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Elton John fell in love with Atlanta in the early 1990s.
He was just out of rehab at the time, and dating someone from the area, the superstar musician said in a phone interview. In the Georgia city, he found warm people and supportive recovery facilities, such as the Triangle Club, which he attended nearly every day for a period.
“The only people I knew were real people, who had normal jobs,” said the 76-year-old English singer, who is famous for hits such as “I’m Still Standing,” “Rocket Man” and “Candle in the Wind.” “The city adopted me and I adopted it.”
The unit is located at the Park Place on Peachtree condominium complex in Buckhead.
The square footage is about 13,500.
The apartment served as John’s homebase for U.S. tours.
The apartment is configured with four bedrooms.
John created the apartment by combining multiple units in the building.
The spread includes a gym.
Bartolotti Media/Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby's International Realty (6)
After staying in hotels for a while, he rented an apartment at the Park Place on Peachtree condominium complex in Buckhead, which he described as “the Rolls-Royce of condos in Atlanta.” Around 1992 he bought a roughly 2,500-square-foot duplex on the 36th floor of the building. Over the next few decades, he purchased five more apartments in the building, cobbling them together into a roughly 13,500-square-foot apartment that served as his U.S. home base for touring and as a gallery space for his extensive photography collection.
Now, with his farewell tour under his belt, John is putting the four-bedroom condo on the market for $4.995 million.
“I didn’t know what the first apartment that I bought would lead to,” he said. “But it was a wonderful surprise. Everything about Atlanta was a surprise.”
With views of the city’s skyline, the apartment has a gym and a massage room, according to listing agent Chase Mizell of Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty. There is also a formal dining room with an overhead gallery space, a wood-paneled office and lounge area, and a grand salon with floor-to-ceiling windows. The primary suite features an adjoining seating area and a spa-like bathroom clad in onyx. It also includes expansive closets for John’s colorful clothing collection.
The condo comes with nine reserved parking spaces, six private storage units, and five dedicated wine storage units.
During his early days in Atlanta, John said, it quickly became clear that the city was the perfect hub for him while touring the U.S. Flying out of Dekalb-Peachtree Airport, he could be performing in any number of cities around the country and still be back in Atlanta to sleep in his own bed at night.
“After years and years of touring, it was so comforting just to come home instead of staying in a hotel,” he said.
John’s expansion of his Park Place home was fueled in large part by his passion for collecting photography, he said. He started collecting in the 1990s “at an avaricious rate,” he said, and picked up pieces by Man Ray, André Kertész, Berenice Abbott and more. The Atlanta apartment wasn’t just a place to live, he said, but a veritable gallery with wall-to-wall photographs.
“That led to buying God-knows-how-many apartments,” John said. It wasn’t clear how much he paid for all the apartments over the years.
The collection is so impressive that museum representatives have asked to visit, he said; it took hours to see all the pieces.
A longtime friend of the Versace family, John decorated the apartment with elaborate Versace upholstery. The condo also contained a piano as well as John’s collections of blown glass, books, antiques and antiquities, he said. When he traveled to South America or Mexico, he would bring back religious artifacts to display there.
“I’m afraid I’m not a minimalist,” John said. “It was a bit of a nightmare to clean and a bit of a nightmare to know where everything was. But I’ve got one of those brains where if something’s been moved, I know exactly where it’s been moved to. And I put it back in the right place.”
Now that John is done touring, he said, he no longer needs a touring base in the U.S. He and his husband, David Furnish, who have two sons, live primarily in England in the town of Windsor, just west of London, where they own a centuries-old estate. They also have a home in Nice, France, he said.
The singer said he would dearly miss Atlanta, where he has made many friends. An Atlanta Braves fan, he said he checks the baseball scores when he wakes up in the morning and was delighted to see they had recently clinched the National League East title.
John’s furniture has been removed from the apartment, which has been staged for sale. His photography collection has mostly been relocated back to England, he said, but he doesn’t know yet what he’ll do with the furniture.
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Mizell said the Park Place building, built in the 1980s and with about 250 apartments, is among the most prestigious in Atlanta. There are about 12 active listings in the building, priced between about $850,000 and $4 million, Zillow shows. The local market saw “unprecedented price appreciation across all segments” over the past few years, but has slowed more recently because of rising interest rates, he said.
Write to Katherine Clarke at Katherine.Clarke@wsj.com