What a Gas! Texas Mogul Streams $4.3 M. to Moby and Pals for Stuy Square Spread

There are certain things about Moby—his nonthreatening electronic music, his bald and bespectacled whiteness, his cutely named old tea shop on Rivington Street, his pro-vegan, pro-Tibet, pro-environment advocacy work—that makes one think he doesn’t take kindly to Houston oil or gas moguls.

The kind of person who, in interviews, produces sentences like “The primary cause of deforestation in the third world is to create grazing land for cattle. Then there’s the amount of waste that is produced by factory farming” is also the kind of person who wouldn’t want to sell a massive East Village sprawl with 23-foot-high stenciled ceilings to an NFL co-owner and natural gas options broker.

But New York real estate is a funny thing.

According to city records, gas broker Javier Loya and his interior designer wife, Lucinda, have bought a four-floor, six-room, three-bedroom unit at Landmark 17, a Victorian Gothic building on Stuyvesant Square that once housed a convent and rehab facility. The couple paid $4.35 million to a group of investors that included Moby.

Their new place includes a room that was originally the convent’s chapel. Texans apparently love buying up New York’s holiest residential spaces; last year, The Observer reported that Dallas computing and oil magnate Sam Wyly spent $3.05 million on an apartment in a converted Washington Square church.

Mr. Loya is not only the president and CEO of CHOICE! Energy (“one of the first institutional natural gas brokerage houses following industry wide deregulation,” its Web site says), but a co-owner of the Houston Texans. He made the news earlier this year when the NFL was reportedly looking into allegations that Mr. Loya is a high-stakes gambler.

The listing with Elliman’s Tamir Shemesh and Ami Rothschild says the place has 3,486 square feet of interior space (plus a tad more outdoors), and also includes the curious phrase “Donated by Eric Clapton in 1992.” Mr. Shemesh explained this week that Mr. Clapton had paid to have the chapel room in Mr. Loya’s new apartment refurbished when the building was a Hazelden rehabilitation facility.

The deal, filed in city records late last week, closed in July.

mabelson@observer.com