Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes Sells Village Townhouse for $19.5M

When you’re the cofounder of a tech company as massive and all-encompassing as Facebook, money is no object. So it makes sense that Chris Hughes, who helped found the company with Mark Zuckerberg while they were roommates at Harvard, would own in the very upper echelon of NYC real estate: a coveted Greenwich Village townhouse. The pristine home has just sold — for millions less than he paid for it, as reported by the New York Post.

Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes’s NYC Townhouse

This is truly the cream of the NYC crop: 157 W. 12th St. is a 4-bedroom, 6.5-bath brick townhome that dates back to the 1800s. It’s built in the Greek Revival style and set on a positively dreamy Greenwich Village block, just bordering the West Village. Hughes and his husband, Sean Eldridge, purchased the home back in July of 2015 for $22.3M. They initially listed it in August of last year for $26M, then reduced the price a whopping 17% in February, taking it down to $21.5M. The sale closed on July 9 for $19.5M.

Inside, this special home is every bit as posh as you’d imagine. There are multiple wood-burning fireplaces, which retain their original marble surrounds. There’s a chef’s kitchen with every high-tech bell and whistle anyone could want, including a walk-in pantry and dual dishwashers. There’s a full-floor master suite, there’s a screening room, and yes, obviously there’s a wine-tasting room.

As befitting a tech mogul, the home is also impressively wired. Every room has an iPad-mini touch pad that controls lighting, audio/video, window shades, zoned heating and cooling, and the security system.

The townhouse boasts five different outdoor spaces, all fabulous. But the most interesting one is the main back garden. It contains a unique feature rarely seen in NYC real estate: a separate, freestanding carriage house, sold as part of the property. (It’s like a suburban home with a guest house in back, but, you know, on West 12th Street!) This carriage house is a stunning jewel box, with massive walls of windows and its very own roof garden. And did we mention it’s connected to the main house by an underground tunnel? How cool is that!

The listing was represented by Maria Pashby and Joanna Pashby at Corcoran.

Who Is Chris Hughes?

In 2002, while still an undergrad at Harvard, Hughes was asked by his roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, to help launch the nascent website that would become Facebook. He eventually became the company’s de facto spokesman before leaving in 2007 to work for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In 2012, the year of Facebook’s IPO, Forbes estimated Hughes’s net worth at $700 million.

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