designer shoes and false eyelashes piled up among bubble-wrapped antique mirrors and glassware. (Morgan’s intern, a 22-year-old in a denim strapless jumpsuit named Paige, let me in.) Morgan’s gold heels, when she arrived for our tour, echoed on the tiles of the solarium. Despite the bargain price tag, Morgan was good humored about it all. “I told my Uber driver the other day — he was into crypto, like everyone. I said, ‘You, too, can live here!’”

Morgan, 60, is a skilled self-marketer. She arrived in New York from Albany in 1981 to go to FIT and turned a gig manning reservations at San Pietro’s on 54th into a bit of “It” girl status. By 1993, she was in the Daily News as a “tall, tan, blue-eyed blond” dating John McEnroe, Prince Albert, and Eric Clapton. She called her customers, Wall Street tycoons including Ron Perelman, Carl Icahn, and Donald Trump, “clients,” and when she moved on (after a society magazine profile called “Bella Sonja, Queen of the Power Lunch”), she met another power player: John Adams Morgan, 33 years her senior but with a youthful spirit and great legs. He proposed in 1997, his fourth time, and though they mostly lived on Caritas, a private island in the Long Island Sound technically located in Stamford, they bought the townhouse the same year, as a pied-à-terre, for a reported $9.1 million. It had previously been owned by an Old Masters gallerist, Pierre Corsini, who kept his art downstairs and lived in the floors above.

“I looked at three houses. I wanted small,” Morgan says of the 4,500 square feet as she opens the door to the home’s elevator, piled high with more boxes. “This house is only 16 feet wide.” The Morgans put $3 million into a renovation, adding a nautical star in the entryway on the ground floor and putting the koi pond in the garden. Upstairs, they redid the kitchen with antique hardware from P.E. Guerin and custom mahogany woodwork. They added silk wallpaper from Gracie Studio. The house’s grandest feature is the massive, gleaming primary bathroom with a huge tub and Murano chandeliers, which Morgan dusts herself. The bedroom has a Juliet balcony overlooking the garden. They put their daughter, Quincy, on the next floor and kept distinguished guests in the apartment up top.

The dining room in the townhouse has hand-painted silk wallpaper from New York’s Gracie Studio.
Photo: Gillian Laub

The fairy tale did not last, but when they divorced in 2007, Morgan kept the townhouse and her husband’s last name. In 2009, she joined the Real Housewives, as a fun, frisky socialite divorcée. She would end up needing the paycheck — by the next year, she was forced to file for personal bankruptcy. She was $19.8 million in debt, as it turned out, after a movie-production deal went belly-up (it was supposed to star John Travolta). “I had a panic attack on Park Avenue,” she remembers.

She first listed the townhouse back in 2008 for $12 million. It went on and off the market for years, rising and falling by a few million, until 2015 when she finally closed her Chapter 11 case — but not after losing other homes in France and Colorado and taking out a $3.3 million mortgage on East 63rd Street. (“I’m proud of that. Do you know how hard it is to get a mortgage during bankruptcy?” she asks.) At that point, Morgan was properly famous on the Housewives, where her financial woes, including a few more busted business deals (a Nigerian soccer team, a chic toaster oven) became part of her story line. The townhouse was her albatross, depicted as both a fallen-socialite flophouse (when fellow stars Luann de Lesseps and Tinsley Mortimer moved in) and as Morgan’s personal Grey Gardens, where she lived among the ghosts of her former life as “Lady Morgan.” In season four, a handyman was seen fishing an iPhone out of a clogged toilet. In season nine, she washed her designer underwear in the bidet. (“Panty soup!,” she said.) For Morgan, at least some of this was shtick: “I was the boozy floozy who’s like, you know, losing her shirt.” Her brand remains a mix of pretension and obscenity: She told me as earnestly about how her four-poster bed was a replica of one that belonged to John Quincy Adams as she described how many lovers she’d had on it.

In 2019, Morgan finally moved out, to a little apartment on Columbus Circle, so she could rent the place. (“I thought it was gonna be like the Place de la Concorde, but it’s very touristy,” she complains.) She says she had an $11.25 million all-cash offer on the townhouse from a very wealthy buyer, but that person (she would only say she was Filipino and wore beautiful hats) balked once the pandemic sent the city into lockdown. So Morgan had to move back in, with no renters to pay the mortgage. She tried selling one more time in 2022, for $8.75 million. No takers.

When Morgan announced in April that she’d be selling her house at auction, through Sotheby’s, it seemed to some like an act of desperation: the Real Housewives of New York has moved onto a new set of women. Morgan was on tour doing improv-comedy shows and charging $99 a pop on Cameo. “It’s a last resort,” theorized Jed Garfield, the Upper East Side broker who represented the seller when the Morgans bought the house back in 1998. He said he thinks Morgan has simply been holding out for too high a price. But he also thinks the place just has problems. “The parking garage” — a 24-hour, brightly lit behemoth next door — “is a negative, and there is a lot of deferred maintenance. It’s a lovely house, but the stuff that’s selling is real estate that is in very good shape, totally renovated.” The pre-auction inspection of Morgan’s home found that the building’s overall condition is “considered to be poorer than average for a house in its age group and of its type.” Plus, “The market isn’t great right now anyway,” Garfield said. Morgan’s old client Ron Perelman has also had trouble selling his Upper East Side townhouse, albeit at the very different price range of $60 million. (Garfield did not mention that his brokerage had the listing for Morgan’s townhouse as recently as April.)

Morgan in the townhouse’s 35-foot garden, in front of the koi pond.
Photo: Gillian Laub

Morgan has answers for all of that. “We’ve all been guilty of keeping the price too high for a house, waiting for that one buyer,” she says. Not renovating kept her taxes low; the parking garage provides security and convenience. “This is a turnkey home,” she insisted. Chrissy Teigen told her she wanted John Legend to buy it for her. Morgan wasn’t, in fact, trying to sell the house for the last 15 years, despite its Streeteasy history — she was actually holding on to it for her daughter to provide stability. Now that Quincy is out of college (summa cum laude, Morgan adds), she is finally ready to let go. She doesn’t want to wait for the market to climb again. “I wanna be free to garden and travel and not have to worry about the house — but I’m not taking nothing,” she said in the kitchen, over vodka sodas, which she mixed with Diet Coke and eventually prune juice (“I haven’t done my Dollar Tree order this week,” she said, poking into the Subzero).

As we sipped our cocktails, Morgan told me the auction was “go or no,” meaning she could pull out if she wanted to, should the bids not be high enough. But by the time I spoke to Sotheby’s the next day, the terms had changed. Based on the offers that had already come in (“We’ve had incredible interest in this property,” Sotheby’s told me), Morgan had decided to say “go.” The townhouse will go to the highest bidder on May 29, when the auction ends, no matter what.

For her next move, Morgan can picture herself gardening in Greenwich, maybe, and she still has a beach house in Florida. Her comedy tour is heading to Atlanta and Nashville. But the one thing she didn’t want anyone to think was that she was leaving the city for good. “I don’t want anyone to think, ‘New York is done and that’s why she’s leaving,’” she said as she got ready to go out, pulling on thigh-high riding boots. “I’ll always be a New Yorker. I just don’t need all this.” She sighed up into the cavernous ceiling. “I just want to get laid, eat, and sleep.”