323 East 52nd Street (La Maison)
323 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022
Midtown East
BBL 1013457503 · BIN 1039789
- Year built
- 1899
- Type
- Condominium
- Floors
- 6
- Landmark
- No
- Flip tax
- None appears in the offering plan on file
This block of East 52nd Street reads as Beekman's approach: low, residential, tree-lined, and mostly made of nineteenth-century houses and small prewar apartment buildings rather than towers. La Maison is what happens when one of those houses is taken apart and rebuilt as four homes rather than restored as one.
The house's twentieth century is genuinely unusual. City records show it in private hands until 1979, then held by a management company, then conveyed in 1984, and then in 1995 to the Nihon Ki-in — the Japanese professional Go association — which operated the New York Go Center from the building. The Go Center's physical operation on East 52nd Street closed in 2010, and the Nihon Ki-in sold the house in May 2014 for $4.1 million. The buyer was Private Luxury Collection New York, LLC, which filed the alteration application in December 2014.
What followed was not a renovation in any ordinary sense. The alteration took the building from two dwelling units to four and included both horizontal and vertical enlargement. The offering plan's own building description makes the extent plain: the historic fabric that survives is the brick party walls on the east and west lot lines. The front and rear elevations are new concrete-block enclosures; the floors are new steel framing with concrete. Temporary certificates of occupancy issued across 2019, the condominium subdivision was filed in April 2020, and the four units closed one at a time between September 2020 and September 2024.
That four-year sellout, on four units, is the single most useful fact about the building for a buyer. It is not a distress signal — a four-unit townhouse conversion sells on a different clock than a tower, and the two units with the most outdoor space were the last to convey — but it does mean the sponsor was the controlling voice in the condominium for its entire early life, and that the building has almost no independent operating history to inspect.
Architecture and unit composition
Twenty feet of frontage and just over a hundred feet of depth on an R8B lot produces a specific kind of home: full-floor, front-to-back, with light at two ends and none on the sides. La Maison uses that geometry the way townhouse conversions generally do — the value is concentrated at the bottom and the top, where outdoor space is possible, and the middle floors are simpler floor-throughs.
Brokerage and listing records describe the four homes as a three-bedroom triplex maisonette at the base with its own entry and garden-level outdoor space; two floor-through residences on the middle floors; and a four-bedroom duplex penthouse with a private roof deck. Every residence carries private outdoor space, and every residence carries the exclusive right to one storage bin under license from the condominium. The building is wired as a smart building with a security system and virtual doorman rather than staffed.
Because the structure behind the street wall is new, the building does not carry the mechanical liabilities a 1899 house normally carries — no century-old risers, no ungoverned party-wall settlement, no legacy heating plant. The trade-off is that a buyer is underwriting a young building's construction quality rather than an old building's known behaviour, and the sponsor's construction warranty period is now well past.
Building operations
Four units, one elevator, no staff. Common charges in a building this size fund insurance, the elevator contract, water and sewer, façade and roof reserves, and very little else. There is no doorman payroll to absorb, which keeps monthlies low, and no operating cushion, which means anything unbudgeted lands as an assessment across four owners.
Governance is where a buyer should spend diligence time. With four units, board control is a matter of two votes, and the plan on file gave the sponsor structural priority for a decade from the first closing — including a right of first refusal over sales and leases and a consent right over the board's own exercise of that right. Confirm in writing where that stands now that all four units have conveyed.
Local Law 97
This building is below the 25,000 sq ft threshold at which LL97 emissions caps apply. No regulatory capital pressure from this law specifically, current or 2030.
See full Local Law 97 analysis →Recent sales
La Maison prices as boutique full-floor product in a corridor whose default inventory is postwar and prewar cooperative apartments in larger buildings. It competes less with the East 50s co-op stock than with the small condominium conversions scattered through Turtle Bay and Beekman, where buyers are paying for outdoor space, condominium flexibility and a low-density address rather than for services.
The condominium structure is the pricing engine here. There is no board package, no purchaser approval, no owner-occupancy requirement, and no restriction on LLC, trust or foreign purchase — which in the East 50s, where much of the competing inventory is cooperative and closely governed, is worth a real premium to a certain buyer. Against that, the building has thin internal comparable evidence, an unusual right-of-first-refusal structure, and a four-owner cost base that offers no protection against a bad capital year. Index any market comparison to the last complete year; the partial current year in a four-unit building is not a data set.
Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.
Recent closings at this building, curated by The Roebling Team research desk. Prices are the transfer amounts recorded with the NYC Department of Finance; apartment-level detail is checked against the building’s own file in The Roebling Research Library before publishing.
| Date | Unit | Apartment | Price | PPSF | vs. Ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 6, 2024 | PH | 4 BR · 3.5 BA · 2,370 sf | $3,900,000 | $1,646/sf | -2.5% |
| Aug 4, 2023 | MAIS | 3 BR · 3.5 BA · 2,728 sf | $3,818,437 | $1,400/sf | -0.8% |
| Apr 15, 2022 | 3 | 2 BR · 2 BA · 1,185 sf | $1,731,025 | $1,461/sf | -8.7% |
| Sep 16, 2020 | 2Sponsor Sale | 2 BR · 2 BA · 1,185 sf | $1,600,000 | $1,350/sf | -12.3% |
| May 30, 2014 | —Sponsor Sale | 4,160 sf | $4,100,000 | $986/sf | -14.6% |
Market read. Most recent trades (2024) cleared a median $1,646/sf across 1 sale. Median listing discount 8.7% from the last ask — a recurring negotiation gap worth pricing into any offer or listing strategy.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-01345-7503) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price; square footage from recorded condo declarations and offering plans.
What to know if you’re buying
Get the right of first refusal answered in writing before you sign. The offering plan on file gives the sponsor a right over sales and leases running to the later of sellout or ten years from the first closing, and subordinates the board's own right to the sponsor's consent in that window. All four units have conveyed. Whether that terminates the right, and what notice a seller must give, is the single most consequential question in this building.
Ask for the last two years of financials and the reserve balance. Four units, one elevator, a young building, a full façade to maintain. There is no scale here to smooth a capital event.
Do not treat PLUTO's 1899 as the building's age. The party walls are from 1899; almost everything else dates to 2015–2019. Inspect it as a recent building, and ask for the closeout documentation and the final certificate of occupancy.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering La Maison, also evaluate:
- 244 East 52nd Street — small East 52nd Street building a block west, on a different tax block; the nearest same-street comparison
- 216 East 52nd Street — boutique East 52nd Street ownership west of Second Avenue
- 345 East 52nd Street — Beekman-adjacent building on the same street, closer to the river
- 450 East 52nd Street — the landmarked Beekman-end cooperative; the prewar alternative at the river end of the block
- 455 East 51st Street — small Beekman-block building one street south
- 335 East 51st Street — comparable low-density Turtle Bay ownership
- 342 East 53rd Street — boutique Turtle Bay building of similar scale
- 321 East 54th Street — small Sutton-adjacent condominium alternative
- 317 East 50th Street — boutique Turtle Bay conversion with a comparable unit count
The neighborhood
For the full corridor — architecture, schools, transit, and pricing across Midtown East — read The Roebling Team Guide to Midtown East.
How to read the facts on this page. Items attributed to an offering plan describe the building as it was offered at that filing — unit mix, square footage, the amenity program as planned. They are not a statement about how the building operates today. Tax and compliance figures are sourced separately to current City records and carry their own dates. House rules, staffing and fee policy can change by board resolution without any public filing: treat every policy line here as a starting point for diligence and confirm it with the managing agent.
Considering a move at La Maison?
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