Inside Toll Brothers' Upper East Side Newbie, The Touraine

The building isn't finished yet, but there's only one unit left for sale at The Touraine, the new Toll Brothers project at 65th Street and Lexington Avenue. So we took our chance to see the building now while we still can, with a trip to the sales office. It does, as is the trend these days, include a model unit, and photog Will Femia's shots are in the gallery above. The building itself, designed by Lucien Lagrange, should be done in January or February of 2013.

Interior designer Stephen Alton did both the building and the building-mimicking sales office, and the place has a European feel to go with the French name. (Which was chosen because "Bob Toll liked it," reps told us.) The freestanding bathtub, for example, is made in France. The grand staircase in the lobby will be hand-painted in silver leaf. Fancy!
The amenities also feel very, well, Upper East Side. There's a fitness center, but there's also a library and a wine lounge, in which each apartment gets storage for 110 bottles. There's a common rooftop terrace, and one of the penthouses has private rooftop space, as well.

That common rooftop terrace should stay relatively quiet, because about half of the buyers are foreigners planning to use their places only as pieds-a-terre. As for how much those (mostly cash) buyers paid, 2BRs started at $2.5 million and 3BRs at $3.5 million, and sales manager Armelle Flood told us everything sold for around ask, because Toll Brothers sees bidding wars as "not very ethical." We didn't think ethics even came into it! The remaining penthouse is asking $19,995,990, Flood told us, "If you know anybody."

Here's its floorplan:

· Official website: The Touraine [thetouraine.com]
· Show Us Your Sales Office archive [Curbed]
· The Touraine coverage [Curbed]