House of Cassini: See the Gilded Age mansion about to sell for just $34.5 million after years of bankruptcy turmoil

For all its serene style, the story of the House of Cassini begins and ends with a violent forced entry.

Its first owner, a millionaire broker and banker, was bludgeoned and robbed by armed burglars who broke in soon after his Beaux-Arts beauty was built.

A century later, its most recent owner — Cassini's 85-year-old sister-in-law, Peggy Nestor — would be physically pulled from the home by federal Marshals, who busted open the brass front door to enforce a bankruptcy judge's 2024 eviction order.

"They put me on the street in a robe!" Cassini's widow, Marianne Cassini, also in her 80s, told the judge of being evicted along with her sister and their niece.

For the past decade, the two sisters have battled in state and federal court to keep the home they purchased together in 1984, 12 years after Marianne's secret marriage to the designer (the union was revealed only after Cassini's death). Nestor, Cassini's sister-in-law, took sole title in 2016, according to court papers.

The sisters continue to wage a tandem, last-ditch battle against the eviction and the bankruptcy judge's final 2024 order that the home be sold to satisfy more than $30 million of Nestor's mortgage debts and liens.

In the two years since the eviction, the home's sale price plummeted — from $65 million under Sotheby's International Realty, to $39.5 million under its latest listing by Brown Harris Stevens, to the current $34.5 million purchase agreement.

Before diving into the home's tumultuous history and tranquil interior, it's worth pausing at the front door, where the original vestibule still greets visiting guests.

Built of curving marble, brass, and glass, the unusual structure served as an airlock — a buffer against the cold in a home warmed by 14 fireplaces.

In the summer, the vestibule helps keep in the central air conditioning, a much later and controversial addition.

In 2006, next-door-neighbor Neil Diamond sued Nestor, saying her new rooftop cooling unit illegally added 13 feet to the height of her building.

The "Sweet Caroline" and "Song Sung Blue" singer sought $2 million in damages for the obstruction of views from his terrace. They settled for an undisclosed sum in 2010.

The home's story begins with Wall Street stockbroker Elias Asiel, who purchased 15 East 63rd Street in 1885 as a new Victorian brownstone.

Asiel had grander plans. He hired one of the top architects of the day, John H. Duncan, to reimagine the 25-foot-wide property as a limestone-clad mansion to rival any on the nearby stretch of Fifth Avenue known as "Millionaire's Row."

Duncan had just finished the General Grant National Memorial — a mausoleum for the 17th president and Civil War hero, overlooking the Hudson River — when he went to work for Asiel in 1897.

Entering Duncan's design tour-de-force, guests can cross a 46-foot, marble-tiled gallery to an oval-shaped dining room, or climb a sweeping, curved staircase to the parlor level.

The dining room, enclosed by pocket doors, mirrors, and fading, carved wood paneling, played a role in a 1906 break-in that left Asiel bloodied and bereft of his silverware.

The pre-dawn, gunpoint robbery was front-page news. "Elias Asiel Pounded Insensible with Brass Knuckles in Bedroom," blared a headline in the evening edition of the Sun.

According to accounts in four city newspapers, the two robbers broke into the basement service door with a saw and a diamond glass-cutting blade.

Awakened upstairs in bed, Asiel was no easy mark.

He got in a good punch or two before being beaten with brass knuckles and bound at the wrists and ankles "with stout pieces of cord."

He also refused to give up the combination to his safe, which contained "a fortune in gems" — heirloom jewelry he would bequeath to his daughter, asleep one floor up.

"Would one of you please wipe the blood out of my eyes?" the trussed broker asked as the pair ransacked his bedroom.

The younger burglar paused to wet a cloth in the adjoining bathroom and gently wiped Asiel's eyes, an act of kindness that later swayed a judge to impose a mere five-year sentence.

The robbers pocketed Asiel's $250 gold watch, 12 of his pearl-and-sapphire scarf pins, and $90 in cash. They then headed back downstairs to the dining room, where they'd left Asiel's silver in a pile to grab on the way out.

The two managed to pack up just three dozen forks and four dozen spoons when they were interrupted. Wriggling free of his ties, Asiel pulled a bedside bell cord to wake the seven sleeping servants, and was shouting for help out the window.

The thieves fled into nearby Central Park, leaving most of the silver on the sideboard. They were caught and convicted some two years later.

The mansion's two most exquisite spaces — a wood-clad library and a bright drawing room — are at either end of the mansion's second level, the "parlor floor," where the ceilings are 17 feet high.

The wood and marble-clad library faces the front of the building, its two tall arching windows overlooking leafy East 63rd Street.

Photos of the library show no bookshelves. But there is reading material, if you're a cherub.

Pairs of the erudite tykes roost in each corner of the elaborately coffered ceiling, holding scrolls enscribed in Latin.

"Malo Esse Quam Videri," reads one, paraphrasing Cicero — "I would rather be than seem."

The second-floor drawing room is a bright sanctuary where sunlight from the terrace floods inside through two French doors and alights mirror to mirror.

A profusion of plasterwork decorates the ceiling and walls, ringing the space in garlands of budding and full-flower blooms.

The effect is like standing inside a wedding cake, under a rose bower, and enclosed by a house of mirrors all at once.

"Elegance upon elegance upon elegance," Louise Beit, the mansion's previous broker, enthused of the drawing room, in a YouTube tour of the home last year.

A spacious gallery connects the second floor's library and drawing room.

"Standing here in the gallery, you can feel how they love lavish entertaining in the Gilded Age," said Beit, of Sotheby's International Realty.

"You can greet your guests at the top of the steps with a string quartet entertaining you from the balcony."

Asiel and his two children — his daughter would marry a Bloomingdale — enjoyed the mansion through the nineteen-teens.

In 1920, a year after his retirement, the broker died at home at age 69, missing the stock market crash by nine years.

The robbery was his most lasting claim to fame. His obituary in The New York Times noted that he "gained high praise from the police for his coolness and bravery in a single-handed battle with two burglars."

City records show that in the '60s and '70s, the home was owned by a California development company and had been divided into seven rent-stabilized apartments.

In 1984, it was purchased by Nestor and Marianne Cassini, the designer's secret wife.

The sisters spent the next 30 years taking out mortgages, renovating, evicting the old tenants, and running the designer's businesses — Oleg Cassini, Inc. and Cassini Parfums, Ltd., both in receivership since 2015.

The next owner — named only as "15 East 63rd Street, LLC" in court papers — is now poised to inherit an architectural gem, rich in history and potential.

"It appears that it has been a significant number of years since the townhouse was last comprehensively renovated," Brown Harris Stevens broker Sami Hassoumi said in a court document on Tuesday.

The mystery buyer's architect estimates that fully renovating the home will cost $25 million and take three to four years, Hassoumi said.