A LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY with ties to car dealership czar Herb Chambers purchased a 5,453-square-foot condominium on the 59th floor of One Dalton Place for nearly $18 million, the latest bold face name connected to the explosion of ultra high-end residential towers in Boston.
One Dalton, a 61-floor hotel and condo tower located in the Back Bay, is the latest step upward in high-rise luxury in Boston. It’s the tallest residential building in the city, and its 165 condos come with equally stratospheric price tags, with units on the top floor reportedly costing as much as $40 million. The actual prices and owners have been dribbling out slowly over the last several months with filings at the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds.
A deed filed on Wednesday indicated a limited liability company called Roadhouse59 paid $17,7547,770 for an unfinished condo shell along with three parking spots and valet parking privileges for a fourth car. The 59th floor is one floor below the penthouse suites, which have more than 7,200 square feet of space.
According to its incorporation paperwork, Roadhouse59 lists as its address the Herb Chambers Cos. headquarters in Somerville and lists as its officers Chambers; James A. Duchesneau, the chief financial officer of the the company; and David J. Rubin, a managing partner at the law firm Hinckley Allen. There was no mortgage listed for the condo.
Chambers is a self-made billionaire who grew up in Dorchester, dropped out of high school, and went on to build one of the biggest and most profitable groups of car dealerships in the country. He revealed earlier this year to the Wall Street Journal that he planned to buy a unit at One Dalton; the newspaper used his purchase to highlight “the newest niche of the ultra-luxury home market: the sub-penthouse.”
According to registry records, Chambers himself has bought and sold units and homes in Boston since the early 1980s, steadily moving up the luxury ladder. Of late, he seems to prefer condos with fancy hotel privileges.
The One Dalton tower, the site of the latest purchase, includes a Four Season Hotel. He still owns a condo at 220 Boylston Street that he purchased for $8,875,000 in September 2016. That property also has a Four Seasons Hotel. In 2016, Chambers transferred a condo at 776 Boylston Street (the home of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel) to a limited liability company for $100; Chambers had purchased that condo for $6.5 million in 2008.
Many of the new owners of units at One Dalton are part of limited liability corporations that conceal the identity of the true owner, but not all do. For example, Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School, sand his wife paid $5.5 million for a condo on the 33d floor. Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw and his wife paid nearly $7.9 million for a condo on the 45th floor. And venture investor Liam Sean Donohue and his wife paid $10 million for a unit on the 49th floor.
