Get Small! Arty Couple Lindemann and Dayan Buy Slender East Side Townhouse for $5.2 M.

In 2006, monolithic contemporary art collector Adam Lindemann bought Jeff Koons’ 3,500-pound Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) from the dealer Larry Gagosian for a reported $4 million. A year later, cruelly, he sold it back to him for $23.5 million.

It’s probably good that he and his wife, Amalia Dayan, don’t have the nine-foot-tall super-pop effigy anymore, because it almost certainly wouldn’t fit in the weirdly miniscule townhouse they just bought at 64 East 77th Street. According to city records, a holding company in Ms. Dayan’s name (and signed by an associate of Mr. Lindemann’s) paid $5.2 million for the house. Their seller is Georgia Rockefeller Rose.

The 12.5-foot-wide brick-front house was bought for Ms. Dayan’s private art dealership, which apparently won’t be hurt by architectural skinniness. “The thinness, the size and the scale are actually what attracted her to the building,” said an assistant, Alissa Bennett. “It’s quite special.”

But when the Old Master gallerist Richard Feigen signed a multiyear lease for the house about nine years ago, he never officially moved in. “First of all, it’s tiny, and it’s extremely narrow. I don’t know what got into me when I rented it,” he told The Observer.

He tried to renovate, but eventually sublet the place for less than his rent, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Amalia’s a friend of mine, and Adam! I wished they talked to me,” he said when told that the house had sold to the arty couple. “The scale of the work she’s involved in—it would be very hard to get access there.”

That won’t stop Ms. Dayan, the granddaughter of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. “Of course we’ll be showing works in the building; there are several floors, and there will be a new elevator installed,” her assistant said. “But obviously we’re not going to be able to get in anything of massive size.”

Luckily, the place happens to be across the street from the 101-year-old carriage house that Mr. Lindemann, the son of a billionaire cell-phone magnate, bought in 2004 for $6.75 million. In 2006, he briefly put it back on the market for more than twice that amount, but Ms. Bennett said the family will live there when it’s fully renovated.

How does the family’s interior tastes run? According to a profile in 2005, Hirst, Warhol and Koons were sprinkled around the family’s living room; Takashi Murakami wallpaper lined his daughters’ bedroom; word art in the kitchen spelled “YOU ROTTEN PRICK.”