Ambassador Buys KT McFarland’s 770 Park Spread for $17.5 M.

Some Park Avenue duplexes have simply too much herringbone and acanthus moldings or Juliet balconies and neoclassical staircase banisters to fall into non-conservative hands.

One-time G.O.P. Senate hopeful K.T. McFarland has sold her 13-room apartment at 770 Park to W.L. (Lee) Lyons Brown Jr., a former George W. Bush–appointed ambassador to Austria. He paid $17.5 million.

That’s a $900,000 discount from the latest listing price, and $2.5 million off the original listing price.

The septuagenarian ex-C.E.O of the Kentucky-based conglomerate Brown-Forman—famous for its delectable whiskey, Jack Daniels—will have his own booze cellar in the building, plus a maid’s room three floors down from the sixth-floor duplex. (If he needs more help tidying, there’s also a servant’s room next to his kitchen.)

According to the listing with Mary Rutherford at Brown Harris Stevens, the four bedrooms (each with en suite bathrooms) are upstairs, in the duplex’s domestic domain. The floor below has a 30-foot-long living room, with “dentil or acanthus moldings distinctive to each of the public rooms.”

The Observer last reported on the apartment in March, when it went to contract, though the buyer was unknown. The duplex became tabloid fodder during last year’s campaign for the Republican Senate nomination, when Ms. McFarland reportedly said that the Clinton campaign was spying on her co-op from an apartment across Park Avenue.

Mr. Brown may be equally uncomfortable: 27 of his new neighbors contributed to various Democratic candidates in the 2004 Presidential campaign, for a total of $253,000, but only four people forked over $2,000 each to the Grand Old Party.

Mr. Brown reportedly helped raise $435,000 for Bush senior’s failed 1992 campaign, for which he was eventually rewarded with his ambassadorship from 2001 to 2005. His old address is listed in city records at 1020 Fifth Avenue—almost as ritzy as his new co-op.