David Sedaris and Hugh Hamrick have added a new piece to their Manhattan life: a 2,500-square-foot apartment on the Upper East Side, bought to make room for an art collection that already includes two Picasso paintings. They also bought the penthouse directly above it in 2020, turning the two units into a larger home just a few blocks from Central Park.
The move matters now because Sedaris, 69, has spent the last few years re-centering his life in New York after living in Europe for two decades. He decided in 2019 to buy a home in Manhattan, and the Upper East Side gave him what he wanted most: less chaos, fewer tourists and a place where, as he put it, disruptive noise would not last long. That mattered to a writer who says he works five to six hours every day and has spent years publishing essays regularly in The New Yorker.
The apartment is not just storage for art. It is part of a broader return to the city Sedaris once left behind, and to a neighborhood he liked for its calm. He had lived in an apartment in SoHo in the 1990s, close to Greenwich Village, but the Upper East Side offered a different rhythm. One of the walls in his office holds a study of Franz Kline’s 1950 painting “Chief,” and Sedaris estimated that the full-size work would fetch about $40 million if it were available for sale rather than hanging at the Museum of Modern Art.
That practical need for space sits alongside a more personal one. Sedaris had wanted the Upper East Side because he believed it had no tourists, but he and Hamrick also needed room for the collection itself. Hamrick helped push the purchase along, and Sedaris has said the apartment fits the kind of life he wanted there. He has also described his office as looking like a talk-show backdrop, a room built around the work rather than around showiness.
What remains unknown is the full scope of what the couple has assembled behind those walls. The two Picasso paintings are the headline objects, but the rest of the collection has not been laid out publicly. For now, the real news is simpler: Sedaris and Hamrick did not just buy another Manhattan address. They bought space for the art they already had, and then bought more space above it when the pandemic changed what home needed to be.
