Buy High, Sell Higher

Editors' Note Appended

JANNA BULLOCK sat prettily on a cream-colored sofa in the cream-colored living room of her penthouse apartment on East 87th Street (which is quietly on the market for .5 million) and tried to embark on a personal history. But there were interruptions.

The frame around the Warhol in the hallway seemed to be broken, should it be fixed? a workman asked. Ms. Bullock's publicist, R. Couri Hay, was struggling with the freezer door of the Sub-Zero, trying to replenish the ice in his Diet Coke. How did it open? The two BlackBerrys on the cushion beside her began to buzz and trill; one played Bach.

The Russian-born Ms. Bullock - now one of a few developers working in the highest end of Upper East Side real estate - had been describing her first job in New York, as a 24-year-old nanny to an Orthodox Jewish man with seven children on Kings Highway in Brooklyn whose wife was in a mental institution.

She halted her narrative, thumbed one BlackBerry, spoke Russian into the other, explained the freezer's habits to Mr. Hay, dispatched the workman with a list of art that needed repair, including the Warhol, and began again.

"I had nothing to do in Russia," she was saying. "It was such an awful time. We couldn't buy soap, we couldn't buy food, everything was vouchers. I had so much energy. I had to get out." She graduated from Leningrad State University, she said, taught Dostoyevsky to high school students ("Janna is very intellectual," Mr. Hay said pointedly), married "the wrong guy," had a daughter, Zoe, and high-tailed it to New York, leaving Zoe with her mother in Leningrad for two years. "You can imagine that was really hard," she said. "I did want to make sure that my daughter would be raised here."

Ms. Bullock, who said she turned 40 in May, and winced slightly at the thought of it, is now the chief executive of the RIGroup, a company she founded that builds shopping and business centers and gated communities of "updated dachas" in the former Soviet Union, where she spends half her time.

In Manhattan, where she has indeed raised her daughter, she has taken as her hobby, as she put it, the buying, renovating and flipping of choice single-family Upper East Side town houses. (Ms. Bullock said her company's initials stood for Russian Investment Group in Russia and for Renovation Interiors in the United States.)

Hers is a niche market - the burnishing of mansion-size town houses - but it may be the quintessential development project of the new Gilded Age, when so many hedge fund managers want to spread their large families out in the habitats of the last Gilded Age. Certainly a mansion has fewer hassles than a Park Avenue co-op, and more grandeur than a luxury condo.

"Starting about four years ago, it's where some of the smart money has wanted to live," said C. B. Whyte, a senior vice president at Stribling & Associates, who has handled many of Ms. Bullock's properties.

Ms. Bullock is in the top five of "maybe 10 developers," doing what she does on the Upper East Side's gold coast, from the 60s to the 80s, between Park and Fifth Avenues, said George W. van der Ploeg, a senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman. Mr. van der Ploeg analyzes the luxury town house market for private clients, many of whom are competitors of Ms. Bullock's, he said, and none of whom are women.

Her properties tend to have rather exotic histories. In February she bought the hole on East 62nd Street where Dr. Nicholas Bartha blew up his house (and himself) last July in an attempt to keep it from his ex-wife. Ms. Bullock paid .3 million for the site, and plans to build a Modernist-style house with a green roof and an underground pool, designed by Preston T. Phillips, a Bridgehampton, N.Y., architect. It will be her fifth Upper East Side project, and she said she might put it on the market for million or million when it is finished, in one to four years.

A town house on East 67th Street, which she bought for .5 million from three warring siblings that Ms. Whyte called "the madman, the pedophile and the heiress" (one brother was a convicted sex offender living in California), is on the market for million.

The house at 14 East 82nd Street, the site of last spring's Kips Bay Decorator Show House, the decorating world's annual turn in the public eye, which she bought for .2 million, has a million sticker price; the house next door, No. 12, is still a wreck. Ms. Bullock bought that one last year for million from Jocelyn Wildenstein, who has had her share of publicity for another kind of renovation.

Editors' Note: August 15, 2007

An article in the House & Home section on July 26 about Janna Bullock, a renovator and developer of Upper East Side townhouses, reported that one of the owners of a house she had bought on East 67th Street tried to set it on fire on the day of the closing. (Although the owner was not named, the address of the house was given in a caption.)

The sources of this characterization of the owner's actions on closing day did not see what happened themselves, but said two others did. The Times did not ask the owner for his version, or check with those who saw him in the house that day. The owner denies doing anything that could be construed as trying to set the house on fire, and the two eyewitnesses do not contradict him.

The unverified assertion should not have been in the article.