Oh, that wily Eloise:

Low ceilings. Columns in the living room. Drainage grates outside the windows.

What sounds like a Lower East Side tenement is actually a $53.5 million pair of Plaza penthouses bought by Russian hedge-fund manager Andrei Vavilov, who says the developer promised him the epitome of luxury and then handed over an “attic-like space.”

In a $31 million suit, Vavilov says the purchase — which would have represented the second-highest amount for a residential sale in New York City history — was the result of a bait-and-switch scam. Unlike The Plaza hotel of the children’s story “Eloise,” where rooms “embodied the height of elegance and sophistication, the same cannot be said of the penthouses,” said lawyer Y. David Scharf, who filed the suit Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court.

“The disparity between what they were supposed to get and what [developer] El-Ad was planning to deliver to them is outrageous.”

Vavilov’s wife, Russian actress Maryana Tsaregradskaya, “burst into tears” when she first saw the finished unit on June 28.