Perfectly Preserved Flashy ’80s Décor in This NYC Apartment

As shown in this listing photo, there are mirrored walls featured throughout the apartment.
Photo: Bizzarro Agency

Apartment 38AB in the Excelsior is a lot. The listing for the three-bed, 4.5-bath at 303 East 57th Street reveals a Reagan-era time capsule: wall-to-wall carpeting the color of a white-sand beach, mirrored walls (and, in the primary bedroom, a mirrored ceiling), and bathrooms with butterscotch-streaked marble and raspberry-blue lighting. The main living room has three exposures looking out on the East River and Manhattan skyline and a ceiling of tessellating yellow cubes, as if it were constructed of pats of butter. It’s a little like a shrine to Gordon Gekko in style and pricing: The sellers are asking $2.5 million.

Matthew Bizzarro of the Bizzarro Agency, who has the listing, did not respond to requests to chat about this perfectly preserved apartment, and a property-records search only enhanced the mystery: The owners are a largely unknown couple, Heinz and Catherine Vollenweider. There’s scant public information about the pair, but the building is far more of a known quantity. Among their neighbors over the years at the 47-story white-brick tower designed by Philip Birnbaum on the outskirts of Sutton Place: a Panamanian ambassador to the United Nations as well as Billy Joel and his then-wife, Christie Brinkley. Rudy Giuliani, after being booted from Gracie Mansion amid his marital troubles, crashed for six months with a Queens car-dealer pal and his partner in the couple’s 44th-floor, 3,000-square-foot apartment. (Which, apparently, later helped sell the unit: “Rudy doesn’t owe me a dime for accommodations because I made up for it in spades,” then-owner Howard Koeppel told the New York Post.)

Did neighbors know much about the Vollenweiders and their distinctive interior tastes? Other residents on the 38th floor tell me that much like other midtown high-rises lining East 57th Street, the Excelsior is a “private” building. “It’s a very secretive apartment,” one neighbor says. Nancy Carlson, who along with her late husband, Kenneth, moved into her apartment on the floor around 1970 tells me that she arrived at “just about the same time” as the Vollenweiders. Catherine “occasionally” invited the couple over for drinks, where the men would be “whispering in the back.” Whatever they were discussing, she adds, “they didn’t want us girls to know anything about it.” As for the couple’s professions or background, Carlson couldn’t say, but she did recall the pair would summer in South America.

The sale of 38AB has been in the works for at least a few months, per the first neighbor: Since around the end of 2024, they recalled seeing movers coming in and out of the home, taking with them paintings and several boxed-up items. (Whether the Vollenweiders plan on parting with what appears to be a marble bed frame in the primary bedroom is unclear.) Whoever buys, however, will need to have the funds to afford the $15,522-a-month in maintenance fees, which covers access to the gym, sauna, and parking, but also the ever-growing rent stemming from the high rise’s land lease. “Every ten years we get assessed on the value of the land,” the neighbor says, “and it goes up.”

As seen in this listing photo, the owner’s taste included wall-to-wall carpet the color of a white-sand beach and marble, marble, marble.
Photo: Bizzarro Agency

As seen in this listing photo, the owner’s taste for mirrors also extends to the kitchen.
Photo: Bizzarro Agency