Articles by Christopher Mason

Auction Set at Kluge Estate in Virginia

Thu, 6 May 2010 07:51:21 -0400

On June 8 and 9, Sotheby’s will auction the contents of Albemarle House, the 45-room neo-Georgian country home of Patricia Kluge, the philanthropist and vintner, near Charlottesville, Va. The two-day auction will be held in a ballroom on Mrs. Kluge’s estate, which is down the road from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
Anyone curious to see the opulent interiors, cluttered with Georgian furniture and Old Masters paintings, may drop by the house during the presale exhibition, from May 31 to June 6. A copy of the 620-page catalog, the largest that Sotheby’s has produced, is required for entry. (It can be ordered at sothebys.com for $65.)
The 933 lots range in value from $50 to $70 for a set of seven Majolica dinner plates to $600,000 to $1 million for an 18th-century Chinese automaton clock made by the Guangzhou workshops during the Qing dynasty. Sotheby’s estimates the auction will earn $9.5 million.
The 24,000-square-foot house was designed in 1980 by David Easton, the architect and decorator, for Mrs. Kluge, a former belly dancer and pinup model, and her husband, John Kluge, the founder of Metromedia, whom Forbes ranked as the richest man in the United States, with $5.2 billion, in 1989. When the couple split amicably in 1990, she kept the house and received a financial settlement, said to be the interest on $1 billion. (The New York Times described it as “a divorce made in heaven.”)
After 25 years of entertaining presidents, movie stars and sundry royals in grand style, Mrs. Kluge is ready for a simpler life. “You have to have energy to live like this,” Mrs. Kluge, 61, said of the house, which has 8 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a theater, a disco and a beauty salon. Outside are an orchard, a conservatory, a Gothic-style chapel, stables and a guest cottage. She has listed the 300-acre estate with TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, for $48 million.
Mrs. Kluge and her third husband, William Moses, are moving to a smaller house they’ve built nearby, which she described as “Colonialish, with modern interiors” and fewer possessions. “Life is not about material things,” she said. “I’ve had time with these pieces. It’s time for someone else to enjoy them.”
Information: (212) 606-7000 or sothebys.com/kluge.

At Auction, the Secret Cache of an Icon

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:39:48 -0500

JAMES ZEMAITIS, the director of Sotheby’s 20th-century design department in New York, had been intrigued for years by the floral designer Robert Isabell and his adventurous auction purchases. But when he finally visited the West Village town house that belonged to Mr. Isabell in July, a few days after the designer’s death at 57 from natural causes, he said, he “was simply blown away.”
“I realized I was seeing an internal landscape that Robert had created,” Mr. Zemaitis said, a “permanent version of his ephemeral backdrops and floral installations for parties.”
That landscape — a combination of the lush foliage Mr. Isabell had cultivated throughout the house and the plantlike forms of the rough-hewn metal sideboards and other pieces in his trove of mid-20th-century furniture and sculpture — was one that few of Mr. Isabell’s friends were permitted to see while he was alive.
“Robert’s house was very private,” said Norma Kamali, the clothing designer, who was a friend of the paradoxically reclusive Mr. Isabell, known for orchestrating events like the star-studded funeral of Andy Warhol and the wedding of Caroline Kennedy.
The interiors that Mr. Isabell devised for his own amusement at 16 Minetta Lane — in an aesthetic he jokingly described as “Blade Runner” meets “The Jetsons” — have now been disassembled. But the objects he cherished will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on Dec. 17 (and will be on display there in advance, beginning on Dec. 12).
The sale’s 128 lots include sublime oddities like a tabletop forest of mushroom-shaped lamps from the 1970s (the lot of 10 is expected to fetch $800 to $1,200) and more rarefied treasures like a 1952 pine-and-lacquered-metal bookcase by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé ($60,000 to $80,000). In scale, they range from an imposing 93-inch-tall bar encrusted with enameled steel, designed by Paul Evans in the 1960s ($40,000 to $60,000), to a pair of biomorphic bronze Harry Bertoia sculptures less than four inches high ($2,500 to $3,500).
Donald Kaufman, the color consultant and a friend, said: “Everything he picked was the opposite of what was trendy or expected at the time. It was beyond style.”
Those who were allowed to visit Mr. Isabell’s private Xanadu, and saw the collection in situ, said Cathy Graham, a co-executor of his estate, described the experience as exhilarating. “It was very glamorous and otherworldly,” she said. “Robert was a genius at creating moods and effects that were always unexpected.”
When Mr. Isabell, a native of Duluth, Minn., acquired the property in 1990, though, it was a ramshackle 1930 town house and an old carriage house divided into six apartments.
“It looked like an old frat house,” Mr. Kaufman said.
(Still, it had a colorful pedigree. Mr. Isabell bought it from Swen Swenson, a Broadway dancer known for his show-stopping striptease in the 1962 musical “Little Me,” who used it as a headquarters to raise bail for protesters arrested during the 1969 Stonewall riots. At one point, Mr. Swenson owned it with Dr. Manfred Graf von Linde, born Robert E. Dent, who was found to have fraudulently misrepresented his age, origin, ancestry and sexual orientation in a sensational 1964 lawsuit brought by the aunt of his deceased wife, who was seeking a posthumous annulment of the marriage.)
As soon as Mr. Isabell took possession of the property, he embarked on a dramatic renovation. He gutted the two buildings and joined them with a glass roof, creating a four-story atrium filled with bamboo, orchids and ivy, and added a vertigo-inducing glass bridge connecting his second-story bedroom at the front of the house with his dressing room in the rear building. An oversize showerhead in the atrium allowed him to drench himself in his own private rainforest.
To create a unified backdrop, he poured a luminous resin floor in a shade of pale gray he devised with the help of Mr. Kaufman. “It gave him a balanced, neutral space that he could change and manipulate with great effect and little effort with idiosyncratic furniture and funky ’50s lighting,” Mr. Kaufman said.
Photographs of the 2,800-square-foot space in the Sotheby’s catalog suggest that the most visually arresting room was the stone-floored basement of the carriage house, where Mr. Isabell paired a hulking walnut bar with green-painted doors designed by Phillip Lloyd Powell, a disciple of Paul Evans, and a sleek oak-and-aluminum sideboard by Jean Prouvé. These unlikely companions were surrounded by an array of biomorphic sculptures in phosphorous bronze by Klaus Ihlenfeld, a German artist based in Pennsylvania.
“It was a real man cave, with a lot of heavy metal,” Mr. Zemaitis said.
The eye-catching pièce de résistance in the room was the “Nickel Couch,” a sensuous metal confection by Johnny Swing, a Vermont designer, who spent three months welding thousands of nickels onto a patinated metal frame. (The couch, Lot 52 in Sotheby’s sale, is expected to sell for $15,000 to $20,000.)
Mr. Isabell often experimented with new ways to display his collections, Ms. Kamali said, “He moved things around all the time — you could never expect anything to be in the same spot.”
He also had a passion for high-tech novelties, which may have been inspired by his days as a party planner at Studio 54.
Liz Garvin, a lighting expert who assisted Mr. Isabell for 18 years, helped him install a web of fiber optics, stage lights and designer lamps controlled by a theatrical console, to conjure up infinite mood variations; when he entered a room, a blaze of lights and music would come on automatically. A disco-ready sound system, with 48 speakers, could be deployed to pipe music from the CD player in his bedroom throughout the house.
It was the ultimate party playhouse for an audience of one: its mercurial owner.
Close friends like Ms. Graham recall that Mr. Isabell gave only a couple of parties in the house during the 19 years he owned it. One of them, a memorable fete held on March 4, 1994, celebrated the publication of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” the book by his friend John Berendt. Guests included Cindy Lauper, Wendy Wasserstein and a leading character in the book, a gentleman known as The Lady Chablis.
“Robert’s genius was apparent in every cubic inch,” Mr. Berendt said. “I think people were more excited about the house than my book.”
It was around this time that Mr. Isabell began collecting in earnest, buoyed by the success of his party design business. Before it became fashionable and expensive, he had acquired 1940s furniture by Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand and lamps by Serge Mouille. By the mid-1990s, he was developing a passion for the more robust work of Paul Evans, Harry Bertoia, George Nakashima, Phillip Lloyd Powell and Klaus Ihlenfeld.
“Robert was almost a decade ahead of everyone else,” Mr. Zemaitis said.
When he began collecting heavy, metal-encrusted furniture designed by Paul Evans — buying prodigiously from Secondhand Rose, a downtown antiques store, and bidding successfully when the collection of Shari Lewis, the ventriloquist and puppeteer, was sold at Sollo Rago Modern Auctions in Lambertville, N.J., in 1999 — it was selling for as little as $800 a piece.
By 2006, the landscape had changed. “Sculpture Front,” a hanging sideboard, sold at Sotheby’s that year for $132,000; a similar piece from the same series sold at Sollo Rago in 2008 for $180,000.
Lot 9 in the Isabell sale is a virtually identical piece from that series, but Sotheby’s is playing it safe by attaching an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.
“The design market took a huge hit last year,” Mr. Zemaitis said. “We’ve priced it low because we have a responsibility to the estate to sell everything.”
The principal beneficiary of the sale is the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, a charity for botanical studies founded by Bunny Mellon, the 99-year-old Listerine heiress and philanthropist, who was Mr. Isabell’s closest friend.
The house, which is also being sold, was originally listed at $3.95 million; it was subsequently reduced to $3.45 million and then $2.85 million. Paul Forger, an attorney for Mr. Isabell and an executor of his estate, said that a deal had been reached with a buyer and that contracts had been signed. He declined to disclose the final price.
Last weekend, a melancholy tumble of dead ivy hung from the windows, a sign that the elaborate irrigation system Mr. Isabell installed had been shut down.
For the lucky few privileged to have experienced the magic formula of fresh flowers, light, incense, music, furniture and sculpture that Mr. Isabell created in his private sanctum, the house is a bittersweet memory.
Mr. Berendt remained a close friend, but the party Mr. Isabell gave there in his honor was the first and last time he ventured inside.
“I think the house was just for him,” Mr. Berendt said.

He Said It With Flowers

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:01:20 -0400

ROBERT ISABELL, the shy and mercurial party designer who was found dead in his Greenwich Village town house last week at 57, was for nearly three decades the pre-eminent ringmaster of startling and fantastical events for charity galas, magazine milestones and soirees that marked the rites of passage for some of the wealthiest members of New York society.
“Robert had a gift for making fantasy real, with great taste,” said Bunny Mellon, the reclusive 98-year-old Listerine heiress with whom he forged a close friendship during the last decade of his life.
Whether strewing glitter at Studio 54 in the late ’70s; tossing flowers on the coffin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose funeral he coordinated in 1994; or herding boatloads of V.I.P.’s like Madonna and Henry Kissinger onto Liberty Island for the debut of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine in 1999, Mr. Isabell was the master of a unique brand of stagecraft, creating events that powerfully evoked their era.
Starting out as a teenager behind the counter of Engwalls, a florist in Duluth, Minn., he ultimately forged from the humble craft of flower arranging a mirror of his times, one decade’s wretched excess giving way to restraint and private ceremony as eras pivoted.
“People think of Robert being so extravagant,” said Anne Bass, the Texas philanthropist, who employed him often, adding that he “could always find something appropriate for the occasion.”
“Six weeks after 9-11, we were debating whether we should go ahead with plans for my birthday,” she said. “Robert created the most beautiful, simple party for me with a Shaker theme. It was so restrained, plain and perfect, with fall leaves, wicker baskets and reproduction Shaker candlesticks.”
Mr. Isabell is most closely identified with the period from the mid-1980s through the ’90s, when newly minted billionaires flaunted their spending power with extravagant weddings and birthday parties, giving new meaning to flower power.
For the New York wedding of Alexandra Miller, a daughter of a duty-free tycoon, and Alexandre von Furstenberg, Mr. Isabell erected a vast tent in lower Manhattan and filled it with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of blooms. Valets with white umbrellas greeted guests, who encountered a 40-foot-wide white teahouse, a recreation of a throne room from Imperial China.
For Caroline Kennedy’s wedding to Edwin Schlossberg in 1986 on Cape Cod, he pitched a vast white circular tent and worked half the night to create a fragrant halo of wildflowers that was suspended over a round dance floor.
That much-chronicled occasion established Mr. Isabell as a modern master of audacious but tasteful spectacle. In 1988, he blanketed the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with white tulips for the wedding of Laura S. Steinberg and Jonathan M. Tisch, an event whose bill was reported to have exceeded $3 million.
When Saul Steinberg, the father of the bride, celebrated his 50th birthday the following year, Mr. Isabell used live models to create tableaux vivants depicting old masters’ paintings. The party became a notorious emblem of 1980s excess, but it did nothing to diminish Mr. Isabell’s reputation.
A decade later, he was still at the top of his game, occasionally infuriating clients with his imperious attitude. In her blog encomium of Mr. Isabell in The Daily Beast last week, Tina Brown praised the movable casbah of cushions that Mr. Isabell arranged beneath the Statue of Liberty for revelers to witness a fireworks display over Manhattan to herald the founding of the short-lived Talk magazine.
Ms. Brown, who worked with Mr. Isabell on more than 30 events, recalled in her column that he could be frustratingly elusive: “His silences were very irritating when you were collaborating with him because he never verbally objected to an idea he didn’t like. He just passively aggressively obstructed it. He would also disappear a lot until you vowed you would never, ever deal with him again. You always did, of course, as, over time, most of the Park Avenue hostesses and fundraisers who were his bread and butter realized there was no one who could touch him when it came to creating something wonderful.”
Last week, many of those society clients lamented Mr. Isabell’s death.
“He seemed in great spirits, happy and full of life,” said Jane Lauder, whose July 4 beach party in Wainscott, N.Y., was the last event he organized. “That’s why it seems so shocking and devastating.”
After friends had not heard from Mr. Isabell in several days, the police were summoned to his town house on Minetta Lane on July 8. They broke down a padlocked gate and the front door to gain access and found him in bed. Dr. Brian Saltzman, Mr. Isabell’s friend and personal doctor, arrived at the scene and determined that he had died on July 5 of natural causes, according to Alexander Forger, an attorney for Mr. Isabell and an executor of his estate.
There was no sign of a break-in.
“We don’t suspect foul play,” said Kathy Graham, the other executor, who arrived just after the police. “But I was curious why my dear friend died at 57.” She has requested an autopsy.
Several close friends said that Mr. Isabell had recently been having financial problems in connection with commercial real estate investments he had made in the meatpacking district.
“I asked Robert if he was nervous,” Ms. Graham said. “He said no, it would be fine. He had total faith that everything was going to be O.K.”
With his chiseled features, black hair and blue eyes, Mr. Isabell had retained more than a smidgin of the matinee idol looks of his youth. To the puzzlement of his close friends and colleagues, he gave no indication of ever having a romantic partner.
“He never spoke of having a boyfriend,” said Ms. Graham, one of the Washington Post Grahams and a former colleague who knew Mr. Isabell for 22 years. “If he did, he was very private about it.”
The one person he openly adored was Mrs. Mellon, who designed the Rose Garden at the White House at the behest of Jacqueline Kennedy. The shy party planner from Duluth and the reclusive philanthropist bonded over a passionate love of nature and the decorative arts.
“It was a very beautiful, deep friendship,” Ms. Graham said. “A marriage, almost.”
Mr. Forger said that the two were “in daily communication” until Mr. Isabell’s death.
Mrs. Mellon acknowledged that the 41-year age gap in their friendship was unusual.
“I know everyone thinks it’s odd,” Mrs. Mellon said in a telephone interview, “but we just got along very well. I admired the very quiet way that he did great things but never wanted any publicity. He wasn’t splashy.”
Mr. Isabell will be buried in Upperville, Va., near Mrs. Mellon’s 4,000-acre estate, Oak Spring Farm, in a plot that he selected last year while coordinating the funeral of Mrs. Mellon’s daughter, Eliza Lambert Lloyd.
Mr. Isabell’s intimate friendship with Mrs. Mellon, whose name he dropped with startling regularity, amused some of his friends and clients.
Ms. Bass said that on a trip to New Orleans with Mr. Isabell to scout locations for her daughter’s wedding, “Every afternoon, Robert would always check in with his dear friend Bunny Mellon and report breathlessly on the exact composition of her mint daiquiris.”
Throughout the day, Ms. Bass added: “It was Bunny this, Bunny that. Finally I told him he had to stop because I was succumbing to an inferiority complex. He didn’t pay the slightest attention.”
On the third morning, she recalled, her daughter and fiancé teased Mr. Isabell by announcing the name of the band they had chosen: “Bunny Mellon and the Daiquiris.”

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Brooke Astor and The Baby Monitor Diaries

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:00:29 -0500

When sordid allegations surfaced in July 2006 that Brooke Astor—of all people—had been denied crucial medications and forced, aged 104, to sleep in a ripped nightgown on a filthy couch that reeked of urine, her only son, Anthony Marshall, now 84, became the white-haired poster child for elder abuse.  Since then, loyalists of Marshall and his third wife, Charlene, have floated theories that the couple is a victim of a vicious plot hatched by a disgruntled former employee–Astor’s longtime butler, Chris Ely, whom Marshall fired–and a cabal of powerful New Yorkers interested in controlling assets previously promised by Astor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other cultural institutions.
But the discovery of the Baby Monitor Diaries–a startling trove of 30 journals of alleged abuse, neglect, and cynical manipulation of Brooke Astor during her Alzheimer's-ridden twilight years–does not bode well for the upcoming trial of Marshall and his lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., in January 2009.
I was dazzled from the moment she descended the stairs, in a stylish leather miniskirt, aged 83.
The handwritten diaries, compiled over a four-year period by nurses who perceived mistreatment of Astor at her Park Avenue apartment and at Holly Hill, her country estate, are featured prominently in Mrs. Astor Regrets (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a new book by Meryl Gordon.   Astor repeatedly insisted that nurses leave her alone, Gordon reports, so a baby monitor was installed at Holly Hill that registered every sound from the room where she slept. On one occasion, a nurse overheard a lawyer discussing documents for Astor to bequeath $5 million to her daughter-in-law, Charlene, whom Astor had never liked.   The diaries include harrowing accounts of how Astor, the erstwhile queen of New York philanthropy, was manipulated by her son and his lawyers. One passage describes how Astor was dragged against her will into a meeting on January 12, 2004, to sign a codicil that bequeathed $60 million directly to her son, thus disinheriting charities that she had championed for decades. On another occasion, a night nurse reported, Astor spoke of dreaming “that someone was trying to kill her.”  “Every time I read the diaries I cried,” Gordon says. “She was so frightened, afraid, and depressed.”  The 18-count indictment by the Manhattan district attorney includes charges that Marshall stole two of his mother’s paintings; awarded himself a $2 million commission on the sale of her favorite Childe Hassam painting, which had been promised to the Metropolitan Museum; and coerced his mother into changing her will to his benefit. Morrissey was indicted on charges of conspiracy and forging Brooke Astor’s name to a codicil that altered Astor’s will to further enrich Marshall.  The book suggests that the dynamic between Marshall and his glamorous mother is infinitely more complex than the headlines first trumpeted by the Daily News in 2006.   “I present Tony as less of a villain than others have,” says Gordon, who thinks that some of the incendiary allegations about Marshall’s conduct initially voiced by his estranged son, Philip Marshall, may be somewhat overblown. “I don’t believe she was living in squalor,” Gordon says.

The central thesis of Mrs. Astor Regrets is that its heroine’s miserable first marriage at the age of 17 to Tony Marshall’s father, John Dyden Kuser, a wealthy Princeton graduate whom she met at a prom, adversely affected her relationship with Tony, and that she could never bond with him. After more than a decade, Astor divorced Kuser, whom she described as a philandering and physically abusive alcoholic. She told friends that Kuser broke her jaw when she was six months pregnant with Anthony, possibly because he suspected that he might not be the child’s father. (As a teenager Tony changed his surname to Marshall when Brooke married Buddie Marshall, who showed little interested in the boy.)

When Astor was honored at a reception at the New York Public Library in 2001, she startled the crowd by tearfully announcing, “I married a terrible man,” referring to Kuser.

"She was talking about a marriage that took place in 1919, when she was 17, and there she was, 80 years later, still talking about it,” Gordon says. Annette de la Renta, Astor’s closest friend, was astonished to witness the incident and was unsure how to react. “Mrs. Astor was becoming unglued about it,” Gordon says.  No matter how strained the mother-son relationship might have been, nothing, surely, could excuse the abuses described in her household staff’s diaries, which one of the nurses wrote using easy-to-decipher code names. “Brooke was Princess Polyanna,” Gordon reports, “Tony was Golden Boy or Golden Retriever, Morrisey was Tutor, Charlene was Miss Piggy or Poor Little Rich Girl.”  The scope of the alleged abuses is horrifying to anyone who had the privilege of knowing Astor, a woman of tremendous warmth, wit, and incandescent charm whose conversation was a delicious mixture of gossip and high-minded literary talk, punctuated with a rapt enthusiasm for the cultural institutions she championed.   Ever the coquette, she exuded winsome charm in 2004, at the age of 102, when she attended a lunch party given by Alexis Gregory, the publisher of Vendome Press, for her old friend George Embiricos, a Greek shipping magnate. Elegantly turned out as usual, she wore a hat, gloves, and a tailored Oscar de la Renta suit. Clearly bewildered by the proceedings, she had a beatific smile, delighted that everyone was making a fuss over her. But it was obvious to even old friends that she had no clue who they were. It is sobering to reflect that two months earlier she had signed over $60 million of her fortune to Tony.  I will never forget the first time I met Mrs. Astor, when my first New York boss, George Trescher, a fundraising genius and one of her closest friends, took me for tea at her duplex apartment at 778 Park Avenue to arrange the seating for a gala at Rockefeller University honoring a bevy of Nobel laureates. I was dazzled from the moment she descended the stairs, in a stylish leather miniskirt, aged 83, apologizing for being a few minutes late because she had been working out with her personal trainer. She and George bickered over who should sit where.   “You can’t sit him next to her!” he told Astor. “Don’t you know he’s sleeping with her husband?” She giggled and deferred to George. With an impish grin she confided that President Reagan and Nancy Reagan were coming to her apartment for dinner that evening and she was planning to prevail upon Mrs. Reagan to pull strings to allow her “wonderful new English butler,” a former footman at Buckingham Palace, to obtain a green card. Two years later, after Mrs. Astor hired me to write and perform a wry musical tribute to Rosamond Bernier, the Metropolitan Museum lecturer, for a party in Rosamond’s honor, I called her to ask if she would consider writing a letter in support of my green card application. I was flabbergasted when her chauffeur rang my doorbell an hour later with a handwritten note from Mrs. Astor, full of beneficent hyperbole.   That incident gave me a profound respect for her sense of civic responsibility, and her extraordinary kindness. Countless others who experienced her philanthropic largesse and delectable charm will probably weep, as I did, to read in Mrs. Astor Regrets of how terrified and vulnerable she felt at the end of her life.

For more on Mrs. Astor, read Michael Gross on New York high society and the battle for the Astor fortune.

Christopher Mason, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is the the author of The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal. He is also a prolific writer and performer of musical tributes and satirical songs.

To view this story on The Daily Beast, click here: www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-17/the-baby-monitor-diaries

The Feud and the Fakes

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:29:44 -0400

THERE are no commercial signs to besmirch the limestone facade of Carlton Hobbs’s 51-room mansion on East 93rd Street, but it is from this building, originally the home of the socialite Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt, that Mr. Hobbs has been selling museum-quality antiques at eye-popping prices for the last three years and staking his claim to the top tier of the New York market.
Mr. Hobbs, 51, a reclusive Englishman who favors jeans and baseball caps, has enjoyed a sterling professional reputation since coming to New York. These days, he would seem to have little in common with his 62-year-old brother and former business partner, John Hobbs, a London dealer known for razzle-dazzle salesmanship and, for the last several months, a scandal involving the manufacture and sale of fake antiques.
While John Hobbs’s store has been closed since spring, when The Sunday Times in London and The New York Times published evidence that he was dealing in fakes, the showroom of Carlton Hobbs LLC has remained open by appointment, drawing customers to whom current economic difficulties mean little.
But a 73-page report recently reviewed by The New York Times, and dozens of supporting photographs, suggest that those customers may not always be getting what they pay for. The report appears to show that Carlton Hobbs, like his brother, employed a British furniture restorer named Dennis Buggins to create both outright fakes and radically altered vintage pieces that could be offered for sale as high-quality original antiques. As his brother did, he denies having done so.
The report, marked “without prejudice draft only,” was prepared for Mr. Buggins by an independent antiques appraiser in connection with a lawsuit filed against him by Carlton Hobbs. But in a twist, Rupert Hobbs, Carlton’s nephew and John’s son, got hold of a copy, he said, after his uncle sent it to his father last year. Now Rupert Hobbs has provided it to The New York Times, apparently in an effort to visit some of the pain his father has endured this year upon his uncle Carlton.
The move is the latest chapter in a long and bitter internecine feud, and may prove to be the final one in the careers of two of the most successful antiques dealers of their generation. Beyond that, at a time when an economic downturn is threatening to cripple the antiques market and when other, smaller faking scandals have chipped away at confidence in the trade, evidence of Carlton Hobbs’s selling fakes could cause damage on a wider scale.
There have always been instances of faking in the antiques business, but they seldom get much attention, in part, many experts say, because clients and even competing dealers have little incentive to go public. “Everybody knows this kind of thing goes on,” said Stephen Drucker, the editor in chief of House Beautiful magazine, but “the story never really comes out.”
If it does, and if the incident involves a high-profile dealer like Carlton Hobbs, it can be “very hurtful,” said Robert Couturier, a decorator in New York who has bought pieces from both men.
“It’s not like you have many illusions after 20 years in this business,” Mr. Couturier said. But the thought that Carlton Hobbs might be selling fake antiques is particularly troubling, he said, “because so much of his business was truly based on trust — trust and profound admiration of his taste and sense of discovery.”
“This is so depressing,” Mr. Couturier said after being told about the report. “Really awful. This is why I now think I’m only going to buy contemporary furniture.”
As for the business as a whole, he added: “I think people will turn away from antiques. And serious collectors will be very careful.”
GROWING up in London during the 1950s and 1960s, Carlton and John Hobbs were inducted into the vintage furniture trade by their father, Sid, who ran a King’s Road junk shop called Odds and Hobbs. John worked as a “door knocker,” going from door to door in fashionable neighborhoods and “charming goods out of hungry owners,” as his friend and fellow London dealer Christopher Gibbs put it in a catalog essay for a 2002 auction. In 1973 he opened a showroom in the Furniture Cave, a multiple-dealer site in Chelsea, London, where Carlton joined him a couple of years later.
Over the next several years the brothers upgraded the business from an outlet for midrange European antiques to something much higher end. In 1987 — about the time they retained the services of Mr. Buggins, a restorer based in the Kent countryside, on an exclusive basis — they moved to London’s Pimlico Road, a prime location that hastened their rise into the upper echelons of the trade. “I’ve never seen people come to such meteoric stardom so quickly in the antiques business,” said Edric van Vredenburgh, an antiques dealer who observed the brothers’ swift ascent in the 1980s. Carlton Hobbs Ltd., as their joint venture was called (it was registered under the younger Hobbs’s name for tax reasons), attracted well-heeled international buyers with grand furniture, much of it Russian, presented with theatrical flair.
According to Rupert Hobbs, Carlton, who was shy and studious, clashed frequently with his flamboyant, freewheeling older brother, and the two men split acrimoniously in 1993, when John left to start his own store on Pimlico Road.
“My dad is quite lazy but a fantastic salesman,” Rupert Hobbs said, offering one explanation for the schism. “Carly would spend hours installing furniture, then John would swan in and sell it and get all the kudos.” (John Hobbs agreed that that was one reason, but added that his brother had also resented his “superstar” status with women.)
The hostility intensified during John Hobbs’s divorce from his second wife in 2002, when, John said, Carlton used a business associate to pass information about John’s philandering to his wife, and advised her to seize his assets.
“I loathe them so much,” John Hobbs said of his brother and the associate, Stefanie Rinza, a managing director of Carlton Hobbs LLC. Given “the things he’s done to me in the last five to six years,” he added, “if I heard that my brother had terminal cancer I would open a bottle of Champagne.” (Through a spokesman Carlton Hobbs declined to speak about his relationship with his brother.)
Despite the feud, both brothers continued using Mr. Buggins, who maintained what he called a Chinese wall policy, hiding one firm’s pieces when anyone from the other firm visited his workshops. “Dennis once caught me peeking under a blanket,” Rupert Hobbs recalled. “Quite embarrassing.”
In 2002 Carlton Hobbs bought the Vanderbilt mansion at 60 East 93rd Street — more recently part of the Lycée Français de New York — for $10.6 million, with the aim of setting up shop closer to his main client base of wealthy Americans and their decorators. Three years of renovation later, he began receiving clients by appointment.
Visiting the mansion can be a transcendent experience, several decorators and clients said.
“It’s really kind of breathtaking,” said Peter Dunham, a prominent Los Angeles decorator. “Every piece is special. There’s nothing you’d see anywhere else, even in another upscale antique store. Everything is extraordinary in its function, look or scale.”
Some of the pieces have remarkable provenances, Mr. Dunham continued, having belonged to people like Marie Antoinette or J. P. Morgan, while others are remarkable in and of themselves. “I remember an incredible strongbox that was Russian, 18th century,” he said. “If you tried to open it without twisting the handle in a certain way, it automatically fired a pistol at you. Extraordinary.”
Mr. Hobbs declined to reveal the names of private clients, but the list is widely believed to include the billionaires Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of Limited Brands, and Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, as well as the influential designers Peter Marino and Bunny Williams. All declined to be interviewed about the Hobbs brothers.
As wealthy as Carlton Hobbs’s clients tend to be, they can be shocked by his stratospheric prices. A Park Avenue philanthropist, who declined to be named because she did not want to be barred from shopping at the mansion, said that when she asked Mr. Hobbs the price of a small side table there, he responded, “ ‘I’m dyslexic, I can’t give prices.’ ” He turned instead to an assistant, who printed out a discreet spec sheet with a price of $400,000.
Mr. Hobbs can seem an odd fit in his grand surroundings. Unlike his raffish brother, he shuns the limelight; decorators and rival dealers said they seldom saw him at antiques shows. (He is, though, a familiar figure on his stretch of the Upper East Side because of his devotion to several dogs he walks regularly in Central Park.)
Mr. Dunham described him as a “quiet, almost ecclesiastical” man, focused on seeking out important finds rather than “what’s fashionable or what’s obviously sellable.” And Carlton Hobbs, the firm, presents itself as resolutely academic in its approach to acquisitions: a recent press release about the appointment of a new researcher there boasted of the “extent to which Carlton Hobbs researches provenance, maker and artistic content,” and went on to announce that “Carlton Hobbs pieces were acquired by or on loan to” some of the world’s most august museums, including the Louvre, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Victoria and Albert and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In his few years in New York, Mr. Hobbs has clearly made a strong impression.
“Virtually every dealer I talk to speaks of how extraordinary Carlton’s stuff is,” said David H. Wilson, a leading American furniture restorer and appraiser. “He’s sort of on his own level.” As a buyer and a businessman, Mr. Wilson added, “Carlton’s always taken the high road.”
Told of the report that seems to implicate Mr. Hobbs, Mr. Dunham expressed astonishment.
“I would back Carlton Hobbs way before I backed John,” he said. “The stuff wasn’t the kind you’d fake up.”
CARLTON HOBBS’S professional reputation might well have remained intact if not for his dispute with Dennis Buggins. Both men declined to comment on the reasons for their estrangement after 20 years of working together, but Rupert Hobbs said he believed the problems began in 2005, when his uncle started to question Mr. Buggins’s restoration bills. The next year, according to an account given in the report, Carlton Hobbs sued Mr. Buggins’s firm, Extreme Architecture, in English civil court, seeking the return of furniture in its workshops. Mr. Buggins, in turn, obtained a court order allowing him to hold on to the furniture temporarily, since Mr. Hobbs had not paid him for completed work.
The claim for the return of the furniture was settled in the fall of 2006, when Mr. Hobbs agreed to pay Mr. Buggins 100,000 pounds, about $173,000 using today’s conversion rates. In February 2007, however, Carlton Hobbs filed a multimillion-dollar suit against his former restorer, claiming that some of the pieces had not been returned and others were damaged or incomplete. He also claimed that the work Mr. Buggins had done on some pieces was substandard and that he had lost sales because the delivery of some items had been delayed.
What Mr. Hobbs did not realize, however, was that Mr. Buggins had hired Nicholas Somers, an eminent arts and antiques appraiser based in London, to document many of those pieces the day before they were returned. Mr. Buggins’s lawyers asked Mr. Somers to prepare a report evaluating each of the 43 pieces he had appraised, assessing its level of alteration and giving an opinion as to whether it could be described as original, what its real value was and whether the dealer’s description of it was accurate. A draft of Mr. Somers’s report was delivered to Carlton Hobbs.
John and Rupert Hobbs, meanwhile, came to believe Mr. Buggins’s legal battle with Carlton was slowing down his work for them. Under pressure from his son, and despite the fact that he had not spoken to his brother for five years, John reached out to Carlton, he said, in the hope of encouraging a settlement. Carlton then shared the report with John.
“Carly said, ‘Look after it,’ ” Rupert Hobbs said. “He didn’t want it getting into the wrong hands. Then when he wanted it back there was a serious panic. He had us running around late at night looking for it.” Before they returned it, Rupert added, “we thought, why not make a copy?”
As John and Rupert Hobbs’s impatience with Mr. Buggins grew, they began to argue with him over money themselves. Around the same time, “Dennis got it into his head that John and Carly were conspiring against him,” Rupert Hobbs said, and soon his father and Mr. Buggins were embroiled in their own legal dispute.
In April, after losing both his major clients and the streams of income they had generated for years — and after being forced to shut down his workshop and sell his home — Mr. Buggins decided to go public with his allegations against at least one of the Hobbs brothers, even if a judicial injunction prevented him from discussing the other.
John Hobbs has never admitted to commissioning or selling fakes made by Mr. Buggins. But he resigned from the British Antique Dealers’ Association in the wake of the first Sunday Times articles in April, which were followed by further damaging evidence in The New York Times in May. Then in June, two commodes that John Hobbs had sold in the 1990s were withdrawn from a Sotheby’s sale in New York — the catalog described them as German neo-Classical, circa 1800, with a high estimate of $300,000 — after The Sunday Times produced evidence that Mr. Buggins had made them. John and Rupert Hobbs have not enjoyed these last few months, and have been particularly galled, both said, by the thought of Carlton Hobbs’s getting off scot-free.
IN July, Carlton Hobbs reached a settlement with Mr. Buggins, who agreed to sign a statement saying that he commissioned the report from Mr. Somers “for the sole purposes of assisting” in litigation; that Mr. Somers’s review of the furnishings “was not a complete one,” given that he had not reviewed every item in person; and that seven hours of the day he spent at the workshop was spent interviewing Mr. Buggins (rather than inspecting furniture). The statement also says that “certain of the pieces” Mr. Buggins worked on in the course of his association with Carlton Hobbs were for Mr. Hobbs’s “personal use, and were not for public sale.”
The financial terms of the settlement were undisclosed, and the court files were sealed. Rupert Hobbs claims to have learned from a source close to both men that his uncle agreed to pay Mr. Buggins more than a million pounds, or more than $1.7 million; Mr. Buggins’s lawyer, Mike Robinson, would say only that he could “confirm that the dispute has been compromised and all allegations withdrawn.”
The allegations remain, however, in the copy of Mr. Somers’s report that Rupert Hobbs provided to The Times. The report includes an analysis of six of the 43 items of furniture the appraiser examined, with photographs supplied by Mr. Buggins showing each piece at different stages of completion. There are also photos and descriptions of four more items Mr. Buggins claimed to have worked on, which happened to be for sale on Carlton Hobbs’s Web site at the time of the appraisal.
The most expensive item discussed in the report is a “pair of walnut Bureau Cabinets” attributed, in Mr. Hobbs’s filing to the court, to the 18th-century English cabinetmaker Giles Grendey. Mr. Hobbs described them as “very important” and said their sales value, even if they were heavily restored, would be more than 850,000 pounds, or about $1.5 million. According to Mr. Buggins, however, they were more than just heavily restored: he told Mr. Somers that he was instructed by Carlton Hobbs to replace the cabinets’ pediments and cornices with ones modeled on a known Grendey piece, and to substitute interiors veneered in figured walnut for the original shelves and interiors.
To fabricate those interiors, he said, he first broke up a late 17th-century Flemish cabinet, but Mr. Hobbs thought the timber “looked too crude and early.” He made a second attempt using pieces of an 18th-century Chippendale period clothes press.
Mr. Somers, who noted that Grendey pieces “are extremely sought after by dealers, collectors and museums,” concluded that the cabinets did not date from 1730, as contended by Mr. Hobbs, and that it would be “inappropriate and misleading” to give purchasers the impression that they were made by Grendey. “These pieces have not been ‘heavily restored,’ they have been heavily altered,” he wrote. If restored to their original condition, he estimated, they would be worth only about $70,000 to $105,000.
Among the other items detailed in the report was a flat-top writing desk surmounted by a cabinet that Mr. Hobbs described as a “Louis XVI Bureau Plat” with “Marquetry and gilt bronze mounted by G Haupt, Stockholm 1770, including cartonnier.” Mr. Buggins claimed that Mr. Hobbs supplied him with photographs showing construction details of a 1779 bureau plat cartonnier by George Haupt in a museum in Stockholm, along with an early-20th-century reproduction of the piece, and instructed him to alter the reproduction to make it look like an 18th-century original. He said he sourced old oak from a dismantled pre-1760s French oak-timbered barn to cover or replace the existing wood, replaced the veneer on its surface with old saw-cut tulipwood and lined the writing surface with reconditioned leather recovered by divers from a shipwreck.
Mr. Somers found evidence of significant alterations, concluding that the table could not be 18th century. “It would not only be totally unreasonable to describe this piece as original,” he wrote, “it would be completely misleading to describe it by George Haupt.” But the standard of workmanship was so exceptionally high, he noted, that any furniture specialist might have a hard time telling that without having the original piece from Stockholm present for comparison. Consequently, he wrote, the replica could easily reappear on the market in five or 10 years’ time, “possibly in another country, with an attribution to George Haupt and a retail gallery ticket price in excess of 500,000 pounds,” or about $870,000.
A third example from the report, the “Mahogany bureau, American, of block front forms, circa 1760,” was valued by Carlton Hobbs at 100,000 pounds, about $173,000, “in view of its authorship and rarity.” It had been dismantled when Mr. Somers inspected it, and Mr. Buggins told him that it had been in his workshop since 1998. He also claimed to have replaced all the drawer fronts with wood from an 18th-century mahogany table leaf, and said that Mr. Hobbs had asked him to refashion the interior, replace the drawer linings, the back panel and all the bracket feet, and cast a new set of handles.
Mr. Somers noted that American furniture collectors and museums were willing to pay a lot for 18th-century American furniture, especially pieces with a known provenance or maker, citing the example of a similar bureau, attributed to John Townsend from Newport, R.I., that sold at Christie’s in New York in 2004 for $1,911,500. But the work done on Mr. Hobbs’s bureau — which Mr. Somers doubted was from the mid-18th century, and thought might be a “Centen(n)ial piece” made 100 years later — “seriously depreciates its value,” Mr. Somers wrote. “I again cannot contemplate any serious private buyer or museum buying this piece in its proposed form.”
MR. SOMERS concluded: “None of the six items which are the subject of the first part of this report and which I surveyed in October 2006 have been restored. In my opinion, all six have been very seriously altered to their detriment.”
Dennis Buggins and Carlton Hobbs appeared to Mr. Somers to have “gone to great lengths and expense to change the original appearance of these pieces by fabricated embellishment” so they could be presented as pieces Mr. Hobbs could describe “as ‘rare,’ ‘imposing,’ ‘very important’ and ‘significant.’ In reality the pieces are pastiches worth a fraction of the price of the genuine article.”
“The same comments would apply to the four items” from Mr. Hobbs’s Web site, he added, if what Mr. Buggins “contends is true.” “Trust and honesty are the backbone of the antiques trade, and private collectors and museums rely on the integrity of a dealer, particularly those who have an international reputation,” Mr. Somers continued. “Without the integrity and trust from both sides, the confidence in the top-level antique furniture trade from buyers would evaporate and the market could crash.”
Beyond the damage the scandal could do to Carlton Hobbs’s business prospects, though — and perhaps to those of other dealers — he may well escape more serious consequences. As a matter of policy, the F.B.I. will not comment on whether it is investigating, but a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police in Britain said neither Carlton nor John was likely to be prosecuted there, because none of their customers have filed a complaint.
That is fairly typical, dealers say: no one complains because no one wants to admit to having been duped.
Still, the financial toll may be punishment enough. Even before the scandal, Rupert Hobbs said, his father’s firm had only been “breaking even for the past two or three years on six deals.”
“The antiques business is in serious trouble; with this on top it doesn’t help,” he said, referring to the bad publicity.
It has gotten so bad, in fact, that he and his father are thinking of getting out of antiques altogether, he said. “We’re thinking of going into modern art.”

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The Versailles of the North

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:53:42 -0400

“THE criticism I’ve had is just massive,” said the Duchess of Northumberland, as she led a visitor through the Bamboo Labyrinth of Alnwick Garden. “It’s really staggering the way that Britain views this project. They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes.”
Given that the project in question is, so far, a garden of 14 acres — large, but not enormous by the standards of English country estates — the duchess, 49, might seem to be laying it on a bit thick. But what she has done with these 14 acres at Alnwick Castle, her husband’s ancestral home — and what she hopes to do with them in the future, and the money that all this involves — has indeed stirred controversy, in worlds as diverse as the English gardening establishment, the British Parliament and the press. What started as a whim of the new duchess, who saw a chance to create a modern counterpoint to the adjacent 18th-century landscape designed by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, has become one of the most ambitious public gardens created in Europe since World War II, a rollicking tourist attraction widely known as the Versailles of the North. And the duchess, in her single-minded drive to make that happen, has amassed plenty of admirers, but more than a few critics as well.
The saga began in 1995, when the duchess, then 36 and known as Jane Percy, was living with her husband, Ralph, a 38-year-old property surveyor, and their four children in a farm house half an hour north of Alnwick (pronounced ANN-ick). That October Mr. Percy’s brother Harry, the 11th Duke of Northumberland, was found dead in Londonfrom an overdose of amphetamines. Ralph Percy was suddenly the 12th duke, with holdings that included 120,000 acres of land, 171 tenant farms and 700 houses and cottages, along with Alnwick Castle, with its collections of Meissen china, Louis XIV furniture and paintings by Titian, Caneletto and Van Dyke. According to The Sunday Times of London, the duke is the 270th richest person in Britain, with a fortune estimated at £300 million.
“It was a total change in 24 hours,” the duchess said. “Not because of where we lived; it was the way that people related to you. Even good friends sent me letters saying, ‘I’m furious — now you’re going to change.’ ”
Her husband, she said, warned her that there would be challenges. “He said, ‘Don’t expect to win, you’ve just got to do your best,’ ” she said. “I thought, What’s he talking about? He’s being such a drama queen.” Now, though, she sees the troubles she had with the garden as evidence he was right. “In England, if you’re married to a duke and raise your head above the parapet and do something on this scale, it’s considered to be overly ambitious,” she said. “The attitude is that you should stay in your castle.”
At first, she was just looking for something to do in her new role. On a walk near the castle in late 1995, she wandered with her dogs through the site of the former gardens, a walled enclosure that had been planted for 40 years with spruce trees, part of a commercial lumber business that helped support the estate. She had grown up around greenery in Scotland — her mother was an avid gardener — and had occasionally helped friends design gardens “for fun”; now she began talking with her husband about reviving the gardens at Alnwick.
Even at this early stage, she wasn’t thinking small: “To do anything,” she told the duke, “I’m going to need a million pounds.” But over the next year, her vision became grander, expanding to encompass a public garden that would draw visitors from all over the country. The duke eventually put in £8 million (about $12 million at the time) through his charitable trust, half in the form of a loan, and the duchess embarked on a fund-raising campaign that is still ongoing.
She also became increasingly determined that the garden should be modern, not a recreation of Alnwick’s long-derelict 18th- and 19th-century gardens — a decision, she said, that would lead to the first of her troubles.
In 1996, after meeting with designers, including several well-known British traditionalists, she hired Jacques Wirtz, a Belgian landscape architect considered by some the modern equivalent of André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens at Versailles. Mr. Wirtz is known for a critically acclaimed redesign of the Carrousel Garden in the Tuileries in Paris, and for redoing the gardens of Élysée Palace, the residence of French presidents.
He delivered a formal plan for the garden in 1997 that has been little altered since. It included prominent features of the present garden like the Grand Cascade, a multitiered hillside waterfall and fountain that is the visual centerpiece of the site; a formal ornamental garden with water rills that contains one of the largest collections of European plants in Britain; a Rose Garden with 3,000 roses in 180 varieties; a Serpent Garden with swirling yew hedges and eight stainless steel water sculptures by William Pye, an English sculptor; the Bamboo Labyrinth, with 500 bamboo plants; a $7 million treehouse built amid 17 lime trees, with an education center, a restaurant that seats 80 people and thousands of square feet of suspended walkways; and the Poison Garden, a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 varieties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.
Before any of this could be built, the duchess faced a challenge from English Heritage, the government agency charged with protecting England’s architectural patrimony, which wanted a garden in the style of a 19th-century redesign of the original. She spent much of 1998 and 1999 and some £500,000 on research and legal fees in making her case, she said. (Asked about the office’s objections to her plans, Rory O’Donnell, a historic buildings inspector for English Heritage, replied only that it did approve a final plan for the garden in May 1999.)
Other challenges came in the form of criticism of the design, particularly its populist bent. There is little question that children, whom the duchess identifies as one of her main constituencies, enjoy this aspect of the garden: On a recent visit, as gaggles of them ran up and down water rills, splashing each other, a little boy shouted to the duchess that the Poison Garden was his favorite feature (and he had not even seen the mock heroin addicts who performed outside it last year as an object lesson for schoolchildren). But some serious gardeners were less convinced. In 2003, after the first of the three phases was complete (the second was finished last year), Mary Keen, a garden designer and critic, described the place in The Daily Telegraph as “popular entertainment, the dream of a girl who looks like Posh and lives at Hogwarts” — references to Victoria Beckham and to Hogwarts School, a role played by Alnwick Castle in the first two Harry Potter movies.
The duchess does not take particular issue with this line of attack — “I never wanted to make a beautiful garden for elite gardeners,” she said — even if she ascribes it to narrow-mindedness. “A lot of my ideas come from Las Vegas and Euro Disney,” she said as her tour continued. The phantasmagorical displays of light and water at the Bellagio casino, she added, inspired her plans for the Grand Cascade, and it was at Euro Disney that she discovered the lighting technology she is hoping to introduce in the Labyrinth, with discreet fiber optic wands that will sway with the bamboo, creating a vast nighttime landscape of “bamboo and light moving together, silver and gold.”
But the main controversy surrounding the garden has had to do with the money required to build it — its overall budget now stands at £70 million ($140 million). Only two-thirds of the project, for which ground was broken in 2000, has been built so far, at a cost of £43 million, which, aside from the duke’s £8 million, came from a mix of public financing and private donations. Mary Keen, in another 2003 article, this one for the Spectator magazine, suggested that run-down city parks were more deserving of government help, but that the grants they get average £1.4 million ($2.2 million at that time), as opposed to the £3.45 million the Alnwick project had already received. “Should those who are savvier and nobler than thou,” she asked, “attract so much more money than those who are apparently more deserving?” Other public harangues followed.
The duchess has argued that the garden, which became a charity separate from the duke’s estate in 2003, is well worth its cost to the public, as a boon to a financially troubled region with one of the highest unemployment rates in Britain. She points out that Northumberland’s economic prospects were particularly bleak in 2000, the year work started on the garden.
“When I began, farmers all around here were losing their livelihoods,” the duchess said, referring to that year’s epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease. “And here was I at that stage, spending £5 million to build a cascade. I remember coming in and feeling sick, thinking, how can I be doing this? I felt like Marie-Antoinette.”
“What I didn’t realize,” she continued, “was that the garden would become a focus for regeneration. Those farmers’ wives were baking for the tearoom here.” In one year alone, she said, 100 farmers and other locals applied for planning permission to turn their houses and outbuildings into bed and breakfasts. According to Mr. August, her longtime aide, of 100 local businesses to which a questionnaire was sent, 59 responded, saying they had developed and expanded as a result of the garden.
The garden has certainly outperformed the expectations of a feasibility study conducted by KPMG, the accounting firm, in 1997, which estimated it would attract 67,000 visitors a year — only slightly more than the number of ticket buyers who toured the castle at the time. During its first full year of operation, the garden had 330,000 visitors, and by last year the number had jumped to 625,000.
“Every year the garden’s generating between £40 to £53 million in extra spend for our district,” the duchess said.
(The increase in visitors may also have something to do with the Harry Potter movies, as some locals suggest. And there is general acknowledgment that Alnwick’s economy was boosted by Country Life magazine’s 2002 selection of the town as the best place to live in Britain.)
Mr. August said that when the third phase is complete the garden is expected to create as many as 445 full- and part-time jobs. That final phase includes five new gardens; a huge lighting program; an ice rink that would become a pond during summer months; a huge relaxation facility for bus drivers, to lure them into choosing Alnwick as their stopping point on trips to Scotland; and a $9 million playground with a “safely dangerous” obstacle course designed to be used by both children and disabled adults.
The only hitch is that the duchess still has to raise the not inconsiderable sum of $60 million.
In the last year, she has traveled to Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong to lecture about Alnwick Garden and canvas for financial support.
“Obviously the fund-raising is horrendous,” she said. “So far not a single penny’s come in.”
But she remains hopeful. On Aug. 22, she will visit Long Island to speak to the Southampton Garden Club, and will attend a dinner given by Audrey Gruss, the philanthropic wife of Martin D. Gruss, a New York financier, who has promised to introduce the duchess to other garden lovers.
Speaking of this endless quest, the duchess said: “My husband said, ‘Can you do this? At what price? Will it kill you?’ I said I have to.”
“I never for a second think I won’t finish the garden,” she added. “But I just don’t quite know how.”

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Furniture Restorers Allegations of Deception Shake Antiques Trade

Thu, 22 May 2008 22:25:46 -0400

MICHAEL SMITH, a prominent decorator in Los Angeles, was staggered when a friend called from London in early April with the news: John Hobbs, a London antiques dealer known for superb English and Continental furniture, stratospheric prices and wealthy American clients, had been accused by his longtime restorer of selling fakes.

Mr. Smith said he was panicked at the thought that two very expensive mahogany chests of drawers he acquired for a California financier in September — described on the invoice as a fine pair of English commodes, circa 1830 — might not be worth anything close to what he had paid.
His fears might have been justified. Detailed workshop records and photographs provided by Dennis Buggins, Mr. Hobbs’s restorer for 21 years, indicate that Mr. Smith’s commodes were designed and fabricated between 2004 and 2006, using materials plundered from several old wardrobes and a linen press. The cost, Mr. Buggins said, was about $55,000. The asking price was 365,000 pounds ($736,000 at the time), a retail markup of more than 1,000 percent, although Mr. Smith managed to pay $450,000.
Since last month, when The Sunday Times in London published Mr. Buggins’s initial allegations and Mr. Hobbs’s adamant denials, what began as a bitter financial dispute between the two men has become a source of anxiety for collectors and interior designers around the world.
Fakes and copies are hardly a novelty in the antiques business. But, if true, the allegations being made against Mr. Hobbs — whose clients include David H. Koch and Leslie H. Wexner and the fashion designers Oscar de la Renta and Valentino — suggest deception and audacity on an extraordinary scale. In a telephone interview, Mr. Buggins claimed that since 1992 his workshop has handled about 1,875 items for John Hobbs, more than half of which involved major alterations or outright inventions.
On April 7, the day after The Sunday Times reported the dispute in two articles (written in part by Christopher Owen, one of the reporters for this article), the British Antique Dealers’ Association suspended Mr. Hobbs’s membership. On May 6, Mr. Hobbs resigned from the group.
Moving vans were parked outside Mr. Hobbs’s shop in Dove Walk, off London’s Pimlico Road, for more than a week in late April, sparking rumors among dealers in the area that he might be emptying his store of fakes or closing it down. But Mr. Hobbs insisted the timing was incidental.
“We’re taking this opportunity to redecorate, that’s all,” he said. “I’m not going out of business.” Mr. Buggins’s accusations are “just ludicrous,” he said. “He never made any fakes for me, ever.”
The dispute between the dealer and the restorer began in September. According to John Hobbs’s son, Rupert, it was a result of his father’s attempt to intervene in an ongoing legal battle between Carlton Hobbs — John Hobbs’s brother and former business partner — and Mr. Buggins. “Dennis then decided that John and Carlton were colluding against him,” Rupert Hobbs wrote in an e-mail. In any case, money stopped changing hands.
Mr. Buggins said he was obliged to lay off the 30 subcontracted craftsmen he had working on projects for Mr. Hobbs, who for 18 months had been his only major client. He was also compelled, he said, to sell his 13th-century farmhouse in the Kent countryside and adjoining buildings that housed his workshop.
The two men are now embroiled in a lawsuit, and Mr. Buggins claims that Mr. Hobbs owes him about $840,000. (In December, Mr. Hobbs filed a counterclaim in the amount of 2.7 million pounds, about $5.3 million, against the return of antiques and works of art and damages.) Mr. Buggins came forward with his allegations, he said, because of his anger at the treatment by his longtime employer, and his discovery that Mr. Hobbs was misrepresenting his handiwork as authentic antiques.
Since the Sunday Times articles appeared last month, some collectors have approached Christie’s requesting appraisals of the authenticity of items they purchased from John Hobbs, a spokeswoman for the auction house said. In late April, David H. Wilson, a leading furniture restorer and appraiser based in New Jersey, flew to England at the behest of a handful of private clients to inspect their collections, he said.
Several pieces gave me cause for concern,” Mr. Wilson said, “so the suspicions of my clients were well founded.”
In New York, gossip about the allegations has spread quickly along Fifth and Park Avenues.
“Every rich person was buying things from John or Carlton or both,” said Thierry Millerand, a New York antiques dealer and former worldwide head of Sotheby’s European furniture department, referring to Mr. Hobbs, 62, and his brother, 51, who now sells antiques in New York. The brothers had a falling out and dissolved their partnership in 1993.
“John has held himself up to the public as such a high-end dealer,” Mr. Wilson said. “That’s why people are so shocked. People were paying a premium, assuming that by doing so they were getting the very best.” Several high-profile New York decorators have spent large amounts of their clients’ money at Mr. Hobbs’s store, including Peter Marino and Bunny Williams, who declined to be interviewed for this article, and Juan Pablo Molyneux, who sidestepped questions about the accusations leveled at Mr. Hobbs.
“John’s things were always exceptional,” Mr. Molyneux said, “with the kind of humor and fantasy I like, instead of boring brown English furniture. I’m very confident that I bought what I paid for.”
Mr. Molyneux seemed unperturbed when told that Mr. Buggins had identified as fake a pair of side tables that he had purchased believing they were antiques, for a Russian businessman’s London apartment. (An article in Architectural Digest in 2005 listed Mr. Hobbs as the source for the tables. Mr. Buggins, shown a copy, claimed to have made them from scratch, using old wood.)
“They’re very beautiful,” Mr. Molyneux said. “When I’m shopping for my projects, I’m not buying for investment. I buy a piece because it tells a story in the room.
“I have a clause in my contract saying I’m not responsible for the antiques we buy,” he added. “I know a lot about antiques, but I’m not an expert.”
Another New York decorator was less sanguine. “It’s very nerve-racking,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he anticipated lawsuits from clients. “I’ve spent millions at John Hobbs. Now I expect I’ll be in striped pajamas.”
But he is unrepentant about his aesthetic choices. “John Hobbs puts on an incredible show — no one else came close to his place in Dove Walk,” he added. “A piece of furniture might be $4 million, but it’s presented superbly.”
Mr. Smith, the Los Angeles decorator — who canceled his commode purchase, leaving his client “happy with the resolution,” he said — was shaken by the experience. “Antiques are the last business based on trust,” he added. “You take things on a handshake deal. That someone would abuse that trust is staggering.”
And Robert Couturier, a leading designer based in New York, described himself as incredibly angry at Mr. Hobbs. “It’s such an abuse of confidence,” he added. “Nobody questioned his honesty. It’s very sad.
MR. HOBBS insisted that he used Mr. Buggins only for restoration and making authorized copies of antiques.
“He made replicas occasionally, once every two years where maybe there was a set of 10 chairs and a client wanted 14,” he said. “But it would be at the client’s request. They wouldn’t be fakes, they’d simply be replicas.”
Records from Mr. Buggins’s workshop appear to tell a different story. Photographs illustrate how he transformed plain, relatively inexpensive pieces of furniture into high-end antiques.
“It’s basically recladding,” Mr. Buggins said. Starting with an inexpensive item, “you use the best materials you can find and literally clad your new design onto that carcass.” Period wardrobes with beautifully aged patinas — known as breakers — were the staple ingredient. “You take the doors and panels and thin them down to 2 or 3 millimeters to use as veneer,” he said.
As John Hobbs’s demand for the production of new “antiques” grew, Mr. Buggins said, it became necessary to rent a barn five miles from the Kent workshop to store his raw materials.
“The barn was massive,” Mr. Buggins said. “It was stocked with 500 wardrobes. John bought stunning ones, absolutely the best. He called them blank canvases.”
The creation of one of his most astonishing inventions — a mahogany partners desk — was documented in 2006 with photographs taken before, during and after. The later images match a desk that John Hobbs recently offered for sale, with a photograph and an accompanying description printed on his letterhead that heralds the desk as “large and important gilt metal mounted mahogany pedestal partners desk, early 19th century in the manner of Marsh and Tatham.” This furniture maker, the description explains helpfully, “was highly successful in attracting royal and aristocratic patrons, and in common with other leading makers, they seldom identified their work with trade labels or stamps.”
Mr. Buggins offered a different explanation for the absence of vintage markings: “I actually designed that desk,” he said.
The cost for labor and materials, Mr. Buggins said, was about 100,000 pounds, or $180,000. Mr. Hobbs’s asking price was 1.2 million pounds (about $2.4 million), a figure that might seem implausible even if the desk’s history were not in question, except that the record price paid for British furniture at auction, 1.76 million pounds for the Anglesey Desk at Christie’s in 1993, was for a desk attributed to Marsh & Tatham.
Mr. Buggins insists that until the time of his lawsuit with Mr. Hobbs, he was unaware that his works were being offered for sale as antiques. “I’m absolutely stunned,” he said.
Through Rupert Hobbs, who runs the London store, Mr. Hobbs declined to comment on Mr. Buggins’s allegations about the desk or the other pieces he was asked about in an e-mail message.
Mr. Buggins said he was also surprised to find, in preparing evidence for his lawsuit last fall, that some of the “antiques” he had manufactured were posted, along with fictional descriptions, on Mr. Hobbs’s Web site (www.johnhobbs.co.uk).
As of Wednesday, the Web site displayed a pair of walnut pedestal cupboards that Mr. Buggins claims to have fabricated using columns that he salvaged from the Tate Gallery in London.
The same columns, he said, were used to create another desk recently offered for sale by Mr. Hobbs, described in a memo on his letterhead as “an unusual double-sided walnut pedestal desk, English 19th century.” The description goes on to suggest that its design would “indicate a commission from a gentleman scholar with an interest in mechanics.” Mr. Buggins said it was fabricated for a fraction of Mr. Hobbs’s asking price of 195,000 pounds ($390,000).
Mr. Hobbs also recently offered “a pair of painted geometric mirrors, Italian 19th century,” priced at 58,000 pounds (or $115,000). Mr. Buggins, on seeing the memo for these pieces, claimed that they were originally plain frames and that he had added the decorative panels, corner plates and lozenges.
To support this allegation, Mr. Buggins supplied a photograph to reporters that showed a mirror propped against a white van outside his workshop, halfway through the process of being embellished with adornments like those described by Mr. Hobbs’s memo. The resemblance between the incomplete mirror in Mr. Buggins’s picture and the one on Mr. Hobbs’s presentation sheet was striking.
Last week Mr. Buggins’s allegations widened to include pieces of furniture sold at auction by Christie’s in 2005 and 2007, all with a John Hobbs provenance. A pair of “Spanish silvered clear and blue foil-backed mirrors, 18th century,” which went for $192,000 in New York in May 2005, was made using old mirror plates and old pine, possibly from a church pew, Mr. Buggins said.
And in September 2007, Christie’s London sold two desks with descriptions that Mr. Buggins called spurious, both in a single-seller auction, “From City Chic to Alpine Retreat, Holland Park and St. Moritz.” Christie’s declined to name the seller, but experts familiar with the collection and the peregrinations of its owner identified her as Louise T. Blouin MacBain, the magazine owner and art collector. Ms. MacBain did not respond to three requests for comment made through her personal assistant.
A spokesman for Christie’s, Toby Usnik, said: “We take such allegations very seriously and will be reviewing any consignments which give us cause for concern and taking such steps as we consider appropriate.”
Mr. Usnik declined to elaborate on whether Christie’s had a policy of alerting the buyer of a piece of furniture when the authenticity of a piece was questioned by its alleged creator. “Our dealings with our clients are confidential,” he said, “but we will take such steps as we consider appropriate depending on the outcome of our review.”
Mr. Buggins said there were more revelations ahead. He claims he is considering setting up a Web site making records available for every substantially altered or fabricated item that passed through his workshop — not just those for John Hobbs — over the past 20 years.
Along with designers and clients, Mr. Buggins’s allegations about John Hobbs appear to have caused discomfort for at least one other dealer: Mr. Hobbs’s estranged brother, Carlton, who sells furniture from a former Vanderbilt mansion at 60 East 93rd Street, which he bought in 2002. On May 7, Carlton Hobbs issued a press release offering “an independent and accredited expert assessment, at no cost to clients, of any item purchased from the firm in the last 15 years.”
The document, posted on the Internet, made no mention of John Hobbs. But anyone familiar with the situation could hardly fail to grasp what was meant by the reference to “concerns recently expressed in the London antiques community about reproductions and replicas of historical pieces alleged to have been misrepresented as authentic period artifacts.”
The press release also offered a refund for any item “found to have an issue of authenticity or degree of restoration,” though it left the criteria for establishing that vague.
One reason Carlton Hobbs might want to reassure his clients is his own history with Mr. Buggins. Although Mr. Buggins declined to name any of his clients except John Hobbs, citing legal reasons, records for the New York State Civil Supreme Court show he filed a lawsuit against Carlton Hobbs in October 2007, in a dispute over the ownership of several pieces of furniture. An affidavit for that case given by Stefanie Rinza, a managing director of Carlton Hobbs LLC, describes a 20-year working relationship between Carlton Hobbs and Mr. Buggins that was in force in late 2005, when Mr. Hobbs was paying Mr. Buggins’s firm “approximately 25,000 pounds a month” for restoration work.
Mr. Buggins declined to comment on the lawsuit, as did Drew Biondo, a spokesman for Carlton Hobbs — though Mr. Biondo did deny that his boss had had a working relationship with Mr. Buggins that involved the creation or sale of fakes.
Told of Carlton Hobbs’s legal and professional involvement with Mr. Buggins, a few decorators have expressed dismay. And his dramatic press release, intended to assuage collectors’ fears and to distance him from the allegations against his brother, seems for some to have raised the possibility that Carlton Hobbs might somehow be involved in selling fakes.
Mr. Couturier, for one, seemed distressed.
“I’m a much better client of Carlton than I was of John,” he said. “With Carlton it’s a lot of money. If it’s true, it would be dreadful.”
But presuming it isn’t, Mr. Couturier is still worried about the short- and long-term repercussions of the Hobbs scandal. The real fallout, he worries, may be for the antiques trade as a whole. “People are nervous,” he said. “People will say they don’t like antiques because half of them are fake anyway.”
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Put a Diamond Under Stress, and You Might Crack

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:01:49 -0400

EVEN a 14-carat pink diamond ring can start looking tarnished if it is immersed in muck. That rose-gold ring, worth up to $15 million by one estimate, was to be the centerpiece of a Christie’s auction last week, until legal actions in Manhattan scuttled the sale minutes before it was to start — on two successive evenings.
On Wednesday, the second night, lawyers for a Wall Street bank that was trying to sell the ring and more than 100 other pieces of stunning antique jewelry to recoup part of a $187 million debt owed by a prominent collector were awaiting a judge’s ruling on the collector’s effort to stop the auction. Christie’s had spent a small fortune promoting the sale, sending the gems on a world tour to Geneva, Moscow and Dubai for potential buyers to savor.
A few minutes after 6, when the auction had been set to start, the cellphone of François Curiel, the director of Christie’s jewelry department, rang. He listened, said thank you and hung up.
“There is no auction tonight,” he announced to a small group of international jewelry dealers gathered at Christie’s Rockefeller Center rooms.
“Disgusting!” cried a prominent London dealer, who grabbed his coat and stormed out.
More than one of the dealers was angry at Christie’s itself, for trying to sell in such a rushed and uncertain manner what Mr. Curiel had called in the sale’s 154-page glossy hardcover catalog “one of the greatest jewelry collections of all times.” After all, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to abort a highly anticipated jewelry sale once may be regarded a misfortune; to abort it twice looks like carelessness.
The twice-aborted sale upended what is normally the high season for international jewelry auctions in New York, but gave outsiders a rare glimpse into the machinations of the high-end jewelry trade. Originally scheduled for Tuesday, the sale, “Rare Jewels and Gemstones: The Eye of a Connoisseur,” was derailed by bitter courtroom wrangling between the connoisseur in question —
Ralph O. Esmerian, 68, a collector of American folk art and precious gems who owns the Fred Leighton jewelry company — and Merrill Lynch Mortgage Capital, a division of Merrill Lynch & Company.
ALSO caught up in the drama is Peter E. Bacanovic, the former Merrill Lynch broker who was sentenced to five months in prison for his role in the Martha Stewart stock case. In January, the month Merrill Lynch first filed suit against Mr. Esmerian in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, he hired Mr. Bacanovic as president of Fred Leighton. He assigned him, among other duties, the job of using his strong social connections to help open a Beverly Hills store.
Last week, Mr. Esmerian’s jewels were displayed in a specially created tented pavilion in the center of Christie’s main salesroom, adorned inside with silver-painted tree branches bearing peacock-feather blossoms, echoed by diamanté curlicues etched onto the black fabric walls and ceiling. Among the treasures was a diamond bow brooch worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, and later owned by Mrs. William B. Astor, the social lioness famous for her ballroom that accommodated 400 of New York’s swells. There was a diamond-encrusted ballerina brooch made in the 1940s by Van Cleef & Arpels and an Art Nouveau glass and enamel bracelet made by René Lalique estimated by Christie’s at $500,000 to $700,000.
Hundreds of discerning jewel lovers had descended on Christie’s to admire the glittering wares of Mr. Esmerian. But he was conspicuously absent.
“I have not been to see it,” Mr. Esmerian said in an interview last week. “It’s not for me to stick my head in there and lend credibility to all of this.”
Mr. Esmerian had used the jewelry as part of his collateral for $177 million in loans (now $187 million, with interest and costs) from Merrill Lynch, most of which went to finance the purchase of Fred Leighton. Mr. Esmerian’s contention — part of his legal maneuvers last week — was that his jewelry collection had been undervalued for the forced sale.
His plan had been to sell the finer pieces in a new Fred Leighton boutique in Beverly Hills, which he said was scheduled to open in September on Rodeo Drive opposite Harry Winston.
Mr. Esmerian was apoplectic about the planned auction being forced by Merrill Lynch. In an emotional interview on Tuesday, he shook his head in dismay as he thumbed through Christie’s lavishly illustrated catalog, pointing to beloved items of jewelry collected by him and by his late father, Raphael Esmerian, a gem dealer who emigrated from Paris in 1940.
“The estimates are disastrously low,” Mr. Esmerian said. “It’s a fire-sale presentation. These are special pieces that deserve some respect. It’s like a magnificent Fifth Avenue mansion being offered for the price of a Third Avenue condo.”
How did Mr. Esmerian — an aesthete educated at Groton and Princeton who until last year controlled a jewelry collection estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars — land in such a predicament? His lawyer Helen Davis Chaitman ascribed his woes to a clash of cultures between her client, an amiable philanthropist who has given millions to museums, she said, and Merrill Lynch bankers who issued and capriciously rescinded his credit.
“Ralph is not a hedge fund person,” Ms. Chaitman said. “He’s not a vulture. He’s a man of such extraordinary kindness.”
Among other philanthropic work, Mr. Esmerian is chairman emeritus of the American Folk Art Museum, to which he pledged 400 works in 2000.
Mr. Esmerian said his relationship with Merrill Lynch began on an upbeat note in November 2005 when the firm agreed to lend him $57 million, backed by the collateral of his “Special Collection,” a group of around 100 pieces of rare jewelry. The loan, Mr. Esmerian said, was for estate-planning purposes.
With the bank’s encouragement, Mr. Esmerian borrowed $110 million more in March 2006, in part to buy Fred Leighton, an estate jewelry company with stores on Madison Avenue and at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, which had raised the profile of estate jewelry in the United States.
The company aggressively pursued Hollywood actresses to parade its showpieces on the red carpet, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Cameron Diaz, and Ellen Pompeo. In 2006, Dolly Parton strutted at the Oscars in diamond bracelets, brooches and briolette pendant earrings on loan from Fred Leighton, boasting to reporters, “This cost $1,200,000.”
IN acquiring Fred Leighton, Mr. Esmerian planned to sell museum-quality jewels from the family’s Special Collection in a retail setting, along with thousands of other pieces from his private stock. (Until then his business was mostly wholesale, consigning jewels to Cartier and other luxury stores around the world.)
Merrill Lynch, he said, ratified the plan. “The Merrill Lynch people always said if you need to buy a special jewel, just come to us and we’ll find the money,” Mr. Esmerian said. “That was in the good old cowboy days when all of this was fun.”
After he made timely payments for more than a year, Mr. Esmerian said, the merriment expired abruptly in September 2007 when he called his bankers at Merrill Lynch to ask for two weeks’ leeway for half his monthly interest payments of $1.5 million. “They said, ‘Sorry, we can’t give you any more time to pay the interest,’ ” he said.
“Ralph is an artist, not a businessman,” Ms. Chaitman said. “In his world, being a week late on a payment is nothing. When he sells a million-dollar piece of jewelry the client might walk out of the store without paying for it. He understands that it takes time for people to liquidate assets. People don’t have money sitting in cookie jars.”
Ms. Chaitman places the blame for Merrill’s decision to force the sale of Mr. Esmerian’s jewels on the bank’s own internal woes related to the subprime mortgage crisis. The bank has taken some $30 billion in mortgage-related write-downs since last year; on Thursday it announced layoffs of 2,900 employees.
Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Merrill Lynch, said the action against Mr. Esmerian is “completely unrelated” to the company’s losses. He said Merrill did not file a legal action against Mr. Esmerian until January, after it had spent the final three months of 2007 trying to reach a “forbearance” agreement with him, which would have set new repayment terms and allowed his business to stay solvent.
“In December we had reached agreement on negotiated terms for a forbearance that would have avoided court,” Mr. Halldin said, “but he refused to sign the documentation needed.”
In its legal complaint, Merrill said that Mr. Esmerian’s failure to live up to the loan terms began months before he stopped making timely payments. The legal papers assert that he sold jewelry that had been promised as collateral and failed to deposit funds from those sales into accounts controlled by Merrill, as required by the loan agreement. Mr. Esmerian also failed to provide required information to the bank about the whereabouts of his jewelry collections, according to the complaint.
(Ms. Chaitman responded that her client had been forthcoming with Merrill Lynch about his jewelry holdings and that money from some jewelry sales did not go into proper accounts because of a mistake by another bank.)
Mr. Halldin noted that Merrill Lynch is not a jewelry company. Just as a bank might auction a foreclosed house for less than full market value because it wants to get its money back and has no interest in becoming a landlord, Merrill wanted to turn its collateral — the jewelry — into cash.
ANOTHER concern of Merrill’s, Mr. Halldin said, was Mr. Esmerian’s hiring of Mr. Bacanovic, a former stockbroker with a criminal record. The bank discussed its misgivings with Mr. Esmerian.
Ms. Chaitman said it was she who had introduced her client to Mr. Bacanovic, whom she had known for decades because he and her daughter were friends from their days at Manhattan private schools.
Fired from his job at Merrill and banned from the securities industry, Mr. Bacanovic had been struggling to find a new path after his release from prison in Las Vegas. “Unlike Martha Stewart, who came right out of jail and went back to running her company,” Ms. Chaitman said, “Peter did not have a platform to come back to.”
He had spent time in Los Angeles, but was back in New York, living on the Upper East Side and consulting for Judith Lieber, the handbag maker.
While Mr. Bacanovic is not a party to the litigation between Merrill Lynch and Mr. Esmerian, he is involved in pushing Fred Leighton forward, despite the continuing drama. He has changed the displays in the New York store, hired sales people, worked with a public relations team to publicize the brand and brought in his friends, Ms. Chaitman said.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Bacanovic declined to comment for this article. Although his social profile is far lower than in the days when he escorted Ms. Stewart around town, he still appears occasionally in boldface in publications like Women’s Wear Daily.
“He has an enormous group of friends and supporters,” Ms. Chaitman said. “And he mixes in a circle of people who can become Fred Leighton customers.”
In Manhattan courtrooms in the past week, Mr. Esmerian succeeded on Monday in having the Christie’s sale canceled. Then on Tuesday, a justice of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court ruled at 4:10 p.m. that the auction could proceed. Bidders descended on the auction house.
But in a surprise move, Mr. Esmerian’s lawyers filed for bankruptcy protection of his companies at 4:20. The sale was off again. “In my 40 years at Christie’s, this is the first time it happens,” Mr. Curiel, the auctioneer, said after he had announced the halt, calming his nerves with a white wine spritzer at the bar.
Merrill Lynch was back in court on Wednesday asking the Federal Bankruptcy Court in New York to let the auction proceed. But after a day of testimony, a judge said no.
Merrill now seems to have given up on selling the jewelry. Both sides have taken a breath and seem resigned to working within the confines of bankruptcy court. “We think it’s positive that there will be close court supervision of all their activities,” Mr. Halldin said. In any case, the jewelry auction season has passed in New York, and the next one is not until December.
But Mr. Esmerian’s woes are not limited to his imbroglio with Merrill Lynch. Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where Mr. Esmerian has done business before, have pressed him to repay his outstanding credit balances. In the case of Christie’s, the debt was around $7 million. When the auction house filed suit to collect, Mr. Esmerian asked it to sell off a collection of his jewelry it had been holding for a long time, Ms. Chaitman said. On Wednesday, hours before the well-publicized Special Collection auction was canceled, the lesser Esmerian collection was sold, she said.
It seems that neither diamonds nor fine art are truly forever. Some of the paintings Mr. Esmerian gave to the American Folk Art Museum were outright gifts, and some were merely promised as gifts, with the understanding that they were being used as collateral on a loan from Sotheby’s.
A few weeks ago the museum was forced to take down one of its greatest prizes from Mr. Esmerian’s painting collection, a mid-1800’s masterpiece from Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom” series that had hung at the museum since its West 53rd Street building opened in 2001. The painting was sent to Sotheby’s, where it is estimated to fetch up to $8 million, which will be applied to Mr. Esmerian’s $11.5 million debt.
Although a promise is only a promise, the museum was taken by surprise. “We didn’t know about Ralph’s problems,” said Susan Flamm, a spokeswoman.
The removal of the painting from the wall was done with decorum befitting the benefactor.
“It wasn’t yanked,” Ms. Flamm said. “It was gently handled.”

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A Shanghai Auntie Mame

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:20:27 -0500

“It’s quite bonkers,” Pearl Lam said of her 22nd-floor, 9,700-square-foot loft in the French Concession district here. The apartment, a mix of ancient Chinese artifacts and Western and Chinese contemporary art and design, may in fact be the wildest interior in the city. Decorated over the course of the last four years, it is also one of the most impressive — not to say overwhelming — showcases of the work Ms. Lam champions through her Contrasts gallery, which now has four branches in China.
Ms. Lam, a daughter of the late Lim Por-yen, a Hong Kong tycoon, has been a pioneer in the Chinese art world. With the 1993 opening of the first Contrasts, in Hong Kong, she began promoting Chinese contemporary art long before it enjoyed even a hint of its current worldwide popularity, or fetching the jaw-dropping prices it now does. (On Oct. 12, Sotheby’s sold Yue Minjun’s “Execution” for $5.9 million, a record price for Chinese contemporary art at auction; six weeks later, the record was superceded by a Christie’s sale of a set of 14 gunpowder-on-paper drawings by Cia Guo-Qiang for $9.5 million.)
She is also proving to be a major force in the emerging market for Chinese contemporary design. In September, she launched the Design Consulate, a branch of Contrasts in Shanghai, which shows work by designers who share her keen interest in cultural cross-fertilization. The gallery’s current exhibition, “The Essence of Chinese Sensibility,” includes work by XYZ, a group of four young Chinese designers that Ms. Lam said she had bullied into the profession, and by Shao Fan, a sculptor and painter whose “deconstructed” chairs merge elements of traditional Ming-style furniture with contemporary materials and styles.
Outspoken, enthusiastic and prone to shrieks of excitement, Ms. Lam is like a wound-up Chinese Auntie Mame. She stands just five feet five in high-heeled boots, but is a striking physical presence in her fuchsia-dyed chinchilla coat and her mauve-streaked hair, which resembles an unkempt chrysanthemum.
Her super-size persona, too, makes an indelible impression. Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, calls her “a force of nature,” while Hervé Aaron, a leading Paris antiques dealer and a longtime friend of Ms. Lam’s, is more direct: “Pearl is sometimes insane,” he said.
MS. LAM divides her time among homes in Hong Kong and London as well as here, but it is in Shanghai, she said, that she has come to feel most at home, after a rocky start.
“I never wanted to live in Shanghai — it was too near Hong Kong, my mother’s home,” she said. “I wanted to be free from familial obligations and pressure.” But she came to the city at her parents’ insistence, in 1992, after graduating from the University of Buckingham in England. She was assigned to oversee the construction of 41 Hengshan Road, the high-rise luxury tower where she now lives, which was built by her mother, Koo Siu-ying, a real estate developer.
The project was often “a nightmare,” Ms. Lam said. “I fired I don’t know how many contractors. A lot of them weren’t used to the standard I wanted, so there was lots of redoing. A friend of mine said it was like we were building a spaceship in the jungle.”
Nevertheless, she fell in love with Shanghai. “This is where I learned to become Chinese,” she said. “I’d never been proud of my heritage because I’m from Hong Kong, where we’re not English, and we’re not Chinese. Before that I didn’t even like Chinese furniture. I saw it as grandmother’s furniture, boring and uncomfortable. But then I discovered Shanghai Deco.”
Standing in her long, narrow living room, which runs along the northwest side of the building between two terrace gardens, one Western and one Chinese, Ms. Lam pointed to a pair of sleek 1930s armchairs. The Shanghai Deco style was a local interpretation of Art Deco practiced by craftsmen between the 1920s and 1940s; its fusion of East and West sparked her interest in the crossing of cultures, she said.
In 1993, she began inviting Western designers — Tom Dixon was among the first — to come to Shanghai and design objects to be made by Chinese craftsmen. More recently, she has funded an artist-in-residence program, housed in a space above one of her galleries, for Western and Asian designers exploring cultural boundaries.
Her home has become a showroom for her ongoing hybridizing campaign. One of its most striking products is a sofa in her living room by Mattia Bonetti, the Paris designer, which Ms. Lam commissioned for an exhibition on cross-cultural influences that was shown at the National Museum in Beijing in 2005. From a distance, the sofa seems to be printed with images from French and Chinese magazines and newspapers, including a glamour-girl portrait of Ms. Lam on a leopard-skin rug and a page from a gay bondage magazine. On closer inspection, it turns out to be delicately hand-embroidered.
“We realized that most of the Chinese crafts had disappeared,” Ms. Lam said, “so we have to make something modern that makes a new use of the craft.” (The twin of the sofa, which belongs to Mr. Bonetti, is currently on display in New York at the Museum of Arts & Design as part of an exhibition called “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery.”)
Ms. Lam also commissioned Shao Fan to create an oversize version of one of his deconstructed chairs for her apartment. The result is an amalgam of three traditional Ming-style chairs combined with a modern wooden bench painted scarlet. It could loosely be described as a sofa, but one unlikely to appeal to a couch potato.
“It’s like all Chinese furniture,” Ms. Lam said. “Shao Fan’s sofas are not exactly comfortable, but they make people look good when they’re sitting on them because you must sit upright.”
The apartment is designed for grand entertaining. There are no interior walls in the vast living space, and in lieu of them, Ms. Lam has used old Chinese artifacts — a pair of studded iron doors and a 19th-century cabinet — to delineate a dining area in the middle. (Sight lines are also obscured with a dozen or so cutout aluminum screens, in swirling arabesques, designed by Danny Lane, a London artist.)
Ms. Lam, who calls herself a frustrated designer, drew up her own plans for the 52-foot-long table that fills the dining area, with the idea of separating it into smaller sections for more intimate dinners. “I did not take into account the glass top,” she said, which is so heavy that she cannot break up the segments. The table seats 66, though she is quick to point out that her dinners aren’t always so ambitious. “Very often I have 40 to 50,” she said. At a Sunday dinner in late October, a black-uniformed fleet of waiters served six courses to 40 people on plates that they were obliged to insert between the fingers of white porcelain hands, one pair for each guest, sometimes with difficulty. (“They’re all handmade,” Ms. Lam explained later, “so the shapes of the hands are all slightly different.”)
Ms. Lam also designed the two light fixtures over the table, each about four feet in diameter, in which peacock and ostrich feathers and sewn-together Chinese traditional woven buttons, called frogs, are used to create the shapes of
Western chandeliers. “The table is very straight and simple,” she explained, “so I wanted a chandelier which is O.T.T., over the top, using all exotic materials.”
With the exception of Mr. Bonetti’s sofa, all of the upholstered furniture in the apartment is covered in outlandish fashion fabrics — “home furnishing fabric is so boring,” Ms. Lam said. An eye-popping swirl of pink, red, mauve and black striped silk adorns a formal 18th-century gilt-wood sofa, and the cushions of the 66 gold ballroom chairs around the dining table are upholstered in mauve and electric yellow.
Overall, the effect is whimsical and absurd, a Chinese version of Pee-wee’s playhouse. Plywood cutouts in the shape of flowers, designed by Ms. Lam and painted white, are suspended from the ceiling in the dining area, and cartoonlike panels shaped like clouds hang from the living area ceiling at varying heights. At night, concealed pink lights above the cutouts lend a phantasmagoric glow. The plaster walls have deeply grooved, swirling patterns, created using wooden templates. Visitors enter the apartment for cocktails on its west side, where the arrangement of furniture and objects is symmetrical, then move to the long dining table and, after dinner, toward the east side of the apartment, where the art and the furniture, including a curlicue loveseat upholstered in a pink-and-black zebra print, are asymmetrically laid out.
“When you arrive at my house it’s more formal,” Ms. Lam said, “but then after a few drinks during dinner you will be more relaxed in a more vibrant and lively room.”As much as she has made herself at home here, Ms. Lam can’t seem to stay put very long. At the October dinner, she had been in Shanghai for just a few hours, having taken a booth at the Design Art London fair the week before, and would be off again in a few days for an exhibition at Mr. Aaron’s Paris store, the Didier Aaron gallery, which she had redecorated in a wacky combination of 18th-century French furniture and contemporary Chinese design.
“Pearl has the great qualities of being extremely dynamic and extremely inventive,” Mr. Aaron said. “What she does is not always the best taste,” he added. “But she gets things moving.”

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A French Star Reinvents a New York Classic

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 16:20:29 -0400

WHEN Jacques Grange paid his first visit in early September to Galerie Mark, a Manhattan real estate sales office masquerading as an art-and-design gallery, his perennial look of wry amusement was tinged with anxiety.
“It’s a bit much, no?” said Mr. Grange, France’s most famous interior designer, standing in the storefront space in the Mark Hotel on Madison Avenue at 77th Street. He raised his demi-lune spectacles to peruse wall text praising him as the hotel’s “ingenious decorator, master planner and recipient of France’s greatest tribute, the Légion d’honneur.” A three-story billboard with a blown-up watercolor portrait of Mr. Grange, identifying him as the force behind the reconfiguration of the 1927 hotel, had yet to go up outside.
In spite of his protests, Mr. Grange, 63, seems content with efforts to trumpet his role in the redevelopment of the hotel, which closed in January and is scheduled to reopen next summer. The Mark is the latest New York luxury hotel to go hybrid —one-third of the building is being converted into 42 co-op apartments — and Mr. Grange is doing it all, designing the lobby, the hotel’s bar and restaurant, the 118 hotel rooms that will remain, and 32 of the new apartments, from moldings and coffered ceilings to custom fabrics and furnishings. (He is also designing the bathrooms for the other 10 co-ops, which will be sold unfurnished.) It’s an unusual project for him — only his second large-scale residential project, and by far the biggest job he has taken on in his 40 years as a decorator — but it is typical, in at least one regard, of the turn his work has taken as he has begun to spend more time in this country.
Mr. Grange’s fame and reputation spring largely from his decades of work for high-profile private clients like Yves Saint Laurent and Princess Caroline, and from a playfully traditionalist decorating style, in which he has often mixed 18th- and 19th-century antiques with French 1940s pieces. But lately, as his list of American clients has grown his work here has shifted toward an upbeat modernism that mixes 20th-century and contemporary styles, and which characterizes his plans for the Mark.
“That’s the influence of New York — the modernity, the creation,” Mr. Grange said. “I’m more protective in Paris, more traditional, but I’m more open to being modern in America.”
The shift began, he said, about seven years ago, when he was working on a Manhattan apartment for Francois Pinault, the French industrialist, with the modernist New York architect Richard Gluckman. “We had a very good rapport,” Mr. Grange said of the collaboration. “You meet somebody, you receive new information, you change your mind, you change your style. It’s an evolution.”
Since then, he has done modern-leaning interiors for many more clients in this country, including Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir, and his daughter, Aerin Lauder. “I love to work in America,” he said. “It’s my favorite clients. They’re so receptive to what I do. And some are young, too,” he added. “That’s fantastic for me.”
But his biggest American clients in the last few years have been the developers introduced to him by Louise Sunshine, the New York real estate marketing strategist who first visited his Paris office on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré in 1999. Mr. Grange recalled his bewilderment on that occasion, when Ms. Sunshine proposed he work on the interiors of One Beacon Court, a Cesar Pelli-designed tower on East 58th Street being built by the developer Steven Roth.
“I had no idea who is Louise Sunshine,” Mr. Grange said, adding that he was “not enthusiastic” at the thought of taking on a huge commercial project. “I looked at her very astonished.”
Eventually, Ms. Sunshine’s legendary persuasiveness prevailed. “When Louise wants something she doesn’t stop,” he said. “She pushes you.”
The location of One Beacon Court, opposite Bloomingdale’s between Lexington and Third Avenues, did not seem propitious for sales of multimillion-dollar luxury apartments, but Ms. Sunshine thought she saw a solution in Mr. Grange. She knew his work and reputation, and believed his “always luxurious and elegant” approach to design, applied to the building’s public spaces, would appeal to prospective buyers.
“It didn’t matter that Jacques Grange wasn’t a household name in the U.S.A.,” Ms. Sunshine said. “Beacon Court was a building for the cognoscenti who could afford the best and the finest. We were not marketing to the masses.”
“It worked,” Mr. Grange said. “She sold everything.”
In 2006, about a year after One Beacon Court opened, Ms. Sunshine introduced Mr. Grange to another of her employers, Izak Senbahar, the president of Alexico Group, the real estate firm that had recently bought the Mark Hotel. Mr. Senbahar had already decided he wanted Mr. Grange to redesign the Mark. “I was looking for someone who’d give me a comfortable, homey feeling,” Mr. Senbahar said. “I love the way Jacques mixes things and plays with styles.”
On trips to Paris to confer with Mr. Grange, Mr. Senbahar and Ms. Sunshine spent time with Pierre Passebon, Mr. Grange’s romantic partner of 20 years, who owns Galerie du Passage, an antiques store there that also exhibits work by leading contemporary furniture designers. They were impressed by his eye and ideas, and by the fact that he “puts Jacques in a good mood,” Ms. Sunshine said — “that’s very important” — and persuaded him to become involved with the project.
Mr. Passebon was invited to commission well-known designers — the roster now includes Ron Arad, Mattia Bonetti and Vladimir Kagan, among several others — to create one-off pieces of furniture for the Mark’s ground-floor public rooms. He would also “curate” art and other pieces for the 32 co-ops, taking charge, Ms. Sunshine said, of “the photographs, the accessories, all the wonderful things that make a suite a home.”
The Mark project is the first time that Mr. Grange and Mr. Passebon, 53, have collaborated in business, a fact that Ms. Sunshine makes much of. “This is just a fantastic thing,” she said, “to be able to live in an environment that has been custom-designed” by the two men. “This opportunity, this lifestyle. This living opportunity.”
THE building is currently little more than a shell, with the exception of a model apartment on the 9th floor that Mr. Grange installed in mid-October.
“I selected materials that are very sophisticated, I hope,” Mr. Grange said, leading a visitor on a hard-hat tour with Mr. Passebon. “With simple, pared-down furniture, if it’s not done in quality finishing, it’s banal.”
In the living room, Mr. Grange reclined on a large gray mohair velvet sofa — like all the furnishings here, his own design. “It’s very soft,” he said approvingly. “Like a teddy bear.”
He described the large scale of the sofa and the king-size bed next door as carefully calibrated: “It’s the lesson of Coco Chanel and Madame Castaing — oversized furniture,” he said. “It makes you feel cozy.”
To create the sense of being ensconced in a comforting cocoon, he designed translucent beige window blinds and amply proportioned ivory taffeta curtains, which, he said, together create a timeless and light feeling, “like floating in a cloud.”
He pointed out a blue armchair, “embroidered specially”; simple desks in the living room and bedroom — “it’s Jean-Michel Frank, interpreted by me”: a gray-on-gray patterned carpet “inspired by Iznik lace”; white marble with nickel fixtures in the bathroom.
“The finishing is very fine,” he said. “It’s couture.”
“Not prèt-a-porter,” added Mr. Passebon.
When the Mark reopens next summer — the hotel and apartments are slated to open together — visitors will be free to wander through the lobby and Bar Mark, which will feature a wavy, cloud-shaped bar and matching cocktail tables designed by Guy de Rougemont, a Paris-based artist and designer, and a herd of pony skin sofas and armchairs by Mr. Kagan, set against a geometrical carpet of Mr. Grange’s design. “I imagined a bar I’d want to go to,” Mr. Grange said, “something amusing with the feeling of a nightclub.”
Mr. Grange is currently working on the design for the hotel’s restaurant, which will be an extension of Sant Ambroeus, the Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue. Its one-of-a-kind pieces will include a skylight by Eric Schmitt, a French designer known for his metal furniture, and quirky cabinets by Mr. Bonetti, the arty Swiss-born designer. Ms. Sunshine was characteristically enthused. “There will never be another restaurant like this,” she said.
It was Ms. Sunshine who came up with the idea of asking the artists and designers who have made the furnishings for the public rooms to create additional pieces to be sold in the sales office, a k a the Galerie Mark (where sketches and swatches from Mr. Grange’s designs for the project are also displayed).
“For instance, there will be a chair by Anne Corbière in the Galerie, and there will be a tear sheet that shows the piece she’s designed for the Mark Collection,” Ms. Sunshine said, using the name given to the one-offs by Richard Pandiscio, a graphic designer hired to help brand the project.
The marketing campaign for the Mark went into high gear on Oct. 16, when Mr. Grange was honored at a dinner at the French Embassy’s Cultural Services Building on Fifth Avenue given by Izak Senbahar and Elias Simon, the owners of the Mark, and attended by what Mr. Grange referred to as the “crème de la crème,” including a few of his wealthy New York clients. The invitation described the event as a celebration of Mr. Grange’s becoming a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, although the fact that he had actually received that honor several months before was not mentioned. And the push will continue throughout the fall, as prospective buyers and design aficionados are invited to meet Mr. Passebon and some of the furniture designers. Looking around at the crowd gathered at the embassy dinner to toast Mr. Grange, Mr. Pandiscio wondered at all the effort.
“Jacques is very talented and it’s an incredible neighborhood,” he said. “How hard do you have to sell?”

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The Ladies Man: Remembering Jerry Zipkin

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 08:29:28 -0400

As Nancy Reagan's best friend, and walker to some of the most glamorous women in the 1980s, Jerry Zipkin wielded a unique brand of social power. Now, more than 12 years after his death, people still can't stop talking about him.

When the Garden Designs the House

Thu, 4 Oct 2007 16:24:43 -0400

ELEVEN years ago, when Christopher H. Browne bought an 18-acre oceanfront estate on Further Lane in East Hampton, he thought he knew what he wanted to do with it. A gardening aficionado, he planned to tear down the existing 1950s house on the dunes and build an English country house in the center of the property, surrounded by formal English gardens and only remotely connected to the sea.
But largely because of an arrangement he had made with the property’s previous owner, by which she could stay in the house for several more summers, he began by focusing his energies on the garden. As a result, the house that he will finally start building this spring — a glazed box on the site of the original house that he designed with Andrew Gordon, a modernist architect and his partner of eight years — has been shaped by the surrounding 18 acres to a degree he never imagined.
Partly by chance, Mr. Browne, 60, a managing director of the Tweedy, Browne Company, a New York investment firm, stumbled on an approach to construction that has been advocated for the past decade by prominent landscape architects up and down the East Coast, including Patrick Chassé in Somerville, Mass.; Douglas Reed of Reed Hilderbrand Associates in Watertown, Mass.; and Thomas Woltz, a partner in Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in Charlottesville, Va. All argue strongly for spending a lot of time with the land that will surround a house before building it.
“By understanding the natural dynamic of a site, you can create more potent and meaningful architecture,” said Mr. Woltz, who holds master’s degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of Virginia, where he teaches a course called “Sites and Systems” that emphasizes the importance of assessing a site’s prevailing winds, geological conditions, plant communities and soil qualities, among other conditions. “The goal is to inspire architecture that’s inextricably linked to the land,” he added.
While Mr. Browne and Mr. Gordon’s gradualism was dictated in part by necessity, both came to appreciate its value.
“A lot of people don’t get it. They say, why haven’t you started building yet?” said Mr. Gordon, 46, of the couple’s East Hampton friends. “There’s nothing worse than when people tear down the trees and plunk down a house, put in a few plants and call it a day.”
“We’re trying to focus on making the house part of the land,” he said.
Mr. Browne, who grew up gardening in New Jersey — “My mother was an avid gardener, and she made all of her boys help her,” he said — already had some experience with the garden-first approach. He bought his last East Hampton property, eight acres on Middle Lane, in 1990, and spent six years creating the garden there while he remained in a house on another property two miles away. “By the time I’d built the house on Middle Lane, it was sitting in a mature landscape,” he said.
That was in 1997, a few months after he had bought the beachfront property for $13 million and two years before he met Mr. Gordon through mutual friends. Within a few months of their meeting, the two were talking constantly about how the new property should be altered.
Shortly after they met, Mr. Browne took a tour of
National Trust estates in England, organized by Sotheby’s. “While Chris was on that trip, he sent me three letters with sketches of gardens that interested him,” Mr. Gordon said, “and that began our dialogue about the dynamics of innovative gardens and houses.”
Mr. Browne discussed with Mr. Gordon the idea of cultivating an intimate garden around their future house, while allowing the rest of the property to feel like parkland. “And that’s what we’ve tried to achieve,” Mr. Gordon said. Other romantic ideas had to be scrapped, like keeping free-range chickens on an island in a pond to provide fresh eggs for breakfast. “We discovered that foxes can swim,” Mr. Gordon said.
In the spring of 2000, before making any major decisions, the couple built a temporary 35-foot-tall observation platform in the middle of the property to help them formulate their ideas for the overall design. From this elevated perch, Mr. Browne came to agree with Mr. Gordon that in spite of the existing house’s limited views of their future garden to the north — its living room looked out onto an interior courtyard — its location had the potential to offer the best views in all directions.
They realized that they wanted a house that would “connect the ocean with the garden to the north,” Mr. Browne said, and decided to abandon his plan of building in the center of the property. Instead, the new house would rise on the footprint of the existing one, but with soil added to make the elevation slightly higher.
“From spending time in the existing house, we realized how much we enjoyed the informality of a one-story house,” said Mr. Gordon, who is president of Andrew Gordon Inc. “We decided to raise it by a few feet to take advantage of the view.”
The couple decided to create a pond in the center of the property that would welcome visitors. “We wanted the first impression to be of the pond and the garden, not the house,” Mr. Gordon said. They staked out informal pathways to give guests different ways to explore the garden. “In the past, some of my best conversations with friends occurred while walking and talking by water,” he added. “I wanted a garden that paved the way for discussion.”
From the beginning, they agreed that they wanted waterlily ponds, a wildflower meadow, an apple orchard and thousands of specimen trees. “Interesting trees provide a romantic sense of history,” Mr. Gordon said, “and water emphasizes change and reflects light more profoundly than anything else.”
The first major step, which Mr. Browne had taken in 1998 while contemplating his original plan, was to plant an apple orchard near the road and to move hundreds of cedar trees to the eastern and western edges of the property. The clearing provided eight acres to create the 500-foot-long waterlily pond and the smaller lotus pond that now dominate the garden. Lined with iris, lilies and native grasses, they have become a natural habitat for dragonflies, hummingbirds, frogs and muskrats. (Imported wildlife hasn’t fared so well: They have given up stocking the ponds with exotic fish, Mr. Browne said, explaining, “It’s disheartening to watch herons pick up a $70 lunch.”)
The pond water is filtered organically through a series of electrical pumps around the perimeter of each pond that pass through beds of water hyacinths that absorb the sediment. “It’s a natural way to avoid chemicals,” Mr. Gordon said. “If you’re swimming, the water tastes sweet.”
To adorn the ponds, which were dug in 2002, Mr. Gordon designed a pair of curved wooden jetties and an arcing bridge to a little island in the waterlily pond. During their frequent walks around the garden in the months that followed, the couple were fascinated by the flickering play of light on the underside of the bridge.
Now, hoping to recreate that dappled-light effect inside the future house, Mr. Gordon has designed three rectangular reflecting pools — 16 feet by 80 feet, 20 by 65 feet and 20 by 24 feet — all jutting out perpendicular to the house and abutting the glass walls of the living room. Blue and purple waterlilies will be cultivated in the pools to echo those in the ponds downhill from the house.
“The idea is to take the sense of water and light into the house,” Mr. Gordon said, “with a soft movement that flickers through the house as the light bounces off the ceiling,” even at night, when the pools will be illuminated.
“The combination of the wind and the movement of water keeps your eye entertained,” he added. “You don’t need loud music.”
The one-story, 9,000-square-foot house they are planning will have four bedrooms and two guest suites. It will be slightly smaller than the existing structure, and not a big house “by East Hampton standards” Mr. Browne said, seemingly proud of his economy. (“We don’t need 8 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms like some people out here,” he said.) Its exterior will be large panels of glass between the lean horizontal planes of floor and ceiling in dark stucco, made to recede into the landscape.
The hub of the house will be a large rectangular living room with glass walls and doors facing the Atlantic to the south and the garden to the north.
They have planned as many precautions as they can to protect the landscape and the plants from the inevitable ravages of construction. “It’s been a real advantage to camp out” in the existing house for three years, Mr. Browne said, reflecting on all the time spent shaping and living with the landscape.
If he had rushed ahead with his original plans, he added, he would have missed out on the possibilities of bringing together garden and sea, and the thrill of living next to the ocean, a thrill the couple experienced their first night in the house. “There was a magnificent lightning storm,” Mr. Gordon said. “Lightning was dancing off the ocean.”
Still, a creative process that’s constantly in flux “takes a lot of patience,” Mr. Gordon said. “As an architect, I’m used to working to a master plan where everything’s plotted. Some of my projects are finished in five months. This is the reverse. It’s evolving.
“We draw up plans, then get a surveyor to plot it out with flags, then we move the flags around,” Mr. Gordon went on. A nursery then “brings in hundreds of trees and forklifts move them around,” he added. “It would have been more economical to buy the nursery.”
“It’s a long process,” Mr. Gordon said. “But it lets us share the planning together, and ideas pop into Chris’s head.”
Mr. Browne, meanwhile, clearly revels in the process. “Gardening is a bit like rearranging furniture,” he said. “You can make dramatic changes every year by picking things up and moving them. It’s not static like the walls of a house are.”
Does he ever lament the 11-year delay in building his dream house? “Not at all,” Mr. Browne said. “I really enjoy the process of discovery and brainstorming. Without all that time, it wouldn’t have been as much fun.”

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Behind the Glass Wall

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 16:37:52 -0400

WHEN Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., officially opens to the public on June 21, paying visitors will have a chance to explore one of the world’s most celebrated works of Modernism for the first time since its completion in 1949. The diminutive glass-and-steel building and its uncluttered interior, which have barely changed in 58 years, are so spare that it is hard to imagine that anyone ever lived there. But for nearly all that time, it was the constantly used country retreat of its round-spectacled creator, who shared it after 1960 with David Whitney.
Mr. Johnson was a controversial architect, acclaimed for a handful of brilliant designs and for his influential role as a curator and mentor, and reviled for his careerism and for work that some considered shallow and derivative — as well as for his fascist leanings in the 1930s (which he later renounced). He loved attention and cultivated his celebrity, holding court daily in Manhattan at a reserved table at the Four Seasons restaurant, which he designed in 1958.
But he was very much at home in the private world he made for himself and his friends in Connecticut. “In New York he could be extremely imperious at his corner banquette,” said Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of Yale’s architecture school and a longtime friend of Mr. Johnson. “You saw him much more relaxed in New Canaan.”
Beginning in the mid-1940s, with his purchase of a five-acre plot, Mr. Johnson assembled what would become a 47-acre estate with 14 buildings and follies, old and new, including a brick guest house, a library and painting and sculpture galleries.
“He treated the whole property as one house,” said Michael Moran, a photographer who visited the property several times in the 1990s. “The guest house was the bedroom, the Glass House was the living room, the library was his study.” There is little doubt, though, that for Mr. Johnson the 1,728-square-foot Glass House, for which he named the entire property, remained the centerpiece.
Its design is simple: an open plan interrupted only by a circular brick bathroom, a kitchen concealed under a sleek walnut folding bar, and ventilation provided by floor-to-ceiling doors on all sides that can be opened to the four winds. Although Mr. Johnson and Mr. Whitney, an art curator, were avid collectors, only two artworks are on display: a statue by Elie Nadelman and a painting attributed to the 17th-century artist Nicolas Poussin, on a two-legged stand in the middle of the space. “I don’t think clutter was allowed,” said the painter Jasper Johns, a friend of both men. “One was always aware of their ruthless elegance.”
In 1986 Mr. Johnson donated his estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation with the agreement that it would be opened to the public after his death. He died in his sleep in the Glass House at 98, in early 2005; his much younger companion succumbed to cancer only five months later, at 66. Below, a few of their friends and acquaintances remember, in interviews conducted mostly by telephone, the home they made in what others knew only as an icon of 20th-century architecture.
FRANK STELLA, artist. I have no reason to believe that there were ever any challenges for Philip living in the Glass House. It was always other people who worried about how they might live there. Philip didn’t have a problem.
FRAN LEBOWITZ, writer and humorist, who lived across the street in a house owned by Mr. Johnson in 1998 and 1999. The remark that angered Philip the most was when people said, “Well, I wouldn’t live here.” He’d say: “I don’t understand. Who asked them?” He was very annoyed by that.
I actually would not have wanted to live there. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep in a house like that. I’m much too afraid of the country. It’s very hard for me not to imagine that anyplace outside New York is full of ax murderers. But I was in the Glass House many times during the full course of the light of a day. To be in it in a very casual constant way was a tremendous aesthetic pleasure. One of the greatest in my life so far.
MR. STELLA I really was taken with it. It was the most level space I’ve ever been in. The feeling of calm and stability you had when you put your feet down on the floor was just wonderful. It gave the lie to the idea that the world rotates and everything is in motion.
RUTH SMITHERS, longtime New Canaan resident. He always said, “This is my serenity, my place to hide.”
I didn’t know the difference between architecture and applejacks. I came up here in 1958. One day in a fit of craziness I called up Mr. Johnson. I said: “I just moved to New Canaan. I’m a friend of Howard Barnstone” — Johnson’s supervising architect for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston. He said, “You moved to New Canaan? What are you doing tonight? Get over here.”
I walked into that house, and I couldn’t believe it. It’s sited so perfectly. My jaw was down someplace.
AGNES GUND, president emerita, Museum of Modern Art. It was very serene — a lyrical, quiet place in beautiful surroundings. The only thing that changed was the weather and the time of day. You began to count on it. I always felt very happy there. I felt luckier and luckier to get asked.
BARBARA HARTMAN, Mr. Johnson’s administrative assistant from 2000 to 2003. He loved how the “wallpaper” changed all the time, by which he meant the outdoors. It was never the same.
BARBARA JAKOBSON, trustee, Museum of Modern Art. To be there in the snow! I was there one winter afternoon. That was simply stunning — the whiteness. I advise people to see it more than once. Go in winter, autumn and spring.
PORT DRAPER, engineer responsible for building and maintaining all structures on the property, starting in 1968. I walked up to the Glass House, I took one look and said, “Oh my God, I could never live in anything else.” I went home and tore all the walls out of my house. That house is so wonderful to live in. People don’t have a clue how wonderful it is.
You see the sunset over Stamford, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. You sit in there and the animals — squirrels, deer, geese — wander around outside. There’s no division between you and the outside.

MS. JAKOBSON It was a very managed landscape. It felt infinite, because you couldn’t see other houses. I’m sure that Philip stood at every possible vantage point to determine exactly what needed to be cut, trimmed. The fact is, the house was his pleasure — and everybody else’s, as a result. Very few people take such infinite care to inhabit a life the way he did.
JASPER JOHNS, artist. One of the first times I visited him there I said, “Philip, it’s so incredible that you’ve found this location for your house, because you’re not aware of being in it, you’re just aware of this incredible landscape.” Philip said, “Yes, I was very fortunate.” And then he said, “David, I think next year we’ll put those trees over there.” And I suddenly had an insight into how he thought.
MR. DRAPER The work never stopped. We were either moving rocks or changing the landscaping or fixing up the Glass House. Over the years we built a new bathroom in there, we put in a new floor when the heating pipes rotted out and all new cabinetwork because the termites ate up all the old cabinets.
Johnson never complained. He always assumed that everything he built there was so oddball, there were bound to be problems. But everything was fun. If things didn’t turn out right he never said anything about it. Because that wouldn’t have been fun. Johnson came out to that house every weekend for only one reason: to have fun. And he was the most fun person I ever worked for.
PAMELA GORES, widow of Landis Gores, an architectural associate of Mr. Johnson who made all the drawings for the Glass House. The first night he spent there, he’d been staying with us. He said, “I have to go over and spend the night.” He went over and called and said: “You’ve got to come over immediately. I turned on the lights and all I see is me, me, me, me, me!” After that he had outside lights installed to balance the light on the inside.
ROBERT A. M. STERN, dean, Yale School of Architecture. He told me that a year or two after the house was built they had to rip off the roof because it leaked. Frank Lloyd Wright boasted that a house of his was a “two-bucket house.” Philip said: “Oh, that’s nothing, Frank. Mine’s a four-bucket house. One in each corner.”
MR. DRAPER The sun would come blasting in there. You’d have to get up very early in the morning. In the winter, the bathroom would block the sun from your pillow, but in summer you’d have to get up early.
MS. GORES I remember his first oil bill was shocking. And oil was 11 cents a gallon when he built that house.
MR. DRAPER There used to be radiant heat in both the ceiling and floor. But the ceiling heat died many years ago for some reason. I think it froze. He ran the floor so hot, you couldn’t go in there with bare feet — you’d burn them. When it got really cold out there, the system would practically put 200-degree water in the floor.
MR. STERN During the 1973 energy crisis it was so expensive to run the Glass House that Philip closed the place down.
In the summer, he loved to open the four doors to get tremendous breezes. There wasn’t any need for a.c. Sometimes the wind would come from the west up the valley and would blow things down. I remember the Poussin was blown down and had to be repaired. And if you look at the low lamp that Philip designed near the floor — it sits near the group of
furniture — it’s very dented. That’s because that would blow over very often.
MR. DRAPER One night a branch blew through one of the windows and then blew through another one. Johnson said, “I thought the end of the world had come!” It’s not tempered glass. It shattered. All over his bed. Rain’s pouring in. Glass all over the place. He’s sitting in his chair, blinking. The glass broke? That was funny. The roof leaked? That was funny.
MR. STERN Clutter? Don’t be silly. Both Philip and David were anal-retentives of the most incredible kind. David would drink, smoke and do every kind of wicked behavior along those lines. But he was the original ashtray emptier. Nothing was ever out of place in the Glass House. Every flower knew its proper position in the vase.
CHRISTY MacLEAR, executive director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. There’s no evidence of tchotchkes. Visitors are always astounded at the discipline it must have taken to be so spare.
DAVID SALLE, artist. I remember coming with a friend for lunch, and David took her coat but didn’t do anything with her handbag, which she set down on the kitchen counter. And Philip said, “You can’t put that there!” She was taken aback. Someone came and put it in the closet.
HILARY LEWIS, co-author, “Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words” and “The Architecture of Philip Johnson.” I never sensed that he was unnerved by clutter. He wasn’t finicky. But when possible he liked things to be returned to their perfect original form. I was there for a photo shoot, and a photographer went to move a couple of objects on the Barcelona table — an ashtray and a malachite box — to better focus the shot on Johnson. David silently walked over and moved them back into their original position. Johnson nodded to the photographer and said, “I think it’s better.”
PHILIP J. DEMPSEY, art dealer and a Johnson grandnephew. He had two dogs, and they knocked over an orchid someone had brought him as a gift. And he said: “It’s time for the orchid to go. Get rid of it.”
MS. GUND David got the dogs to keep him company. At first Philip didn’t like them. Then he loved them.
MS. LEWIS Oh, my, yes, they did shed. Keeshonds — they’re Dutch barge dogs. Fluffy, wolf-looking dogs. I’d say, “Philip, the dogs are on the daybed!” He’d say: “That’s O.K. They’re waiting for David.” There was a sense of complete comfort with having dogs around. It was actually very much a lived-in space.
VINCENT SCULLY, Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture, Yale. He was so hospitable there, in the early days. I visited first when the house was under construction, in 1948. And when it was first built it was wide open. Yale students were there every weekend. It was sort of a running seminar. There was always a conversation about architecture. You’d go in and get a martini. It was a real salon — something we don’t have much of in America.
MS. SMITHERS Nobody could get in there except Yale students. They had to be very young and very cute. They just called up Mr. Johnson. But few people in town could get in — very few except me.
MR. STERN I started going in the ’60s. Typically it was Saturday or Sunday lunch. Other architects would be there. Jack Robertson. Charlie Gwathmey. Richard Meier. The crowd Philip later called the kids, when we were in our 40s. You’d walk around. You might end up at the art gallery and have another drink there. There’s a little bar in the gallery. The conversation was wide-ranging, highbrow and low — the brows went up and down. Gossip was extremely important.
MS. LEBOWITZ Philip was a big lover of gossip and wit and other people’s problems. And he knew a lot, because he was interested. Philip was extremely intelligent. Much more intelligent than he needed to be. He was very cultivated in a way that probably no American is now. It was just for pleasure — there was nothing the least bit academic about Philip.
MR. STELLA Philip was ferociously
entertaining. You were always on the borderline of being in stitches.
MS. GORES I remember wonderful parties in the 50s. Mies was there with his mistress, who was beautiful. Henry-Russell Hitchcock was there, and the Rockefellers. Philip loved to give a good party.
MS. SMITHERS In the 60s, Mr. Johnson threw a big party for Merce Cunningham. It was at the time of all the massive publicity for Andy Warhol. I think MoMA had just bought the soup can.
I was standing with a double scotch, hoping for the best. It was spring and twilighty. All these people milling around, very glamorous. I said: “Mr. Johnson, look over there. There’s a white-haired man coming in.” I thought it was an old guy. Philip said, “It’s Andy.” Everyone went over to say hello, except me. I didn’t know who he was.
It was John Cage music and Merce Cunningham’s dancers — beautiful dancers. Cage’s music had something to do with doors slamming and whistles going off. Then great balloons — some big and black, some small and red and yellow. It was very strange. I thought to myself: “Here we are in 1967, standing next to a glass house listening to doors slam and whistles going off. This is out of this world.” It was so out of context for suburbia in the 60s. You were talking about car pools and how not to have babies.
We left shortly thereafter. My then-husband thought the whole thing was humbug.
DAVID VAUGHAN, archivist, Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The music was so loud the neighbors complained. Then Andy Warhol’s band, the Velvet Underground, played afterwards, for the public, and again the neighbors complained about that.
MS. SMITHERS Incidentally, New Canaanites hated Philip Johnson. What he was doing to this town! He was making a New England town into Heaven knows what!
I remember one time around 1970, I took my children over — they knew about my rapture over Mr. Johnson. I said to him, “Mr. Johnson, we’re so lucky to have you here,” and he said, “Well, you’re the only person who thinks that in New Canaan.”
MR. STERN For a long time, Philip had a wonderful cook, Lena. Her husband, Reinhold, was the butler — he dropped things. Lena always prepared lunch in that open kitchen. It doesn’t seem so startling now because everyone has lofts and open kitchens, but it was quite startlingly different. Then they got rid of the cook — Philip was cutting down on expenses.
FRANK O. GEHRY, architect. David did the cooking and was very fastidious. He also provided the suitable narcotics for the occasion — marijuana baked in bread. He had a baker who made it for him. And Philip just drank his large glass of gin, in the early days. Pure gin. It looked like he was drinking water. He could put away a lot of it.
MS. LEBOWITZ You never saw anyone eat less in your life. It must have been the key to his longevity. Philip was very uninterested in food. It was like eating with a model.
MR. GEHRY They dressed for the occasion. It made sense: their activity, their dress, the room and the site, it all had a symbiotic relationship that was uncanny. It was grand and generous and eloquent, and all of a piece. And it wasn’t claustrophobic — you felt good being there. The discussion, the building. I miss it. I miss them very much.
MS. JAKOBSON There was a certain ritualistic aspect to visiting the Glass House. The greeting; to the lunch; the walk; the finish, so Philip could take his nap and work. You always felt welcome, and you always knew when it was over.
MR. STERN Philip would do a fabulous body motion, and you knew it was time to leave. If people didn’t leave, he’d say, “Time to go, kiddies.”
MS. LEWIS By the time I was working there, in 1992, David didn’t seem interested in cooking anymore, and Philip was not keen on overnight guests. He said the problem with the guest house was, “You end up with guests.”
He was happiest being alone there with David. Literally every time David walked into the room, Philip’s face would light up with a big smile. He’d say, “David’s here!” as if this was a wonderful surprise.
MICHAEL MORAN, photographer whose pictures of the property, taken from 1994 to 1996, are collected in the new book “Glass House.” When I was there, he and David were sleeping in the guest house and treating the Glass House as a living room, a place to meet. But then something interesting happened: after Johnson had had heart surgery in 1996, he used the Glass House as a hospital room. You got the feeling that if he was going to die, he wanted to die in the Glass House. We would be walking around the grounds, and you would see him in bed. Then, of course, he had his remarkable recovery and lived for many more years.
MS. MacLEAR For years, he and David would work across the table from each other in the Glass House, Philip with his back to the landscape. But after his surgery, he changed his location at the table, turning around to watch the landscape.
MS. LEWIS He was so interested in what was happening outside the Glass House. He’d be speaking to you, but seem a little bit distracted, not because he had trouble concentrating but because something was so fabulous outside, whether it was a specific type of bird or the way the light was affecting a certain type of tree.
MS. JAKOBSON Philip lived forever, then David was gone in a few minutes.
But David was utterly steadfast. There was one brief moment when he put Philip in a nursing home, and it lasted for about a day. I can’t think of anything more wonderful for Philip than the fact that he stayed in the Glass House to the end.
Philip Nobel contributed reporting.

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After Midcentury Modern, Whats Old Looks New

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:46:12 -0400

DURING a black-tie preview of the Biennale des Antiquaires, Europe’s best-known art and antiques fair, on Sept. 13, Robert Couturier paused at an exhibitor’s booth to inspect a small table designed by Jean-Michel Frank in 1938. “It’s exquisite,” Mr. Couturier, the New York decorator, said later. “But at $400,000 for three pieces of wood with fish skin and glue, it’s a bit much.”
The astronomical prices being asked for certain pieces of 20th-century furniture were the subject of widespread comment at the preview. Several revelers were agog at the asking price for a 1951 library table designed by Charlotte Perriand, at the stand of Galerie Down Town, a Parisian dealer: 1.5 million euros, or nearly $2 million.
The fashion for 20th-century furniture — from Design Within Reach to Mr. Frank’s sleek Art Deco designs — has been the staple of shelter magazines for the past decade, as collectors at the top end of the market have increasingly vied for masterpieces by 20th-century designers, like the pair of 1920’s jardinieres made by Armand-Albert Rateau, a French architect and decorator, that sold at Christie’s in June for $5.3 million.
But many observers at the Biennale, which opened to the public on Friday and runs through Sept. 24, were moved to pose the seemingly inevitable question: Has the fashion for 20th-century decorative arts reached a saturation point, if not yet in the mainstream market then in the collectors’ one that generally leads it? And if midcentury modern is finally reaching its peak, what will collectors turn to next?
There was no shortage of speculation.
“I think the mid-20th century is already a little bit on the way out,” said Juan Pablo Molyneux, the New York-based decorator. “I believe we’re going to go more into Oriental tranquillity and simplicity. Open the paper and whatever’s going on in the world is related to China. All the great architects in the world are working in Shanghai.”
Mr. Couturier, for his part, said he believes “people are going to go back to beautiful 18th-century furniture” of the kind that dominated the high-end antiques market as recently as 10 years ago. (The period was the Biennale’s original reason for being when it was founded in 1901, but by this year only eight 18th-century furniture dealers were represented, an all-time low, compared to 26 booths offering 20th-century art and furniture.)
But the prediction that came up more often than any other had to do with a period that was glaringly absent at the fair: the 19th century.
“In the Biennale, it’s been like that for years: It’s like the 19th century never existed,” said Daniel Alcouffe, the former chief curator of decorative arts at the Louvre. “But I think things are going to change. I think in the next Biennale we’ll have stands about the 19th century.”
Odile Nouvel, the curator of the 19th-century collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which opened last week after a 10-year, $46-million renovation, pointed to a big auction that Sotheby’s will hold in London in October, which includes works of art created for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. “Ten years ago such an auction would be absolutely impossible,” Ms. Nouvel said.
One reason for the rising interest in 19th-century decorative arts may be the diminishing supply of high-quality 18th- and 20th-century furniture. According to Louis Bofferding, a New York furniture dealer, “Nineteenth century is the only thing that hasn’t already been bought up.”
Jacques Grange, a leading French decorator who works in a wide range of periods, has recently developed a taste for the undulating lines of furniture from the 1890’s. “The quality’s fabulous and the prices are very reasonable,” he said, adding that he is beginning to advise clients to “to go in this direction.”
And Benjamin Steinitz, a Paris antiques dealer, credited a new French interest in the 19th century in part to François-Joseph Graf, one of France’s most famous interior designers. “In Paris it’s quite the taste now, because of the taste of Graf,” he said.
This month, Mr. Graf’s work and influence has been evident all over the city, not only in the lavishly styled booths he designed for some of the most prominent dealers showing at the Biennale, but in the 10 period rooms he created at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and in the arrangement of furniture at Galerie Historismus, a new showroom specializing in furniture from 1840 to 1910. During a pre-show visit to the Grand Palais, the newly renovated 1900 exhibition hall where the Biennale was held this year, he spoke of the 19th century as “the most interesting period” in the decorative arts, in part because it’s been “so out of fashion.”
Mr. Graf, for one, hopes that doesn’t change too quickly, “so I can buy and my clients can buy. But it’s getting to be very expensive, he added: “A piece by Lièvre” — Édouard Lièvre, a French painter and cabinet maker who died in 1886 — “was $100,000 just a few years ago, now it’s a million.”
Ms. Nouvel said that in the renovation of the museum, space formerly allocated to 18th-century furniture was drastically reduced to make way for new 19th-century galleries. “The public is fascinated by the last two” of these new galleries — those representing 1880 and 1890 — based on her observations from the first week, she said. “They are the two darkest rooms,” she went on, “very dark and neurotic, with dragons and animals fighting.”
People “are now ready to see the 19th century in a more complex, interesting way than a decade ago,” Ms. Nouvel said. “That’s a big change.”
Roberto Polo, the artistic adviser of Galerie Historismus, is counting on it. Mr. Polo, who is widely celebrated for his extraordinary eye and taste, is also known for a spate of legal problems in the 1980’s and ’90’s, including jail time in Switzerland on charges of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from clients when he was a financial adviser. The showroom is his comeback venture, and a departure from his focus on 18th-century pieces at his New York antiques store in the 1980’s.
Mr. Polo’s legal imbroglio does not appear to have diminished his credibility among Parisians who admire his taste.
Ariane Dandois, a leading Parisian dealer of furniture of the 18th and early 19th centuries, echoed many others in saying, “No matter what has been done or said, I don’t care. He’s always had a fantastic eye, and fantastic taste.”
Nevertheless, the project is not without risk. “Most people have a terrible impression of the 19th century; they make a face,” Mr. Graf said, scowling to illustrate. “They think it’s a bad copy of the 18th century.”
Despite her praise for Mr. Polo, Ms. Dandois cast doubt on predictions that 19th-century furniture was due for a revival. “I don’t think people are ready for that again,” Ms. Dandois said. “The one thing everyone wants is contemporary paintings,” she said, which are seen to be incompatible with 19th-century furniture.
Mr. Molyneux was also dubious. It’s something that might happen, he said, but “personally I dislike” the period, he said. “There are extraordinary pieces, but it’s like a theme park. Why would you go through that again?”
And Mr. Couturier said he was unmoved by the 19th-century period rooms at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “I found them dreary to a maximum,” he said. “I hope this isn’t going back into fashion or I’ll have to retire. It’s so heavy, so middle class, and it’s dark, too. I can’t stand it.”
Even so, he does not discount Mr. Polo’s chances for success. “Roberto Polo has wonderful taste,” Mr. Couturier said. “Maybe he can make it happen.”
Mr. Polo said that while some people may be resistant to the charms of late 19th-century furniture, one period that he shows, 1890-1910, is more likely to appeal to contemporary tastes. Daniel Morris, a founder of the Historical Design Gallery in New York, agrees. “The work of the 19th century that’s going to become very popular is the stuff that presages modernism,” Mr. Morris said, “the more radical simplified forms that are the precursors of 20th-century design.”
Mr. Morris also predicted a renewed interest in Art Nouveau, a movement that flourished in France and Belgium, and which has long been out of fashion.
In Paris, Hervé Aaron, a leading 18th-century dealer with galleries in Paris and New York, seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Art Nouveau was very much in fashion 20 years ago,” he said. “I believe it will come back.”
Philippe Garner, the international head of Christie’s 20th-century decorative arts department, was struck by the absence of Art Nouveau at the Biennale and anticipated a resurgence. “It’s a market that’s currently being overlooked,” he said.
Mr. Garner seemed intrigued by Mr. Polo’s efforts to promote 19th-century furniture. “Polo is a wonderful phoenix, isn’t he?” Mr. Garner said. “It seems like a canny move, a clever thing to do. Some of the 19th century schools are undervalued and the work is wonderfully imaginative and beautifully crafted.”
But Mr. Garner sees no end to the market’s enthusiasm for 20th-century modernism. “I don’t think we’re anywhere near saturation,” he said. The current mania for contemporary art is likely to endure, he said. “And 19th-century furniture and contemporary art don’t make natural bedfellows,” he observed.
Interest in the 19th century may be on the rise. “I think it’s plausible,” he said, “but I don’t think it will be at the expense of the beautiful simplicity of 20th-century design.”
“Fashions change, and one goes through different moods and needs,” Mr. Garner added. “Twentieth-century modernism is a wonderful setting to live in, very Zen. But sometimes you want the mind and eye to be richly entertained.”

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In Moscow, a Battle for a Modernist Landmark

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:17:58 -0400

A FEW hours after Viktor Melnikov died of cancer at 91 on Feb. 5, his estranged younger daughter and nephew appeared on his doorstep with a retinue of lawyers and bodyguards to try to seize control of his house in the center of this city.
“My father’s body was still warm,” Ekaterina Karinskaya, Mr. Melnikov’s elder daughter, recalled bitterly. Ms. Karinskaya, the executor of her father’s estate, refused to surrender the house, and her relatives eventually left, but a mysterious car remained outside for two days, she said. According to Ms. Karinskaya, the three men inside it photographed everyone going in and out of the house, but would not disclose who had hired them.
Acrimonious family conflicts are a way of life for the Melnikovs, who have spent the past 20 years embroiled in recriminations and lawsuits over the house in question, the only private one built in the center of Moscow during the Soviet period and an internationally acclaimed Constructivist masterpiece by Mr. Melnikov’s father, the Soviet architect and painter Konstantin Melnikov.
According to Barry Bergdoll, a professor of modern architectural history at Columbia University and the recently appointed chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, the house, finished in 1929, is worth fighting over.
It “is one of the most important house designs of 1920’s modernism,” he said. “The house is of global significance.”
John Stubbs, the vice president for field projects at the World Monuments Fund, likens it to Sir John Soane’s house museum in London and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, calling it “a rare and telling survivor of the extraordinary story of the Russian artistic avant-garde.”
Viktor Melnikov’s will, which has not yet been probated (it was scheduled for Aug. 5, six months after his death) bequeaths his half-share of the house to the Russian state on the condition that it be preserved as a museum honoring his father. It has been held up because the government has not decided whether to accept the bequest.
Two days after Mr. Melnikov’s death, Ms. Karinskaya was shocked to discover that her first cousin, Alexei Ilganaev, who had inherited the other half-share, had sold it in November to Sergey Gordeev, a 33-year-old real estate developer-turned-senator with his own plans for the property.
“Alexei sold it without consulting my father, who was the only person living in the house,” Ms. Karinskaya said.
Now, all involved await word from the Ministry of Culture and the agency in charge of administering national property about what will ultimately become of this striking and historic house that occupies prime real estate near Moscow’s old Arbat pedestrian street.
THE grim soap opera of litigation began in 1988, when Viktor Melnikov’s sister, Lyudmila, demanded that it be subdivided to allow her to move in. He refused and she initiated a lawsuit that dragged on for eight years. A Moscow court awarded her a half-ownership of the house, but not the right to inhabit it. And last year, in a lawsuit initiated by Mr. Melnikov, in a King Lear-like twist, a Moscow judge ruled that his younger daughter, Yelena Melnikova, had deceived her blind father into signing a document giving her ownership of his share of the building. She appealed and lost, but the squabbles continue. Ms. Melnikova is currently disputing the accounting methods used to calculate the compensation that she and her sister are entitled to receive from their father’s estate.
During his lifetime, Viktor Melnikov adamantly refused to sell any of his father’s paintings, sketches or architectural drawings, a legacy worth tens of millions of dollars, opting for a life of poverty in order to preserve the house exactly as it was at the time of his father’s death in 1974.
According to Clementine Cecil, a British-born founder and trustee of the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society who has been a tireless crusader for the house, Mr. Melnikov spent virtually no money on food, surviving on tea and meager servings of vegetables. “Cockroaches scurried about the kitchen and over the paintings,” she recalled.
The elder Melnikov’s eyeglasses still lie where he left them, by his drawing desk. Earlier this summer, Ms. Karinskaya led this visitor up a curved stairway late one night to her father’s huge, airy painting studio on the top floor. Clearly impatient with her guest, who struggled to keep up in the mandatory house-tour slippers that made the narrow stairs seem especially treacherous, she pointed out the building’s unique structure.
The three-story, plaster-sheathed house is composed of two interlocking cylindrical towers. The taller, to the rear, is honeycombed with rhomboid-shaped windows that cast shifting patterns of light by day. In the front of the house, a 17-foot-tall expanse of glass is topped with a sign proclaiming the name of its creator: Konstantin Melnikov, Architect. (It was a bold calling card during a Soviet regime that prized uniformity; after the house was completed, Stalin denounced Melnikov, who was never permitted to build again.)
Recently, the house has begun to show signs of serious physical neglect. “The bathroom floor has completely collapsed,” said David Sarkisyan, the director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, who has been involved with efforts to preserve it for the past six years, and who joined Ms. Karinskaya’s midnight tour. In the room where Viktor Melnikov slept, Mr. Sarkisyan pointed to a four-foot chunk of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, revealing the building’s waffle-like construction. The frame of the main window, he said, has ruptured under the weight of the glass, and could easily collapse, “which would be disastrous,” he said.
Despite the house’s historical significance, the city has permitted the construction of high-rise condominiums nearby with underground parking garages, which has affected the stability of the site, according to Natalia Dushkina, a professor at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, who organized a conference on the preservation of 20th-century Russian architecture there in April. “The soil structure has changed dramatically over the past few years,” she said. “The additional water pressure has flooded the whole site, and there is damp and fungus in the basement.” Inept conservation work carried out by the city in the 1990’s has contributed to the building’s decline, she added.
Observers at the World Monuments Fund, which placed the building on its 2006 Watch List of 100 most endangered sites, have noted with concern that the 8,600-square-foot site, at 10 Krivoarbatsky Lane, is valued at more than $40 million, making it a tempting target for developers. (Since 1992, more than 400 of Moscow’s historic buildings have been destroyed under the watch of mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has expressed contempt for “idiots for whom the preservation of old bricks is an aim in itself.” Critics suspect a conflict of interest: Mr. Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, owns one of the city’s largest construction companies, Inteko, estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.)
Although Mr. Gordeev has said from the start that he is interested in turning the house into a museum, preservationists have been worried about what the former developer’s true intentions might be — particularly, according to Ms. Karinskaya, because he initially spoke of converting the house into a private museum that he would personally fund, rather than the state-run operation Viktor Melnikov’s will called for. “After my father died Mr. Gordeev came to see me, to find out how much I cost,” Ms. Karinskaya said. “When he understood that I was priceless he left very unsatisfied.”
Some of the preservationists’ skepticism may stem from Mr. Gordeev’s association with a controversial government official who assisted him in the acquisition: Iosif Kobzon, a pop crooner who heads the Parliament’s culture committee and is often described as Russia’s Frank Sinatra — a reference not only to his singing voice but to his alleged connections with organized crime, according to The Moscow Times. Mr. Gordeev acknowledged that Mr. Kobzon had been helpful in an official capacity. “I sent him a letter, and he helped organize meetings with Melnikov’s son and granddaughter,” he said in a telephone interview, referring to Viktor Melnikov and and his daughter Ekaterina.
And Mr. Gordeev’s motives have also been called into question because of his history with Rosbuilding, a development company of which he was a founder. Ivan Glukhov, chief of Moscow’s main investigation agency, has blamed the company for a rash of hostile property takeovers, in which seizures are carried out according to laws, but enforced through intimidation and blackmail of shareholders. (In an official Kremlin news broadcast on April 6, Mr. Glukhov claimed that Rosbuilding had “used loopholes in the legislation to grab several enterprises on the territory of Moscow.”) Mr. Gordeev, who acknowledged that “there were some scandals” associated with the company, said he has not been involved with it for four years. And in a recent telephone interview, he seemed to have changed his tune about his hopes for the house’s future, speaking eloquently of the need to make it a federally run museum.
“Melnikov is the most important modern architect — and the most interesting — in our history,” he said, going on to wax poetic about the house. “With the diamond-shaped windows he explored the aperture between light and darkness. To experience sunrise and sunset in this house is very dramatic. Beautiful. Fantastic.”
“The most important thing is to start the process of creating a European-standard contemporary house museum,” he continued. To that end, he said, he is prepared to donate his financial interest in the house to the state. “I sent the government a letter, offering to help in the creation of a federal-level museum,” he added. “If the government doesn’t have enough money to fund this museum I can arrange support.” In buying his half-share of the house, Mr. Gordeev said, he had merely intended “to stop the silliness between the relatives and all the conflict.”
So far, at least, the acquisition appears to have had the opposite effect. “If Katya, the executor, will be more collaborative and less suspicious,” he said, referring to Ms. Karinskaya, “I think the project will go well.” Asked whether she felt she could trust Mr. Gordeev, now that his goals for the house appear to be in tune with her own, Ms. Karinskaya took a deep breath.
“I prefer not to answer this question,” she said.

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For Russian Style, an Extreme Makeover

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:25:59 -0400

THERE are two popular sayings in Russia: ‘Remodeling your apartment is a way of life’ and ‘Remodeling your apartment is worse than a fire.’ ” As she spoke, Marina Albee, sitting near the makeshift stove in her St. Petersburg living room, looked dolefully toward the kitchen, where a group of Uzbek workmen were hammering noisily, as they had been, in one spot or another, for the past several weeks.
“Everyone I know is undergoing renovations,” said Ms. Albee, an American-born philology teacher here who is married to Alexei Haas, a prominent Russian decorator. “People clasp their head in their hands and start moaning” whenever the subject comes up, she continued. “So many marriages have split up, so many fortunes have been lost.”
After a decade in which moneyed, status-conscious Russians have succumbed to one acquisitive fad after another — designer clothing, then limited-edition watches, then Bentleys and Maseratis, then fine art — interior design has become the latest all-consuming craze. Among the millionaires and billionaires who control the country’s industries, and even among members of Russia’s burgeoning middle class, renovation, or “remont,” is a constant subject of conversation at dinner parties, beauty salons and athletic clubs.
Even as the turquoise, coral- and butter-colored facades of this 18th-century city are being burnished in preparation for the meeting of the Group of 8 industrial nations beginning this weekend, thousands of the apartments behind those facades — and inside the austere Stalinist apartment blocks of Moscow — are caked with plaster dust and teeming with contractors.
The new wealth in Russia, spurred by oil and gas production, has created a gold rush for European and American interior designers — people like Juan Pablo Molyneux, 59, a New York decorator who is working on a 120,000-square-foot palace for an industrialist outside Moscow and visits the site every 10 days. And where “five years ago there was only a handful of Russian decorators,” said Brigitte Saby, a 50-year-old interior designer based in Paris who was one of the first Westerners to flock to the country in the early 1990’s, “now there are thousands” (or at least hundreds, by the estimates of more conservative observers).
There are 23 interior design schools in Moscow, almost all of them founded in the last three years, and 46 Russian interior design and architecture magazines, most less than four years old, according to Karina Dobrotvorskaya, the founding editor of Russian Architectural Digest, which was introduced in 2002.
“Decorating is a very fashionable job now,” said Ms. Dobrotvorskaya, 39. “All the blond Russian escort girls love to call themselves interior designers.”
She remembers when attitudes were different. Even in the waning days of Communism, she said, for some people “material culture was considered bourgeois and very shameful.”
When Ms. Saby arrived in Moscow to decorate the apartment of a Russian businessman in 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “nobody understood the word ‘decorator’ or ‘interior designer,’ ” she said. “Most people, the apparatchiks”— the Party’s midlevel bureaucrat class — “had the same sofas and armchairs. It was awful, heavy Soviet stuff.”
Those who could afford to soon moved beyond apparatchik style, with mixed results. The grim grays of Soviet uniformity were widely supplanted in the mid-1990’s by a look that many designers now recall with horror: “Euro remont.”
The phrase elicits an expression of disgust from Ms. Saby, who regularly encounters vestiges of Euro remont, a Russian take on Western style characterized by gaudy materials and finishes and often visibly cheap construction.
“Euro remont was tacky and vulgar,” she said. “They put spotlights and columns everywhere, with everything shiny and new. The motto was, ‘It’s got to be new or it’s not good.’ ”
Andrei Dmitriev, one of the country’s most celebrated designers, described the look as “a barbarian’s understanding of what’s beautiful.”
In the years since, well-off Russians have begun to develop a more complex relationship with “material culture.” Where certain status-enhancing consumer products were once enough to confer a sense that the owner had arrived, many Russians now crave more: not just evidence of their buying power but an understanding of how best to wield it.
“The major difference between Russian clients then” — in the 1990’s — “and now is that they travel a lot,” said Kirill Istomin, a 30-year-old interior designer in Moscow who trained at the Parsons School of Design in New York. “They stay in the best hotels, they’re very much into A-plus comfort and their eye becomes educated.
“I’m not saying they know the difference between a bergère and an armchair,” he said. “But they realize that decorating is an important part of the social scene. It’s not enough to have an $1,800 alligator bag.”
The world has also come to Russia, with events like the Moscow World Fine Art Fair, an annual show of artwork and collectible European furniture that attracted 7,000 Russians to its opening night in late May, and that has tripled in size, to 70 dealers, in the three years since its founding.
The country’s shelter magazines — particularly the big three, Russian Architectural Digest, Russian Elle Décor and Mezzanine — have exposed their readers to sophisticated interiors in New York, Tokyo and Rome. And Ikea, which first brought its affordable Swedish furniture to Russia in 2000 (when 35,000 Muscovites turned up for the opening), now has five stores and three “Mega Malls” there, and has invested more money in the country, $1.7 billion, than anywhere else in the world.
In the midst of all this, decorators — particularly those with international experience — have come to be seen as shamans of good taste, with the power to help their clients remake themselves for the post-Communist world.
“I’m like a psychologist for my clients,” said Mira Apraxine, 45, a Moscow-based interior designer. “I explain the future for my client, how he has to position himself. The décor explains his personality. That’s why I have a lot of success.”
And as Western influences and Russian sensibilities have mingled, some decorators have started to branch out beyond the high-tech minimalist and Italian modern styles that came into vogue after the Euro remont years (although the Italian look remains popular). Several, including Ms. Apraxine, Mr. Istomin and Mr. Dmitriev, have pursued versions of a refined eclecticism that combines European furniture, both contemporary and antique, with prerevolutionary and contemporary Russian painting and decorative elements.
This new aesthetic — call it Russo remont — seems to express an emerging national confidence and a willingness on the part of both decorators and their clients to set themselves apart from their European counterparts.
The rise of talented designers, and their role in helping to educate Russian tastes, is a boon to magazine editors like Ms. Dobrotvorskaya at Architectural Digest. “Compared to four years ago, it’s much easier for us to find Russian projects we want to publish,” she said. Previously, she noted, “we had to use Photoshop to get rid of all the ugly things.”
But while there may be plenty of Russian projects that the magazines would like to publish, many are off limits. Russia’s new superrich invariably guard their privacy, and generally refuse to allow themselves or their homes to be photographed or identified, for fear of attracting the attention of tax authorities or gangsters or both. (Although the heyday of street shootouts seems to have passed, violent crime remains a serious threat, which explains the preponderance of bodyguards.)
“Everyone’s scared about the money they have,” said Anastasia Mikhailovskaya, 40, a designer in Moscow. “Usually they’re not very proud of the way they get it,” she added delicately.
Those rare homeowners who do grant permission for photo shoots tend to insist on anonymity (as did all those, except Mr. Dmitriev, whose homes are shown here), and may demand alterations of a kind that Western publications would be unlikely to agree to. “Once we photographed an apartment with a view of a famous cathedral in Moscow and we had to switch it for another cathedral to protect the identity of the owner,” Ms. Dobrotvorskaya said.
The reticence of clients is also a problem for designers, making it difficult for them to publicize their work or even build a portfolio, but it pales in comparison to some of the other challenges their employers can pose.
“The oligarchs all marry 25-year-old women who want to become decorators,” Ms. Saby said, using a term that some people reserve for the 20-some richest men in the country, but that others, like her, use for the merely very rich. “After a six-week course she considers she understands everything. She tries to change your project and it becomes a mess. Then she thinks that if she doesn’t pay your fees she’ll be able to get everything herself.” Appealing to the client’s sense of fair play in such circumstances is usually a waste of time, she said. “When you’re dealing with the oligarchs, a contract is not going to help you a lot. If it’s not doable I say, ‘I wish you very good luck.’ ”
There are also the more mundane hurdles of daily life in Russia. Certainly things have improved since Ms. Saby’s early days there, when “there was no plaster for the walls, no screwdrivers, no knowledge about construction,” she said. But reliable craftsmen remain in short supply, according to many decorators and renovators. (“It’s a huge problem to find a Russian worker who doesn’t drink,” said a St. Petersburg homeowner who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he feared reprisals from Russian craftsmen. Many renovators hire Uzbek workers, both legal and not, whose Muslim faith forbids the consumption of alcohol.)
And the materials and services that high-end decorators depend on are often hard to find. Mr. Istomin, the young designer who studied at Parsons, was struck by the limited resources in Moscow when he returned there three years ago after working for Albert Hadley in Manhattan.
“The major problem for me is that there’s no developed infrastructure like New York,” said Mr. Istomin. “There are many people ready to pay $400 for a custom lampshade, but there’s no place in Moscow that makes them.” (Mr. Istomin, who describes his current clients vaguely as “very powerful people with new money from various businesses,” has his shades made in Manhattan and shipped to Moscow.)
The country’s vast and unpredictable bureaucracies present further obstacles, particularly for foreign decorators. Bill Stubbs, 47, a Houston designer who joined the gold rush four years ago, has since taken on so many projects in the former Soviet Union that he publishes his Web site, wwstubbs.com, in both English and Russian. (He is currently designing the interior of a $100 million private plane, a modified Airbus 319, for a Moscow client.) In 2002, he was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport when he arrived a few hours before the official start date of his Russian visa. He spent seven hours in a locked cell and his luggage, passport and ticket were stolen before he was deported.
When he described his ordeal to his Russian client, he was told that he could have avoided such difficulties by offering the guards a $100 bribe.
“They take any opportunity to extort,” Mr. Stubbs said. “It’s unfortunate.”
For all the obvious impediments, though, taste is evolving with startling speed in Russia, Ms. Saby said. Until just 15 years ago, “most people were living like babushka ladies,” she said, noting that it’s hard for most Westerners to comprehend the extent of the country’s transformation.
Mr. Dmitriev, 49, who is based in St. Petersburg and whose work represents perhaps the most original blend of Russian and Western influences — his rustic-luxe environments are more artistic expression than succor for oligarchs’ egos — believes the country’s aesthetic standards still have a long way to go. “With the new Russians there is a bad vulgarity,” he said. For him, “ideal design is a ruin with a rich fabric,” he said; he describes his own work as “misery combined with luxury.” But most Russians who hire decorators, he said, “like everything brand new and glitzy.”
Ms. Apraxine, who recently completed work on a triplex apartment in the center of Moscow with her husband, Nikolai Druzin, 43, an architect, takes a longer view of shifting tastes. The building was constructed in 1912; during the Soviet period it was divided into a dispiriting rabbit warren of communal apartments, with three or four families living in each room.
It is now a high-tech, high-design refuge for a client she described as an influential political strategist and philosopher. The dining room’s neo-Gothic ceiling has been restored and its walls painted a shade that Ms. Apraxine called “grand duke green.” Nearby, the owner’s private office can be opened only with his thumbprint, by use of a discreet electronic device set into the wall.
For Ms. Apraxine, the apartment represents an exuberant sense of the new possibilities in Russia. But with an acknowledgment of the melancholy aspect of life typical of a Russian, she noted there is an emotional cost to all this change. The sudden shift from Soviet-era communal apartments, where as many as 20 families might share a single bathroom, to the luxurious interiors she creates for her clients can create a sort of culture shock.
“For some people it’s a big trauma to be rich suddenly,” she said, “to come from a little horrible apartment and suddenly arrive in a splendid apartment.”
Or as Juan Pablo Molyneux put it, more simply and less gloomily, “They used to live five people in one room, and now when you’re shopping they ask, ‘Where is the fur closet?’ ”

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A Messy Romance With Faded Grandeur

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:38:40 -0500

IT was really a beast of a house," Belinda Rathbone said, sitting in the living room of her six-room condo in the Avon Hill section of Cambridge, Mass., on a crisp winter Sunday afternoon. Ms. Rathbone, a photography historian, was describing her initial impressions of the Guynd, a handsome but decaying Georgian mansion in northeast Scotland where she lived for 10 years with her now-estranged husband, John Ouchterlony, the 26th laird of his family's 400-year-old ancestral estate.
The Guynd, the Gaelic word for a high, marshy place (it rhymes with wind), is also the title of Ms. Rathbone's recently published memoir of her decade-long highland fling. In the book she describes in comic detail her attempts to breathe life into a crumbling estate as the American wife of a thrifty Scot who refuses to throw anything away — even shattered wineglasses (with a bit of glue they might be usable one day), pairs of tights (great for filtering lumpy old paint) and an ancient collection of barely functional vacuum cleaners.
According to Ms. Rathbone, several women hired to clean the place quit, defeated by the task of tidying a 32-room house crammed with old bank statements and ancestral detritus that Mr. Ouchterlony (pronounced ock-ter-LONE-ee) could not bear to part with. "There's generations of stuff which needs to be sorted out eventually," Mr. Ouchterlony said in a telephone interview. "You can't just throw things out. Belinda has a rather minimalist approach."
Besides, he said: "In my experience, cleaning ladies don't do much. It's a case of tokenism, I'm afraid."
Looking around her bright and airy apartment, which she shares with their 13-year-old son, Elliot Ouchterlony, you would never guess she had been the chatelaine of such an anarchic home. With the exception of a few knives and forks, the only mementos of the Guynd are in a pile of photo albums.
As they tucked into a lunch of squash soup and Cheddar, mother and son joked about Mr. Ouchterlony's dread of throwing things away, including a pile of old broken telephones on a table in the library.
"They've been sitting there longer than I've been alive," Elliot said, wryly.
Elliot's decision to attend a school in Massachusetts, not Scotland, coincided with the unraveling of his parents' marriage, a subject that Ms. Rathbone chronicles in her book. The tale begins with an account of their whirlwind romance — they made love after meeting at a mutual cousin's wedding in 1990 — and concludes with their separation in 2001. (They remain married but have no plans to reunite, Ms. Rathbone said.) The joys and strains of the marriage are depicted through the prism of their efforts to resurrect the Guynd, a house that felt more like a mausoleum when the laird brought his prospective bride to visit for the first time. She was 39, he was 53.
Damage and decay were everywhere. The house had been requisitioned as a barracks during World War II and the beds of wounded soldiers had been dragged across the floor, leaving deep ruts in the parquet. Colorful walls had faded to a grim institutional gray, and everything seemed in need of urgent repair: the cupola in the front hall leaked in heavy rain, the window sashes needed fixing and the basement was piled high with generations of old mattresses.
In spite of the obvious challenges, Ms. Rathbone was intrigued. "I itched to help, to bring this place back to life," she said. "John is so convincing, and I guess I'd never felt quite so needed. This role was clearly waiting for me to take on."
Ms. Rathbone had the front hall painted a cheerful bright yellow and the dining room a stately deep Worcester blue. Fancy wallpapers were ordered from London for the library and for Ms. Rathbone's boudoir, much to the consternation of the laird, who was happy to save money elsewhere. ("Fortunately, we found some nice remnants from a remainder shop on Lexington Avenue," Mr. Ouchterlony said.) A local firm was hired to reupholster timeworn sofas and armchairs in time for a party to celebrate the house's 200th anniversary in 1999.
Meanwhile, Ms. Rathbone was finishing a biography of Walker Evans, the photographer known for his poignant depictions of the South during the Great Depression. "I found myself writing about Walker Evans and his photos of ruined plantations while I was living in another ruined plantation in Scotland," Ms. Rathbone said. "I seem to be drawn to faded grandeur themes."
By contrast, Ms. Rathbone's Cambridge apartment feels tranquil and comforting. And clean. "Central vac is a really cool thing," she said, delving into a kitchen closet to retrieve a vacuum hose that can be plugged into inlets on each of the three floors of her apartment, which was carved out of an 1890's Queen Anne-style Victorian house by a local developer.
One reason she was drawn to the apartment, Ms. Rathbone said, was that renovations were complete when she and Mr. Ouchterlony bought it as an American pied-à-terre in 1999. The living room contains a collection of genteel Americana — a carved eagle over the front door, a ship model and an hourglass mounted to a weather-beaten panel to the right of the fireplace — family treasures inherited from Ms. Rathbone's father, Perry Rathbone, who was a director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
While researching her memoir, Ms. Rathbone excavated a big black tin box from the basement of the Guynd that was filled with family letters and journals. She discovered that the house had been built by a young bachelor laird who was pressured into constructing a mansion worthy of his family pedigree. But he never moved in. "For decades there it sat on the landscape, empty," Ms. Rathbone said. "He moved in a few books and his pebble collection."
An air of tragedy lingered from previous generations. Mr. Ouchterlony's two uncles were killed in combat during World War II and his father, Tom Ouchterlony, suffered from depression and mood swings attributed to his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany.
"There's a presence, a sadness," to the house, Ms. Rathbone said. "Whatever you do to spruce up and brighten the walls, there's no getting out from under it."
In light of such discoveries, and with the decline of her marriage, Ms. Rathbone found her memoir becoming darker than she had originally intended. "When I started writing the book years ago, John thought it was absolutely marvelous," she said. His attitude appears to have changed. "He's been very quiet about the book," she said.
So how does Mr. Ouchterlony feel about the way he is portrayed in "The Guynd: A Scottish Journal"?
"I've been skimming it," he said, sounding cautious. "She does write rather amusingly, I must admit. There's some artistic license, but from what I've read so far there's nothing that causes me acute grief."
Mr. Ouchterlony admitted that he was dreading the prospect of hearing from people who have read the book, which was published in November in the United States and this month in Britain. "I've rather avoided the phone, actually," he said.
Ms. Rathbone doubts Mr. Ouchterlony will ever sell the estate, which she refers to as his "albatross" and as "a life sentence."
"John complains about what a burden it is, but he'll never leave the Guynd," she said. Mr. Ouchterlony seems resigned to his fate. "I'm stuck with it," he said. "That's the truth."

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The House of Worth

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 08:47:23 -0500

RONALD LEE FLEMING said he felt exultant when he purchased Bellevue House in 1999. The house, a Colonial Revival mansion built in 1910, was the work of the celebrated architect Ogden Codman Jr., and a repository of some particularly colorful social history. Codman had designed it for his cousin Martha Codman, a Boston heiress who scandalized Newport society with her 1928 marriage to a Russian opera singer 30 years her junior; later, the house belonged to a former Ziegfeld Girl who gave singing lessons to the heiress Doris Duke and outlived three wealthy husbands.
Bellevue House was in disrepair when Mr. Fleming bought it, having sat empty for seven years. Worse, it was at risk of being sold to a developer who wanted to turn it into a boutique hotel, "which I thought would be tragic," Mr. Fleming said solemnly.
Mr. Fleming, an urban planner based in Cambridge, Mass., who has written six books on historic preservation, has a proselytizing zeal on the subject of America's great mansions, and a consuming obsession with the welfare of his own. Hoping to make it a comfortable gathering place for his children in the wake of his recent divorce, he set about restoring it to its one-time glory. The project took seven years, and was finally completed late last month.
Luckily, he had a guide in this undertaking: "The Decoration of Houses," the influential handbook that Codman published with his client and friend Edith Wharton in 1897. Codman and Wharton, who often bickered, were as one in their disdain for the pompous Newport "cottages" built by Gilded Age robber barons, and for the "dubious eclecticism" of High Victorian style. They advocated a return to "suitability, simplicity and proportion," ideals in keeping with Mr. Fleming's stringent classical tastes, and very much in evidence in Codman's design for Bellevue House.
Behind its prim facade, the house conceals grand and classically proportioned interiors, including a sky-lighted rotunda famous to historians of the decorative arts. ("It's like stepping from New England into 18th-century Rome," Louis Bofferding, the New York antique dealer, observed during a recent visit.) For two years, Mr. Fleming concentrated on reconstruction efforts, replacing — among other things — the crumbling rotunda dome, the rotting balustrade on the roof and much of the brick wall surrounding the three and a half acres.
"By the end of all this I'll be in debtor's prison," he said. (That seems unlikely; Mr. Fleming paid $2.1 million for the property but inherited a good deal more than that from a fortune amassed by his great-grandfather, a wholesale jeweler in California.)
Codman and Wharton's book also argues that "the décor should respect the bones of the house," Mr. Fleming said, "and we tried very hard to do that." He was lucky to find the house furnished when he bought it — "I wanted it to be instantly habitable, so I said, 'I'll buy the whole thing' " — and to discover that many of the furnishings dated to its original owner, who shared the authors' sensibilities. Martha Codman and her Russian husband, Maxim Karolik, used her family fortune to build a superb collection of 18th-century furniture and paintings and 19th-century art, much of which they donated to create the American Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but some of which remained in the house.
Mr. Fleming found a cache of photographs of interiors from 1922 that helped him determine which carpets and pieces of furniture had been there from the start, including a set of 10 19th-century Chippendale chairs and the dining room's 19th-century table, chairs and
buffet. To supplement these pieces, he has slowly been acquiring antiques that he deems suitable to Codman's restrained aesthetic, like a turn-of-the-century version of a Louis XVI settee and matching chairs in the drawing room that he bought last summer at a Connecticut antiques store.
"The Decoration of Houses" was not as helpful on every point as Mr. Fleming might have wished, particularly when it came to the house's bleak, utilitarian kitchen, with its broken plywood cabinets, Formica counters and rutted linoleum floor.
"In the book they never refer to the K-word," he said. "Our challenge was to step into the mind of Ogden Codman and continue his thinking into the 21st century, where the kitchen is the center of family life."
Mr. Fleming hired Jon-Paul Couture, a Providence-based architectural designer experienced in the renovation of historical homes, to remake the kitchen and to design a billiard room for his teenage son, a new wine cellar and a mud room — all in the spirit of Codman. A wall was torn down between the existing kitchen and an adjacent broom closet, which became a breakfast room with a classical pink-and-white cupola, gilded sconces and a shell-form china cupboard based on a cabinet in the library designed by Codman. A pair of Roman Ionic columns and fluted pilasters now connects the space to the new kitchen, with its Chinese pink-and-green marble counter tops.
The dentil molding around the kitchen cornice was painstakingly copied from the one Codman designed for the dining room. Similarly, Mr. Couture borrowed the design of the arched doorway that links the kitchen and dining room to the front hall and repeated it in a series of arches that form a straight line, and a source of light, from the mud room through to the kitchen, pantry, hall, dining room and conservatory beyond.
In the interest of adhering to Codman's sense of scale and proportion, Mr. Fleming and Mr. Couture even redesigned an dappliance, dispensing with the elaborate hood that came with the kitchen's newly installed La Cornue stove and creating a custom-made version with "scale and details that took their cues from the architecture of the room," Mr. Couture said.
For all his concern with living up to the master's vision, though, Mr. Fleming rebelled in at least one area: Codman, he said, "used a green in the dining room that we didn't like." Mr. Fleming chose peach instead. "It's a warm color that's supposed to make ladies more attractive."
Outside, inspired by a formal teahouse that was built on the property in 1922 — a copy of a 1794 architectural folly by the famous woodcarver and self-taught architect Samuel McIntyre — Mr. Fleming erected a copy of a smaller McIntyre folly from 1799. And he has just received permission from the Newport Historic District Commission to build a third teahouse, based on McIntyre's drawings for the cupola of a church built in Salem, Mass., in 1804 and 1805.
Despite his talk of providing a reassuring hearth for his brood, Mr. Fleming seems to have become a little folly-mad of late: He admitted that one of his first priorities had been the copy of the 1799 folly, which was being completed just as work began on the inside of the house. "My kids were really upset that I built a folly before redoing the kitchen," he said.
Not all of his construction projects have gone smoothly. He ran into trouble with the commission in 2004 when he erected a pergola on his property without seeking their permission. "I didn't enjoy being reviewed like that," he said archly. "I'm a preservationist and frankly I have more expertise than people on the board."
Mr. Fleming and Sandra Ourusoff, his companion of three years and the publisher of Opera News magazine, clearly enjoy their role as hosts at Bellevue House. For a pair of passionate preservationists their first
encounter, in 2002, was propitious: "We met in an 18th-century hacienda in Ecuador on New Year's Eve," Ms. Ourusoff said.
The two share a taste for faded grandeur, which Mr. Fleming seems to take to greater extremes. After months of cajoling, he finally capitulated to Ms. Ourusoff's insistence in 2003 that the drawing room's tattered 1960's curtains needed replacing.
"They were rags, which Ron was perfectly happy with," said Ms. Ourusoff, who installed swags of pink-and-green fabric from Christopher Norman's New York showroom. "The architecture is really what he's interested in," she added. "The other things he sees as tangential."
Mr. Fleming has been under pressure to replace the living room's pink-and-green carpet, which he said he believes is original to the house. "My daughter Siena wants to have it rewoven," he said. Last week he finally got around to taking another distressed carpet to be repaired. A brown-and green-design, it was installed by Jane Pickens, the ex-Ziegfeld Girl, who had it woven in Portugal. Something had to be done: strands of the carpet's fabric were being held together with Scotch tape.
As he greeted his dinner guests in a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket the other day, Mr. Fleming seemed oblivious to the sizable rip in the shoulder seam, a future restoration project.
After inviting the ladies to retire to the drawing room after supper, he led the gentlemen in a passionate discussion of historic preservation over a glass of port, and basked in his remaining guests' compliments upon his efforts to adapt and restore Bellevue House. "I hope Ogden Codman would have approved," he said, with the air of a man who had no doubt.

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Palm Beach Bows to the Wind

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:28:42 -0500

WHILE Hurricane Wilma was ravaging this plutocrats' playground with sustained winds of 110 miles an hour on Oct. 24, 2005, Mario Nievera, Palm Beach's leading landscape architect, was in Pennsylvania, putting on a brave face as he delivered a lecture about his work to the Philadelphia Garden Club.
As Mr. Nievera showed slides of his more exquisite creations — purple bougainvillea wrapped around coconut palms and allées of guava trees — the plants themselves were being ripped to shreds by Wilma, which would ultimately cause $12.2 billion worth of property damage to Florida. Having struggled for more than a year to revive gardens destroyed in September 2004 by Hurricane Frances — the most destructive storm to hit the town since 1947 — Mr. Nievera was daunted at having to start all over again. Although he stood to profit mightily, he dreaded the added stress.
In the wake of Wilma, he said in mid-January, "there's twice as much work, on top of all our ongoing projects."
"And there are only so many hours in the day," he added, particularly in Palm Beach, where a job like his requires ceaseless socializing with fretful clients.
After Frances and then, just three weeks later, Jeanne, "nobody believed we'd get another hurricane" Mr. Nievera said. Many of his clients rushed to restore their gardens to manicured perfection in late 2004 and in 2005, only to have them ripped out again by Wilma.
Mr. Nievera said most of his clients are growing more cautious about how they spend their garden budgets and asking for plants and trees that are more likely to survive another hurricane. They appear to be heeding warnings from meteorologists that the area could face more major hurricanes in coming years. Before Wilma "the sky was the limit," he said, referring in particular to the sums spent on recreating his tropical but tailored designs after the 2004 hurricanes. A client who approached him for the first time after those storms commissioned a garden with $1 million worth of plants, which was installed just in time for Wilma's arrival.
"My client lost $500,000 worth of plants," Mr. Nievera said, adding, "there's no such thing as hurricane insurance."
Wilma struck as Mr. Nievera was scurrying to get his clients' gardens ready for Thanksgiving, which some regard as the start of the winter season in Palm Beach. As a result of the devastation, he is still working to finish several of the projects two months into the season — a delay that few clients would have tolerated in years past.
The follies of the 2004-05 winter season have proven useful in one way, enabling Mr. Nievera to tailor his advice to clients based on his own observations of which plants can withstand extreme winds. When he advised Tom Quick, a Palm Beach resident whose fortune derives from Quick & Reilly, the former discount brokerage firm, to buy a pair of 30-foot date
palms to replace a couple of coconut palms that had succumbed to Frances, it was for aesthetic reasons: they were large enough to hide a view of the house next door that had been opened up by Frances. But the date palms, which cost roughly $10,000 apiece and cost $20,000 more to transport and install by crane, proved a practical investment.
"I can't complain: they survived Wilma," said Mr. Quick, surveying his backyard. A large clusia tree at the back of his house was less fortunate, and is now in dire shape. "We're planning to replace it," Mr. Nievera said. "We just can't find the tree."
Despite an abundance of nurseries in South Florida, plants have been irksomely scarce. "There are 10 times the number
of people looking for plants," Mr. Nievera said. "People wanted to replant their annuals, but there were none to be had. And when that happens, everyone gets really mad."
Huge price increases have also caused some ire. "Palm trees used to cost $600," said Terry Allen Kramer, a perennially tanned banking heiress who is also a Nievera client. "Now one lousy palm tree is three thousand. And these are just plain old coconut palms. Not royal palms."
Ms. Kramer was startled when she and her husband, Nick Simunek, flew to Palm Beach the day after Wilma. Her palatial estate on South Ocean Boulevard "looked like the Sahara," Ms. Kramer said. "I had four feet of sand on my oceanfront lawn, and there was a swath of trees down in the front." This after she had spent $50,000 redoing the north and south border gardens, following Frances.
The fruit trees have been replaced, but with the rise in prices Ms. Kramer is holding out until spring before deciding whether to replace the 30-foot palms she lost on the ocean side. Many people are "waiting to see if they really want to spend that money," Mr. Nievera said. "It's a real change in mentality."
Other clients, though, have asked him to stormproof their grounds, to whatever extent possible. Earle Mack, whose appointment as ambassador to Finland had just ended when Wilma struck, and his wife, Carol, had to deploy an army of assistants to clean up their estate, which overlooks the ocean and Lake Worth.
"We had 17 workers at the house for three weeks," Mrs. Mack said. "There was a couple of feet of sand covering everything. There wasn't a single leaf on one shrub or tree."
The couple asked Mr. Nievera to redesign the front of the property, the worst-hit area. A defoliated stretch of Australian pine hedge that ran 100 feet along the front wall was replaced by a low-lying row of pittosporum, a hardy broadleaf evergreen shrub.
By the front door Mr. Nievera created a pair of parterres edged with Purple Queen ground cover and Green Island ficus, interlaced with diamond-shaped sections of sand-colored Chattahoochee stone gravel and contrasting black lava rock.
"It's hard to get any colorful plants to grow on the ocean side of the house," Mr. Nievera said, "so I chose the purple shrubs and gravel to create a sense of color." In the center he placed six mimusop trees, which he described as "very salt tolerant, hard to find and hurricane resistant."
The ravages of Frances and Wilma also inspired Mr. Nievera to redesign the garden of his own house, a single-story Bermuda-style ranch at the south end of Palm Beach, which he bought in 2001 for a bargain $495,000. In November he tore out an allée of storm-ravaged guava trees that used to line his front walkway and replaced them with pygmy dates, which are more resilient.
He also cut down all his coconut trees, which had mostly been killed. "I couldn't take it anymore," he said. And he came up with a novel solution for his ficus hedges, which took a serious beating during both hurricanes.
"Ficus are the least wind-tolerant of plants," Mr. Nievera said. They tend to lose their leaves and are easily uprooted. "The tendency in Palm Beach is to maintain them very high — 20 or 30 feet. But you can't do that, because the wind rips right through them."
After Frances punched large holes in the ficus, Mr. Nievera decided to trim the top of the hedge into an undulating wave pattern to complement the missing sections, giving it a crazy-quilt style that he refers to as his roller coaster.
Meanwhile, for his clients, he has been busy designing ways to conceal an awkward but increasingly familiar addition to Palm Beach's topography: the large propane-fueled electricity generator.
Both Frances and Wilma felled power lines, leaving some houses and businesses without electricity for more than a week each time. ("Palm Beach is very peculiar," Ms. Kramer said. "We pay the highest property taxes, but they don't bury the electric cables.") Without air-conditioning, toxic mold flourished in the 90-degree heat and the damp conditions that followed Frances, ruining expensive paint finishes, playing havoc with antique furniture and forcing some collectors to send paintings to the restorer.
The long wait for electricity prompted several moguls to buy generators large enough to power a tropical mansion. The generators usually take up at least 100 square feet, Mr. Nievera said, and are often seven feet tall. They cost an average of $30,000, which does not include the cost of obtaining permits, digging trenches and other aspects of installation.
"It's a carbuncle in the landscape," Mr. Nievera said. His landscaping responsibilities now include locating the generators in
accordance with local planning rules and selecting fast-growing shrubs to further conceal them.
He recently obscured a giant generator behind a wall of white-flowering Confederate jasmine.
"Beauty definitely comes at a price," Mr. Nievera said. "But people here can afford it."

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Ephemeral Art, Eternal Maintenance

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:31:03 -0500

EVEN as the real estate market cools, the contemporary art market is at fever pitch, as evidenced by the record-breaking total of $157.4 million brought in by Christie's sale of post-war and contemporary works on Tuesday. But as collectors bid extravagantly for works created in the last two decades, some may be failing to consider the perils of living with such pieces.
A word of caution for those tempted to stop by the next big contemporary auction, at Phillips, de Pury & Company tonight: As stunning as an installation like Damien Hirst's "Love Lost" might look in your living room, and as reasonable as the Phillips estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million might seem for a gynecologist's office submerged in a tank swarming with rainbow-colored koi, "Love Lost" weighs 20,000 pounds when assembled. It also requires that the fish be fed every three days, and that a diver - or an owner with goggles - plunge into the tank at least once a month to scrub away algae and fish muck.
For centuries, private collectors and museums have contended with the difficulties of maintaining artworks: Old Masters need a good cleaning now and then, and conservators struggle to preserve the early drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, who used cheap house paint. But the challenges are becoming increasingly acute for collectors as they try to live with - and slow the decay of - valuable works created during the past 20 years or so by artists using unconventional and often volatile materials.
Mark Fletcher, an art consultant in Manhattan, is well acquainted with the rigors of maintaining contemporary art created from ephemera. "Hopefully these things will outlive us," Mr. Fletcher said, but "people seem more comfortable with the notion of art eliciting a response today without much thought about its long-term durability."
"I walk away from a lot of art for that reason, especially with people I advise," he said.
The reality of caring for unstable artwork hit home when Mr. Fletcher and his partner, Tobias Meyer, the worldwide head of Sotheby's contemporary art department, acquired an installation piece in 1999 by John Bock, a German artist whom Mr. Fletcher described as "very important." The sculpture, which featured prominently in the couple's dining room, involved a series of hand-knitted sweaters, fishing wire and a constant supply of fresh melons and vegetables. Dinner guests were suitably impressed, but Mr. Fletcher grew tired of maintaining the sculpture, so the couple decided to give it to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. "I didn't want to be putting out fresh vegetables every week as those things rotted," Mr. Fletcher said.
The maintenance challenge is particularly acute for collectors like Adam Sender, the 36-year-old founder of Exis Capital, a hedge fund, who is drawn to the conceptual work of artists like Matthew Barney. "Unit Bolus," a Barney installation in Mr. Sender's collection, is composed of an electrical freezing device connected to a stainless steel rack that supports a dumbbell made from frozen, cast petroleum jelly.
"If the electricity goes out, you're right back to square one," said Todd Levin, a curator whom Mr. Sender employs full time to oversee his burgeoning collection.
A novel quandary presented itself in 2002 when Mr. Sender purchased the "Ehrich Weiss Suite," another Barney installation, which includes seven black Jacobin pigeons. Contained in a room with a transparent door, the birds are allowed to perch on a black box intended to represent the coffin of a Harry Houdini-like escape artist. "We were very concerned when we purchased this," Mr. Levin said. "Pigeon guano is acidic and we feared it would eat away at the acrylic coffin."
The first question, Mr. Levin said, was whether Mr. Barney would want the droppings to remain on the piece.
MR. LEVIN turned to Christian Scheidemann, a conservator whose West 22nd Street studio specializes in contemporary art. Mr. Scheidemann consulted with Mr. Barney, who decreed that the guano should stay put. After a week of scientific inquiry, Mr. Scheidemann came up with a solution: "We determined that the acidic part would be activated once the object got into a moist atmosphere," he said, "but if it's dry, it will remain dormant." Mr. Sender intends to install the sculpture in his home, but for now the coffin is in a humidity-controlled warehouse in Queens, and the rented pigeons have returned to their coops.
The rise of unconventional materials has provided Mr. Scheidemann with an intriguing niche. "We create manuals for complicated art works," he said. "How to store it, handle it, display it and the amount of light and moisture it needs."
"It's like a zoo," he added. "You're dealing with very different animals, and they all need their own care."
When a glitter-encrusted ball of elephant dung protruding from a Chris Ofili painting sustained a fracture - the result of an accidental bump from a profusely apologetic dinner guest - the hostess, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, turned to Mr. Scheidemann. He and Ms. Rohatyn, a prolific collector and contemporary art dealer, consulted with Mr. Ofili, who provided Mr. Scheidemann with some extra dung balls with which to stabilize the object.
"We don't do anything without the artist knowing," said Ms. Rohatyn, who said she shared Mr. Scheidemann's belief that the artist's intentions are sacrosanct.
Most collectors rely on conservators to delay the corrosive effects of time on their artworks. But Paula Hayes, one of the artists represented by Ms. Rohatyn, may be unique in tending to her creations - tiny natural landscapes in whimsical glass terrariums - on a weekly basis after they are sold. (Her pieces sell for $6,500 to $11,000 at Ms. Rohatyn's East Side gallery, Salon 94, and at R 20th Century Design in Tribeca.)
Last Friday, Ms. Hayes wielded a pair of 24-inch tweezers also used in heart surgery as she reached into a large oval terrarium on Ms. Rohatyn's dining table to tend a dainty crop of miniature bamboo, oxalis and selaginella.
"It's a wild organic world in there," Ms. Hayes said. Her quiver of tools, which she carries around in a plastic tube, includes surgical scissors (for pruning) and a turkey baster (for watering).
Ms. Rohatyn's house was just one stop on Ms. Hayes' weekly rounds. She also visited the East 80th Street townhouse of Aby Rosen, a collector of contemporary art who is the president of RFR Holding, a Manhattan real estate empire.
"She sells a self-contained universe," Mr. Rosen said, admiring a large domed terrarium created by Ms. Hayes that sits in the middle of his dining room table. "I have eight of them in my steam shower."
The windows of Mr. Rosen's townhouse are coated with a film designed to minimize the effect of the sun's ultraviolet rays on his art collection. But he refuses to follow the example of some collectors who keep the curtains drawn to protect their investment.
"I like to live with my art," he said, standing in his library, which is crammed with works by Warhol, Twombly and others. A big white sculpture by Mr. Hirst hangs over the fireplace: a glass-fronted medicine cabinet containing dozens of boxes of medications for depression, headaches, and sexually transmitted diseases. (Mr. Rosen bought the sculpture, "Le Caprice," last year at Sotheby's in London for $400,000.) "It's pretty light sensitive," Mr. Rosen said, peering at the colorful array of boxes of Videx, an anti-HIV medication. Some were brightly hued, others faded. "A whole bunch of people I know scan them to preserve the crispness of the print," he said. "If they fade, you can print up a new set of boxes for ten thousand bucks."
When the object in question is worth millions of dollars and involves a 14-foot tiger shark pickled in formaldehyde, the costs for maintenance soar dramatically. In such situations it helps to be a billionaire like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund mogul who paid $8 million this year to acquire an iconic sculpture by Mr. Hirst titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." Every time Mr. Cohen decides to relocate his shark, he is obliged to call in HazMat experts in protective gear to neutralize the formaldehyde, which can only be used once. Mr. Scheidemann, who is familiar with the sculpture, estimated the cost of the process to be in the region of $100,000.
Tanks, whether they contain formaldehyde or water, pose a plethora of conservation challenges. Last Friday afternoon at Christie's in Rockefeller Center, condensation clung to the walls of a five-foot-long vitrine containing three mercury-filled basketballs floating in water. The piece - "Three Ball 50/50 Tank" by Jeff Koons, from 1985 - was slowly acclimatizing to the air-conditioning blasting through Christie's public galleries.
Some collectors might have qualms about purchasing a sculpture that has to be drained and refilled now and then to kill the algae. But Amy Cappellazzo, an international head of Christie's postwar and contemporary department, seemed confident that conservation issues would not deter serious collectors from bidding on the piece by Mr. Koons at the Post-War and Contemporary Art auction on Tuesday night. (It sold for $486,400 to the gallerist Larry Gagosian.)
"These works become like devotional objects," she said. "It's like caring for your altarpiece."

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In August, the Rich Race to Renovate

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:33:53 -0400

AT 9:30 last Friday morning, there was an ear-piercing screech of electric saws and a palpable sense of panic as 30 men furiously attacked the floors, walls, ceilings and plumbing of Mary Tyler Moore's former apartment at 927 Fifth Avenue. Carpenters, electricians, marble installers and plasterers dripped with sweat as they rushed to finish renovations on the 18-room apartment for its new owner before the dreaded Labor Day deadline.
Tony Ingrao, the interior designer on the project, grimaced at the deafening noise; only Ms. Tyler Moore's erstwhile neighbors Pale Male and his nestmate Lola seemed oblivious to the din as they glided past the apartment's windows.
Like 20 or so other grand addresses in Manhattan, 927 Fifth requires that construction work be completed between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when many residents are in Europe or reclining by the pool in the Hamptons. Over the past five years, co-op boards at many of these buildings have begun enforcing the summer-only construction rules more strictly. Buildings that were once casual about such rules now take them "incredibly seriously," said Dolly Lenz, a managing director of the real estate company Prudential Douglas Elliman - with the result that some of the city's top decorators and contractors now view the last weeks of August as the most nerve-racking of the year. "They literally come and chase you out of the apartment," said Mario Buatta, the interior designer, referring to building employees. "It's tough on the owner and very tough on the contractor."
Adding to the anxiety, some buildings impose stiff fines for work that remains unfinished after Labor Day. Five years ago the fines were in the region of $200 to $300 per day, according to Randy Polumbo, a contractor. These days the usual daily rate is $1,000.
Ms. Lenz ascribes the shift, and the tensions that it has brought in some buildings, to "the wealth factor." With hedge fund managers and their clients becoming richer by the minute, she said, "people become more exacting" - both those who want to renovate and those who don't want to deal with noise and fumes and dust.
"I've sold triple-mint-condition apartments that have been gut-renovated, and the purchasers want to rip everything out and start over," Ms. Lenz said. "And people who live next to that apartment think, I just lived through that and I don't want to do it again."
"You're talking about most powerful people in America, and the richest," she added of the would-be renovators, but "the buildings absolutely halt the construction and don't let the workers in."
If work is not completed by Labor Day, homeowners can find themselves forced to wait nine months to resume renovations, paying huge monthly maintenance fees for uninhabitable apartments. At one Park Avenue apartment, work dragged on for three summers after workers missed two September deadlines.
To avoid such dramas, Mr. Buatta relies on Mark Martinez, a contractor whose company, Interior Management, specializes in summer-only construction. Mr. Martinez, 32, defied the image of the scruffy contractor last week as he darted between job sites in his blue blazer, crisp blue shirt and cream pants. He claims to have completed all the summer projects he has taken on in a single season, even a gut renovation of a 6,000-square-foot duplex at 730 Park Avenue last year. (He declines to name his clients, but receives rave reviews from some of them at franklinreport.com, a Zagat's of decorators and contractors.)
Still, he said, "we're sweating bullets every time." By the end of August his workers try to push the limits of every workday - which the rules typically limit to six hours - only to have "the building come and throw us out." On one occasion, he admitted, his team failed to meet the Labor Day deadline when a supplier ran out of marble. When it finally arrived, he ran several vacuum cleaners simultaneously to conceal the sound of his whirring saws from the neighbors.
Michael Foster, a decorator who grew up in the construction business, sees working on such a tight deadline as an art. "Big construction jobs have more than 200 vendors," he said, from demolition crews to cabinetmakers. "You have to get everyone in the right place at the right time. It's like an orchestra."
Mr. Polumbo, the proprietor of 3-D Laboratory in Manhattan, compares the work to "a military maneuver." To prepare for the summer assault, he rents storage space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he assembles entire rooms of the apartment - floors, walls and all - using pieces that are "ready to go together like a puzzle."
"You can't afford to make a mistake," Mr. Polumbo continued. "If they catch you walking around with a chisel, or if you drop a hammer after Labor Day, you may as well move to Mars."
The average contractor "doesn't quite understand what it takes to have 70 people working in one apartment during the last month," said Bunny Williams, the interior designer. "You need someone with experience and manpower, who can call in the troops and make miracles happen."
She added, "We usually slither in just under the wire."
Contractors who can accomplish such miracles in one season often charge accordingly. "Things done fast are usually expensive," said Robert Couturier, another interior designer. "You try to negotiate, but contractors aren't stupid," he added. "When you're close to finishing, sometimes the contractor says, 'Whoops! I made a mistake - I need another $250,000,' and if the client wants to move in, he has to pay."
Most buildings on Park and Fifth Avenues do not have summer rules, Ms. Lenz said. "If I had to guess-timate I'd say only 15 percent," Ms. Lenz said. The list includes some of the fanciest addresses in Manhattan, including 740 Park Avenue, 820 Fifth Avenue, One Sutton Place South and 10 Gracie Square, she said. There are no buildings with summer-only construction rules on the Upper West Side, according to realtors.
But increasingly, co-ops around the city are instituting time limits on construction, regardless of the season. Most luxury co-op buildings have "a very strict deadline of 90 or 180 days for construction," said Steve Abrams, the owner of Fountainhead Construction. "It's changing my business significantly, and separating the men from the boys in who can build major apartments in a very tight time frame."
Several buildings on Central Park West that enforce such limits also impose hefty fines for additional days. The San Remo at 145 Central Park West gives tenants six months to complete noisy work and charges fines in daily increments that add up to more than $65,000 for the seventh month of construction. At the United Nations Plaza on East 47th Street, fines for exceeding the time limit on noisy construction can reach as much as $10,000 a day.
While the summer-only rules have the obvious advantage, from their residents' perspective, of limiting construction to one season, they can also contribute to pile-ups of projects, which in turn lead to short tempers.
"In some buildings you have four projects and only one freight elevator," Mr. Couturier said. "It's a complete madhouse." Under such circumstances, the elevator can take 40 minutes to arrive.
At One Sutton Place South, there are seven apartments under construction this summer, causing consternation for contractors and residents alike.
"It's pretty noisy," said Betty Sherrill, the interior designer, who recently retired as president of the co-op board after 27 years.
"I'm glad I'm out here in Southampton," she added.

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Toddler-Proof and Party Perfect

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:29:11 -0500

LAST Saturday the TriBeCa loft of Dominique Lévy and Dorothy Berwin was the scene of a rollicking dinner party capping off a week of art shows in New York. The guests - artists, visiting Europeans and collectors- caroused late into the night amid artworks by Cindy Sherman, Tom Sachs, and Tim Noble and Sue Webster, whose wall-mounted light sculpture in the front hall flashed the word "Forever" all night. Cheers erupted when the artist Lisa Yuskavage demonstrated her skill at fireman's lifts by hoisting Ms. Berwin over her shoulder not once but twice.
The following morning Ms. Lévy, an art consultant who is the former international director of private sales of 20th-century and contemporary art at Christie's, was nursing a hangover and wearing dark glasses as she greeted guests at a brunch for the opening of a show of Polaroids by Andy Warhol, the first exhibition at her sleek new gallery, Dominique Lévy Fine Art, on East 74th Street.
"It's been a long week," Ms. Lévy said wearily. Ms. Berwin kept everyone amused by recalling the exploits of an artist who had sat on the lap of a married financier the night before, asking him if he was rich enough to buy her paintings.
Ms. Berwin is an independent producer whose latest film, "On a Clear Day," was selected for opening night at Sundance in January. As significant players in the overlapping worlds of contemporary art and film, Ms. Lévy and Ms. Berwin have emerged as one of Downtown's new power couples.
They entertain frequently in their 6,300-square-foot apartment, which is filled with contemporary art and designer furniture and suggests a stage set for heroines in an updated Noël Coward comedy of manners. Gertrude Lawrence would feel right at home.
The women met in 1998 at the London premiere of a film co-produced by Ms. Berwin. Ms. Lévy had recently moved from London to New York, and they began a transatlantic courtship by e-mail. When they started living together in 2001, they found that they shared remarkably similar tastes in furniture, art and even flowers. Both were already passionate collectors of furniture by Modern and contemporary designers.
"Looking around, you couldn't say which was hers or mine before," Ms. Lévy said. "And we both only like white flowers," she added, gesturing to a lavish arrangement of parrot tulips and lilies in their favorite noncolor.
Ms. Lévy and Ms. Berwin are known for their high style and strong character. As daughters of powerful European businessmen - a Swiss financier and a British lawyer, respectively - both have inherited the acumen and steely resolve of their fathers. And both are highly gregarious. "I was so intimidated by Dominique's high profile at Christie's," said Yvonne Force, an art consultant. "Then I realized that these two black-haired power ladies are girls who want to have fun."
They are also doting parents. Ms. Berman, who was divorced a few years before she met Ms. Lévy, brought her son, Caleb, now 10, to New York. Ms. Lévy gave birth to a son, Samuel, two years ago.
"Life is very full," Ms. Berwin said.
Ms. Lévy found the apartment in 2000, a year after François Pinault, the French billionaire who owns Christie's, invited her to move to New York to run the private sales division, which generated more than $100 million a year on her watch.
The apartment was a warren of small office cubicles. "No one wanted this space," she said. "But I loved the high ceilings and huge windows, and I decided to go for it."
In 2003, when Ms. Lévy was pregnant with Sam, Ms. Berwin bought the apartment next door, which gave the couple a nursery wing and substantial office space. That year Ms. Lévy decided to leave Christie's and go out on her own. "I wanted my business to be more haute couture, so I can work with artists I'm passionate about," she said.
The conjoined apartments are bridged by a futuristic-looking egg-shaped screening room with curved banquettes and walls upholstered in dark purple soundproofing material, which contribute to a sense of being inside a plush cocoon. The room also serves a symbolic nexus between the domestic and professional zones of the expanded apartment. By day it functions as a screening room for InFilm Productions, Ms. Berwin's boutique movie company; by night it serves as the family's media room.
Much of the furniture in the apartment comes from Galerie Kreo, Ms. Lévy's favorite design store in Paris (www.galeriekreo.com), including a powder-blue chaise by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, an oak desk from the 1950's by Jean Prouvé, and a contoured aluminum commode by Marc Newson.
The chandelier over the dining table, composed of trumpetlike tubes of blown glass, was commissioned from Jeff Zimmerman, a glass artist, through the R 20th Century gallery on Franklin Street r20thcentury.com).
The couple decorated the mauve and yellow kitchen with a fairy-light train strung between two columns. "Everyone has been asking the name of the artist," Ms. Lévy said. "They think it's a piece by Tim and Sue," she added, referring to Mr. Noble and Ms. Webster, London artists whose work has fetched $300,000 at auction. Actually the train is an $80 Christmas decoration from a costume shop on Lower Broadway.
There is plenty of bona fide art of course. A mushroom sculpture by Takashi Murakami springs up from the carpet of the media room. On the wall at the end of the table where the family eats supper each night is a self-portrait of Cindy Sherman as a clown, a picture that has particular resonance for Ms. Lévy, whose first job was working as a clown at children's parties. Nearby a life-size orange rat by the renegade sculptor Tom Sachs, fashioned out of torn-up Hermès gift bags and with a matching syringe clenched in its teeth, adorns a side table.
The 45-foot-long living room is dominated by a wildly colorful painting by Franz Ackerman, a Berlin artist. "All the colors leapt out at me when I bought it," Ms. Lévy said. "It's really the heart of the apartment."
The couple do not seem concerned about the potentially combustive proximity of children and expensive artwork. "Strangely enough, Samuel has learned not to touch," Ms. Lévy said. "And Caleb was always very sensitive to it. Everywhere they go, they look at the art."
A budding artist, Caleb has tried copying the Ackerman, and recently finished a charcoal drawing of the Sherman clown, which he gave to Ms. Yuskavage.
The other day Ms. Berwin's persona seemed to change abruptly as she walked from the living room to her office, a large room she shares with four assistants. With a brisk, no-nonsense manner she began peppering one of them with questions about faxes and budgets, dictating letters and fielding calls from Gaby Dellal, the director of "On a Clear Day." (The film, starring Peter Mullin and Brenda Blethyn, is about an unemployed Scot who decides to swim the English Channel.)
"Working at home is wonderful," Ms. Berwin said between calls. "Not only do I save travel time, I get to spend more time with the children. It's extremely practical and efficient."
Meanwhile Ms. Lévy was in the living room, trying to relax in a tangerine armchair designed by Jean Prouvé. She looked mildly exasperated as her 2-year-old son scampered across the room and turned on the vacuum.
"Sam loves everything to do with cleaning," Ms. Lévy said. "We were in Central Park this afternoon having an ice cream and all he wanted to do was come home to play with the vacuum cleaner."
Unlike Ms. Berwin, who shares Sam's zeal for cleanliness, Ms. Lévy is cheerfully undomesticated. "Dorothy is quite obsessed with order," Ms. Lévy said, as if identifying a troubling character flaw. Ms. Berwin is also an adventurous cook; Ms. Lévy prefers to make reservations. "When Dorothy's not here, I order in," Ms. Lévy admitted.
Sam is already bilingual. "He speaks French to me and English to Dorothy," Ms. Lévy said. His favorite word of late is "ridiculous," which he applies liberally to every situation. Sam's antics make his mother erupt with giggles and hugs. "I'm a little bit silly gaga with my son," she said.
Sam's father is Fermin Vilanova, a Spanish advertising executive who lives in Barcelona. "He's an extraordinary father with a very warm heart," Ms. Lévy said. "He comes to see him every month, and they speak twice a week."
"I think a child needs a daddy and a mummy," she added. "There was no way I was going to have a child without a present father."
After a marathon of art fairs and complex deals Ms. Lévy seemed to be unwinding as she sipped a cup of chamomile tea. Until, that is, the calm was disturbed by the loud drone of the vacuum cleaner.
"Darling boy!" Ms. Lévy said plaintively. "No more cleaning."

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She Cannot Be Bought

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:10:18 -0500

In January, one of the art world’s brightest young stars, Julie Mehretu, was put on display in a highly unusual way—on the stand in a Manhattan courtroom, where she’d been called to testify by her dealer, who’s feuding with a collector over her work. Born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and a white mother from Florida, Mehretu currently lives in Harlem with her girlfriend, fellow artist Jessica Rankin, who accompanied her to court, visibly pregnant with the couple’s first child.
The two women, in their scuffed construction boots and jeans, seemed out of place and a little bewildered. But in a way, everyone was. The suit was brought by Jean-Pierre Lehmann, a leading collector of cutting-edge contemporary art who was there to assert his right to buy Mehretu’s paintings. Yet she testified that before this case, she’d been completely unaware of Lehmann’s existence, even though he was one of her most passionate fans.
During a courtroom break, Lehmann looked hurt: “She’s never heard of me. I can’t understand why.”
Lehmann v. The Project Worldwide is the first lawsuit ever to come to court over a collector’s thwarted access to contemporary art. The case hinges on an unusual agreement: In February 2001, art dealer Christian Haye, who wore an electric-blue suit and cowboy boots to the trial, approached Lehmann, a 66-year-old French-Swiss collector who spends more than $1 million a year on contemporary art for his homes in New York, East Hampton, and Gstaad. Out of the blue, Haye asked him to invest $75,000 in his Harlem gallery, the Project, now at 37 West 57th Street and known as the Project Worldwide. In exchange, Lehmann would receive a 30 percent discount on his purchases from the Project until he had racked up an aggregate of $100,000 in discounts.
To sweeten the deal, Haye also offered Lehmann a right of first refusal on any work by any artist sold by the gallery. The arrangement went awry, according to Lehmann, when Haye declined to give his investor the one thing he kept asking for—and that other buyers seemed to be getting: large paintings by Mehretu, 34, whose exuberant abstract works map real and imaginary cities in layered flickers of ink and broad strokes of color. Her first big break came with P.S. 1’s first “Greater New York” show, in 2000, a launch pad for young talent (the second edition opens March 13). Then Empirical Construction, one of her largest works, was included in last year’s Whitney Biennial and snapped up by the Museum of Modern Art, where it is prominently displayed right around the corner from Barnett Newman’s obelisk. Now her art is very much in demand.
The courtroom battle has become an object of fascination in the art world. That may be because it reflects an increasingly common collector’s predicament—at its heart, it’s about someone’s being denied the opportunity to obtain what he can patently afford. The contemporary-art market hasn’t been this overheated since Soho circa 1989. Nowadays, hedge-fund billionaires who stroll into Chelsea galleries seeking work by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Cecily Brown quickly discover that money alone won’t help them get it. There is, more than ever, a waiting list, and more to the point, a pecking order within the list, which vaults some collectors above others.
Jean-Pierre Lehmann, of course, is no hedge-fund upstart; a discreet private investor, he’s been collecting art for three decades, and his wife co-owns a leading Chelsea gallery, Lehmann Maupin. But in this instance, he might as well have been one. Unlike other stymied collectors, however, he decided he had grounds to sue.
“This case shows the length a collector would go to secure themselves choice material,” says Sandy Heller, an art consultant to some of New York’s top hedge-fund managers. “Julie Mehretu’s work looked amazing at MoMA. If I were told I was going to get something by her and didn’t, I’d get pretty pissed, too.”
When did collecting art become such a maddening exercise for wealthy collectors, akin to having to go before picky co-op boards only to be rejected over and over again? Even Rembrandt and Dürer had waiting lists. But “lists for younger artists are a much more recent phenomenon,” says Chelsea dealer Barbara Gladstone. “It’s a function of this excitable market.” People on Wall Street are seeking contemporary-art trophies—and waiting lists make works even more enticing to obtain. It sounds familiar, and naturally everyone wonders when this bubble will burst. Right now “feels like the last days of the Roman Empire,” says private-art curator Todd Levin. “Compared to the eighties, it’s a much broader group with much more money”—though some of the people are the same ones who bought art the last time around.
During her brash ascendancy as the queen of Soho in the eighties, art dealer Mary Boone succeeded in manipulating market demand by setting up waiting lists for such neo-Expressionist painters as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Ross Bleckner, and Eric Fischl. (It was a far cry from the dark ages of the sixties, when dealer Irving Blum struggled to find buyers for Warhol soup cans, which now fetch millions at auction.) Operating out of a former garage on West Broadway, Boone was the first gallerist to require aspiring collectors to purchase work by artists before it was even created—a move that exposed her to criticism that she sometimes persuaded artists to part with substandard work to meet the frenzied demand she’d helped stoke.
Boone’s system finally came undone with the collapse of the art market in 1990. A Fischl she had sold for $1.4 million at the peak of the eighties was resold in the early nineties for $167,500. (Fischl’s market has since rebounded; he’s now represented by Larry Gagosian.) “Waiting lists disappeared during the early nineties, when the market was soft,” says Lorinda Ash, an art consultant. “They’re back with a vengeance.”
Today, demand far exceeds supply for such works as the slyly satirical paintings of John Currin; Lisa Yuskavage’s pictures of enormous-breasted femmes fatales; Kai Althoff’s multimedia evocations of the mysterious and macabre; the strangely beautiful retro-futuristic paintings of Neo Rauch; and Luc Tuymans’s paintings of child abuse, Nazism, guilt, and scrofulous pigeons.
“Lisa is the ultimate of wait lists, because she’s not at all prolific,” explains her New York dealer, Marianne Boesky. “She makes five big paintings every two years, maybe.” (Jean-Pierre Lehmann, as it happens, has a large number of works by Yuskavage.)
Over at Gladstone’s gallery on West 24th Street, Sarah Lucas’s God Is Dad, a sculpture composed of a pair of nylon tights, a wire hanger, and a lightbulb, may not be everyone’s idea of fine art. But it’s priced at £65,000 (in deference to the artist’s London bank account). And “I have a long wait list because it’s Sarah’s first New York exhibition in eight years,” Gladstone says. She declines to say how long. “It’s not a bakery. She’s popular, let’s just say that.”
At the January 22 Cecily Brown opening at Gagosian’s stadium-size gallery, there was a lot of conflicting chatter about the list for the British abstract artist’s paintings, priced between $70,000 and $130,000. “I’ve heard there are 200 on Cecily’s list,” an art adviser said in shock. “I’ve been having a running joke with my husband,” a dealer replied. “Last week we heard that there was a list of 137 for Cecily, and he said, ‘Today I met Mr. 132.’ It’s absurd. There’s no way to validate those numbers.”
Most dealers will discuss which artists have waiting lists, but usually not who’s on them, or even how many people are in line. Consequently, many in the art world dismiss the lists as so much hype; they certainly exist, but they’re grossly inflated. Nonetheless, this is a market in which collectors are even queuing up for works by kids who are still in art school—like Alison Fox, a painter in Hunter’s grad program whose current one-woman show at the East Village’s ATM gallery sold out before opening night, according to gallery owner Bill Brady. He’s quick to add that the British collector Charles Saatchi and the Guggenheim were among early buyers for the paintings (priced at $1,400 to $5,000), and that Fox already has a twenty-person waiting list for new work. “My list isn’t full of speculators,” he insists.
Saatchi is among those collectors who can jump to the top of a list, no matter who the artist is. Joining him there is anyone with a well-regarded private (but open to the public) museum, like Eli Broad in California, or the Rubell family, whose recently expanded space is in a former drug-seizure warehouse in Miami, or Marieluise Hessel, who is building an impressive contemporary collection for Bard College. They’re followed by those who’ve built private collections, like Dakis Joannou in Athens, who owns “probably more Jeff Koons than anyone else in the world,” says art consultant Mark Fletcher. Si Newhouse, Michael Ovitz, Peter Norton, and Agnes Gund are similarly privileged buyers. “If a collector with a fine reputation—say, Si Newhouse—is interested,” says Boesky, “then I’ll have to prioritize that client over a wonderful person who might have been waiting longer. And that causes tremendous angst.”
What that means is that an ordinary rich person can get left in the lurch. The system is openly discriminatory, but not without its logic. In gallery parlance, a work of art is not so much sold as “placed” in a museum or collection that is likely to enhance the career of the artist. For dealers, it’s a way of controlling what happens to art after they’ve parted with it—hence, of manipulating its value. Dealers often rejoice, and collectors despair, that the art world is the last big unregulated business in America. Prices can be altered by steering works to the right people in the right places. And what dealers really don’t want to see is a work get flipped at auction
Yet it’s precisely those auctions that have caused such a spike in the value of contemporary art. The frenzy’s being fueled by the discrepancy between the primary market price for works of art sold in galleries and the dizzying prices they’re likely to reach in the secondary market, particularly at auction. Take Kai Althoff, whose paintings are sold by Anton Kern, his New York dealer, for $10,000. “They’re literally worth ten times that on the secondary market,” a European dealer observes.
So why aren’t dealers charging more themselves? “If we started jumping our prices to match the auction market, we’d be faced with a limited group of collectors who’d be willing to buy,” says Boesky. “You never want to [then have to] lower your prices. So it’s better to have work that’s in consistent demand.” Dealers say they like to raise prices according to “fundamentals”—for instance, if an artist has a museum show. Still, Boesky admits, auction prices do play a role in setting dealer prices. When Takashi Murakami paintings that Boesky sold for $60,000 started fetching $600,000 at auction, she conferred with his other galleries around the world and agreed to raise prices to $250,000.
Galleries often make clients promise not to resell work at auction, arguing that it can put an artist’s career (and the gallery’s investment in that career) at risk if the piece fails to sell. Conversely, if it sells for too much, other collectors may be inspired to dump work by the same artist at auction, with similarly unpredictable results. Dealers prefer that owners come back to them with works to resell, privately.
“I remember when we bought an [Andreas] Gursky from Matthew Marks, and they were so anxious that the piece would end up at auction,” says Abigail Asher, a partner in leading art advisory Guggenheim Asher, referring to the German photographer. “We assured them this was one of our best clients, and they would never do that in a million years.”
“The beauty of the art world is that it’s the last handshake business,” says dealer David Zwirner. “You have to trust the other guy.” Such trust, though, can be misplaced. Two years ago, when a collector purchased a Murakami mushroom sculpture from Boesky, the dealer warned her it would take time for the piece to be fabricated in France. It wasn’t long, however, before the collector began calling the gallery every week, yelling, “Where’s my mushroom?”
“She tortured me for two years,” Boesky says. But when the piece was finally shipped to New York, Boesky discovered that the collector had arranged for it to be sent directly to Christie’s without even an overnight stay in her apartment. “It was a gross thing to do,” she says. “I certainly won’t work with her again.”
One of the more contentious dealer-collector disputes of recent years involves Barbara Gladstone and Daniel S. Loeb, a 42-year-old hedge-fund manager who owns an impressive contemporary-art collection. Loeb likes to relax via ashtanga yoga (he recently married a yoga instructor). But he’s also famously outspoken and accustomed to getting what he wants.
In March 2003, Loeb was walking through the Armory art show at Pier 92 with his art adviser at the time, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a respected private collector in her own right; aspiring collectors hire her in order to gain access to desirable work. They wandered into Barbara Gladstone’s booth, where Loeb fell for a Matthew Barney photograph from his art-house cult film series, “The Cremaster Cycle.” It was just the sort of fortuitous find collectors hope to come across at one of the five major annual art fairs around the world. (Galleries hold back important work to show at the Armory or Basel.)
Loeb was ecstatic when a director of the gallery agreed to sell it to him. But the following week, Rohatyn phoned with bad news. The director had neglected to check with Gladstone before reserving the work for Loeb, and he couldn’t have it after all. Gladstone’s motivation for canceling the sale remains unclear—part of the opaque machinations of dealers that can drive aspiring collectors crazy. Had she already promised the photograph to someone else? Did a more important collector come along? Gladstone declines to go into the specifics: “It was a misunderstanding, period.” Whatever the reason, Loeb was furious with the gallery. “I had to remove myself from the situation,” Rohatyn recalls. “Dan’s anger took over and he was pretty upset.”
Loeb declines to comment on the dispute. Since then, however, he appears to have grasped that feuding with Gladstone isn’t necessarily the greatest idea. “It’s certainly not the way to ingratiate yourself with someone who has what you want,” one art-world observer notes.
“Dan’s off Barbara’s play list, maybe in perpetuity,” a rival dealer says with glee. “You have to be extremely well mannered if you want to get ahead.”
However, Rohatyn claims that Loeb and Gladstone have resolved their differences. “I tried to mediate it, to get them back together to where Barbara will feel comfortable selling him something again.
“Dan respects Barbara,” she insists. “These things do happen. It’s unfortunate, but you just wait till the next thing comes along. I grew up in the art world, so my attitude is a little bit different. I try to be casual. If you don’t get one picture, there’s always another picture. I’ll wait for a picture five years if I have to.”
Rohatyn also plays an important role in the Haye-Lehmann dispute, as the owner of several Mehretu paintings Lehmann thought should rightly have been his.
After Lehmann struck his right-of-first-refusal deal with Haye, the Project mounted Mehretu’s first one-woman show in New York in November 2001. All parties in the subsequent legal fracas agree that Lehmann was invited to preview the exhibition, but he was traveling in Europe at the time. Upon his return, he expressed interest in two large paintings, which had already been sold. Thereafter, he says, he persistently reminded the gallery of his desire to buy Mehretus—and at the 2003 Armory show angrily complained to Haye that he had not been offered the chance to do so. Lehmann did buy other discounted work from the gallery, and Haye attempted to placate him by selling him a small Mehretu, Excerpt Regiment, for $17,500. In court Lehmann explained that because of its size he didn’t really want the painting. “But he bought it, and he’s stuck with it,” the judge joked. “I thought it was pretty good myself.”
Lehmann testified that he was furious when he received a catalogue of paintings from a one-woman show by Mehretu at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “I was flabbergasted,” he said in court, “because I’d asked for a year and a half for a work by Julie Mehretu. And I saw that the Greenberg Rohatyns owned five, and people I’d never heard of owned them.”
“There were obvious reasons to think that we’ve been very badly treated,” he said later.
Rohatyn and her husband, Nick, own a large, art-filled house on East 94th with a ground-floor gallery called Salon 94, open to the public three days a week and also to collectors by appointment. In court, Haye described Rohatyn as an early investor in the Project, a description that his friend politely rejects. “I was an early supporter of Julie’s work at the Project,” she says, “but I was not an investor in the gallery itself.”
Rohatyn sees no reason to apologize for her Mehretus. “I showed Julie before she showed with Christian,” she says, referring to a group exhibition she helped organize in 2000. “I won’t sell pictures that I own personally. And I’m a happy lender to exhibitions. To me it makes perfect sense that I have them.”
After seeing the Walker catalogue, Lehmann immediately wrote to Haye: “The catalogue . . . indicates that you sold at least 5 major paintings of Julie’s to a local dealer [Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn]. This is totally unacceptable, and you have not fulfilled your end of the contract. We have to demand from you the prompt payment of our remaining credit: $17,500.”
According to Lehmann, he was never interested in the money, only in applying pressure on Haye to sell him Mehretu’s work. “I know a lot of bad people in the art world,” he says. “I’m not a bad person. In 35 years I’ve never had a problem with any gallery.” He received a check soon after, without a word of apology. When no conciliatory offer of a Mehretu followed, Lehmann went on to file suit.
In their quest to acquire work by artists who are deemed fashionable, collectors will do all sorts of curious things. “I’ve seen tough business people grovel in a way they would never do in their business lives,” says Amy Cappellazzo, a former art adviser who is now head of Christie’s contemporary department. Others simply take a tough approach. “A client of mine was so desperate to buy a painting last week, he told me to tell the gallery he was starting a family foundation to build a private museum,” an uptown art adviser says. “I asked him if it was true and he said, ‘Of course not. Just tell them that so I can get the goddamned painting.’ ” The adviser declined.
But dealers have also devised their own idiosyncratic ways to control the distribution of art. Zach Feuer, who just had a sold-out show for Dana Schutz, another rising art star, now offers collectors a novel two-for-one deal for select works: “We ask people to buy two pieces, with the condition that one gets donated to a public institution.” Not everyone has warmed to the approach. “The deal he offered was, give a large painting to a museum, and get a little one to take home,” an art adviser says. “I said, ‘Get lost.’ ”
According to Feuer, three collectors agreed to his terms. One, Susan D. Goodman, a strategic-marketing consultant whose clients include AOL, donated one of her Schutz paintings to the Corcoran in Washington. “I’m very philanthropic,” she says, “and I loved the idea of being able to do something for the museum and helping Dana’s career. It also had some tax advantages.”
The artwork Goodman is donating is a 78-by-72 oil-on-canvas painting called Twin Parts. “Isn’t it wild?” she says. “The subject is plastic surgery.” The picture she gets to take home is the 25-by-22-inch Head Eater. “It’s an image of a person eating their face. It’s really gross but kind of cool.”
Some dealers scoff at Feuer’s arrangement. But he can’t get his head around Christian Haye’s practice of promising investors access to works of art. “This paying-for-access thing is insane,” he says. “It seems like it’s going to end in a lawsuit no matter how you do it.”
What many in the art world don’t understand is why Haye allowed the case to go to court, rather than simply giving Lehmann the opportunity to plunk down $200,000 or so on a large painting by Julie Mehretu. For one thing, Lehmann is precisely not the kind of collector who would flip the work at auction. “Frankly, I can’t imagine what was going through Christian’s mind,” says Boesky.
Haye, 35, who was a poet and an art critic before becoming a dealer, says he did fulfill his agreement with Lehmann by selling him works by a video artist he was also keenly interested in, Paul Pfeiffer. (Lehmann purchased six works by Pfeiffer for a total of $250,000.) “It’s not like I told him he’d never get a Julie Mehretu painting,” Haye says. “I just said, ‘Wait.’ The people who wonder why I didn’t sell him a painting to avoid trouble are the galleries he spends a million a year at. Basically, if he had not sued me, he’d have one already.”
But did Haye really have a Mehretu to offer? By his own admission, it normally takes Mehretu five months to produce a large painting like the one at MoMA. She is currently said to have a commission to produce paintings for Michael Ovitz, the former Hollywood power broker who is a longtime member of MoMA’s board (a commission that was neither confirmed nor denied by Haye or Mehretu).
It’s also possible there were other people Haye wanted to reward for their support. In court, he identified Dennis Scholl, a Miami businessman, as an investor in the gallery. Scholl denies investing but acknowledges making a “friendly loan” in 2003. That same year, Haye sold him an ink-and-acrylic Mehretu for $80,000.
Ruling in Lehmann’s favor, Judge Ira Gammerman said Haye was in “a clear breach” of contract, and warned that “unless the parties reach an agreement, there’s going to be an award of substantial damages for the plaintiff.”
The two sides are scheduled to appear before Gammerman on March 2 to learn just how substantial. Haye’s attorney, Alan Effron, assesses the damages at $120,000, while Lehmann’s lawyer, Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern, puts the number in excess of $1.9 million.
Haye says he’s not worried about the damages, though the courtroom experience has left him dispirited. “This is hopefully my first and last lawsuit,” he says. “Law & Order and The Practice are fun to watch, but not much fun to be in.”
But, he adds, “once Jean-Pierre started the legal process, I had to figure that with an endless amount of museums and private collectors that want [a painting by Mehretu], is it in Julie’s best interest to give the fruits of her labor to someone who is going to sue me?”
Julie mehretu doesn’t seem to have much interest in discussing the subject of what’s in her best interest. “It’s an issue between the gallery and the parties involved,” she says. “I’m not a party of those contracts. That’s why I’ve tried to steer clear of the whole situation.”
A testament to her covetability, the case is hardly an embarrassment—even if her dealer’s lawyer put her on the stand to back up his contention that the Project should owe Lehmann less in damages than he’s seeking because her works haven’t increased that much in value since their original sale. (“I couldn’t believe a gallery would call their artist to testify about how little her work is worth,” says Stern.) “I would go with whatever the square foot is,” Mehretu says, estimating the worth of her paintings by their size. She later estimated that the one sold to Scholl had gone up in value only two and a half times—and was worth only $200,000—rather than the almost fourfold increase estimated by the plaintiff’s expert witness.
Despite such a blunt assessment, Mehretu must be aware that what gives her paintings such value in the wild, unregulated art market is precisely what can be least regulated about them: herself. Collecting the work of living artists excites, and frustrates, collectors because it is so unpredictable. Will an artist’s output dry up? Will her style change? Will a painting soon be worth four times what was paid for it?
And although many artists attempt to sway their own markets, dining with collectors if not (like Rembrandt) bidding up their own works at auction, Mehretu seems a bit more removed from the fray. After all, she didn’t even know Lehmann’s name.
“I make paintings, and when they’re finished, the gallery decides who has been interested in the work and they discuss with me who they’re planning to sell it to,” she says, while adding that right now she has no intention of leaving Christian Haye. “And they usually make very good decisions.”

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For the Baron of Yonkers, a Gothic Revival

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 08:38:04 -0500

DRESSED in ripped jeans, a black leather jacket and a bandanna wrapped around his unruly mop of black hair, Kohle Yohannan seems an improbable lord of the manor. But there was no mistaking his proprietorial glee on a recent windswept afternoon as he led a tour of his home, a gray granite 18-room castle in Yonkers that he recently renamed Greystone Court.
Built in 1883, the mansion evokes the gilded age of Yonkers portrayed in "Hello, Dolly!" But like Yonkers itself, its glory has faded over the years. Once the center of a grand estate, the house now sits on a single acre surrounded by crumbling Victorians and modest tract houses.
Since acquiring the pile for $469,000 in 2001, just a few weeks after Sept. 11 ("I told myself, `If the world gets blown up, at least I'll get blown up in a castle,' " he said), Mr. Yohannan, a 37-year-old writer and confessed maverick, has been busy restoring the 13,400-square-foot mansion to its former magnificence.
It was a mammoth task, and early visitors thought Mr. Yohannan had taken leave of his senses. The late John Galliher, a New York socialite and his close friend, described the baronial fixer-upper — a maze of cobwebs that resembled the haunted house at Disney World — as "poverty deluxe."
But after three years of intense labor, Mr. Yohannan threw a rollicking housewarming lunch this fall to show off his domain. Eighty guests showed up, including John Loring, the design director of Tiffany & Company, and Cathy Hardwick, the fashion designer.
For many of the revelers it was their first foray to Yonkers, a city just north of the Bronx that is only 23 minutes by train from Grand Central Terminal.
"When I tell people I live in Yonkers, they usually give me a look of quiet, dull pity," Mr. Yohannan said.
The guests quaffed Champagne and admired Mr. Yohannan's handiwork. Antique chandeliers gleamed brightly in the banquet-size dining room; the Gothic chapel was illuminated by sunlight streaming through restored Tiffany glass; and the octagonal ballroom, with its sweeping views of the Hudson River, was crammed with bohemian clutter: a lamp made from three deer legs, a stuffed peacock, and a pair of carved rococo doors thought to be from the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron's home. Upstairs, dainty cornflower-blue draperies worthy of a French chateau festooned what he referred to as the "Marie Antoinette bedroom." And the Turkish sitting room was piled with cushions in exotic blues, oranges and reds that clashed amiably with the dark green silk on the walls.
Mr. Yohannan is no less colorful. He tools around Yonkers on a Ducati motorcycle or in a secondhand Bentley. Born in San Francisco to parents of Iranian and French extraction, he grew up in a rambling Beaux-Arts house that his family had restored on a shoestring budget. "My dad was a mechanic, but my mom had really great taste," he said. "Our neighbors were doctors and lawyers who drove Mercedes, and we were the grease monkeys who fixed their cars."
At 16 he abandoned a fledgling career cleaning spark plugs for 25 cents apiece to become a fashion model, strutting his stuff down the catwalks of Barcelona and New York, where he also enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology and learned to make dresses. When he was 22 — during his sophomore year at Columbia University — he became the fourth husband of Mary McFadden, the fashion designer, who was 51; the relationship ended 22 months later in well-publicized recriminations. (In court papers, Mr. Yohannan described Ms. McFadden as an "older, selfish, willful" woman who demanded "rough sexual treatment" and "group sex sessions." She called him a "toy boy" and a "flake." He left the marriage with a settlement of $110,000 and the couple's pet cockatoo, Socrates Zinzar Big Bux.)
"God bless her, I was a lousy husband," Mr. Yohannan said. "I was so overwhelmed by it all."
Over the past five years he has written three books on fashion and earned a master's degree in design history from the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in cultural history at Bard College.
He has financed the renovation, which he says has cost $750,000 so far, largely with savings accumulated through real estate deals, for which he has a Midas touch. In 1993 he bought a derelict church in Hudson, N.Y., for $48,000 and transformed it into a comfortable country house, which he sold for a 250 percent profit, a selling-high pattern that he has repeated with every apartment and house he has owned. He has, however, turned down an offer of $6 million for Greystone Court.
He stumbled on the castle in 1997 while driving around Yonkers, where he had purchased a rundown garage for $100,000, transforming it into a recording studio. (For several years he moonlighted as a music producer, another item on his crowded résumé.) He sold it in 2001 for nearly $400,000.
The castle was not for sale, but Mr. Yohannan spent years dropping by to admire the romantic exterior until the owner of the house, a Haitian woman in her 80's, finally answered the doorbell, succumbed to his persuasive charm, and eventually accepted his cash offer of $469,000. "She said, `You're like me. You're crazy enough to think you can fix it,' " he recalled.
Mr. Yohannan's first night in the house — on Halloween 2001 — was a constant battle to stay warm. Wind rattled through broken windows, and squirrels scampered over his mattress, which he had dragged into the ballroom in order to admire the romantic view of the Hudson River.
Lying there, Mr. Yohannan was mesmerized by the room's carved oak ceiling, with its elaborate garlands, swags and figural carvings. According to historical documents that came with the house, the two-ton ceiling, built around 1690, had once graced a manor house in Nottinghamshire, England.
"I talked to that ceiling all night long, imagining all the people who have danced beneath it," Mr. Yohannan said. "I thought, `I can't believe I own this house.' "
Elation turned to anxiety the following morning when he made a list of urgently needed repairs. The slate roof leaked, and a broken boiler pipe was gushing water. And something had to be done about the three-foot gap between the front door and the first floorboard, an inhospitable arrangement to say the least.
To help with the restoration Mr. Yohannan hired George Nienstedt, a wisecracking local craftsman who became the project manager.
"The first step was to seal up the house, which was heating Yonkers," Mr. Nienstedt said. They installed storm windows, partly to discourage youths from what had become a neighborhood sport: throwing rocks through the Tiffany windows. And they set up a carpentry workshop in an anteroom of the chapel, equipping it with every conceivable power tool to fix rotten joists and damaged moldings. Mr. Yohannan participated in every aspect of the work. "I apprenticed myself to George," he said.
He also assisted Nellie Misch, a stained-glass artist who lives nearby in Dobbs Ferry, whom he hired to restore the windows. Her most delicate task was the restoration of a stained-glass window that Mr. Yohannan discovered in the attic. Called "Allegory of Music," it was designed by John LaFarge for the Fifth Avenue mansion of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, which was demolished in 1927 to make way for Bergdorf Goodman. The 4-by-9-foot window now illuminates Mr. Yohannan's palatial powder room.
Mr. Yohannan trawled antiques shops and flea markets across the country, returning with eccentric items like molting animal heads for the ballroom: an ibex from Louisiana, a wild boar from Texas and a giant elk from the 26th Street flea market in New York, which stared out of the trunk of his Bentley when he drove it to Yonkers. "There was lots of honking and laughter," he said. (The Bentley was another bargain: "I found it in The PennySaver," Mr. Yohannan explained.)
With a sharp eye for unlikely objects, he bought an old-fashioned piano in Beacon, N.Y., gutted it, topped the stately rosewood frame with a marble top and sink to transform it into a kitchen island. (Pots and pans hang around the perimeter to conceal the plumbing.)
Mr. Yohannan had a head start with decorating: the house was full of architectural fragments from Europe, installed by previous owners. In the dining room he discovered 18th-century paneling with gold leaf detailing that lay beneath three coats of turquoise paint, which he painstakingly scraped away. "I was seeing that color in my nightmares," he said.
To help pay for further renovations — and for college tuition — Mr. Yohannan now rents out his castle for fashion and movie shoots. Julia Roberts and Kirsten Dunst spent seven days at the house in 2002 filming scenes for "Mona Lisa Smile." (Inquiries: greystonecourt@aol.com.) He expects to spend another year, and another million dollars, on improvements, he said. Several rooms stand empty except for piles of wallboard, waiting to be transformed into something
suitably baronial.
Snobbish New Yorkers may turn their noses up at Yonkers, but Mr. Yohannan's investment appears to have been prescient. Low city taxes and a stock of fine but run-down houses awaiting renovation have been luring some New Yorkers north. A tiny ranch-style house on Mr. Yohannan's street recently sold for more than $500,000 to a young couple who work in Manhattan.
Mr. Yohannan, meanwhile, has indulged in some snobbery of his own, renaming his castle Greystone Court because "I couldn't bear its former name," Chateau Fleur-de-Lys. That name, he thought, "was better suited for a brothel or a bad French restaurant in a strip mall — in someplace like Yonkers."

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Antiques Arrayed in Paris, Americans Are Not

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:27:29 -0400

WATCHING Chanel-clad Americans graze on foie gras as they pored over gilded 18th-century consoles and Ruhlmann cabinets at a preview of the 22nd Biennale des Antiquaires — Europe's grandest antiques show — you would never guess that there was a strain in French-American relations.
But at an opening gala on Sept. 13, presided over by Bernadette Chirac, wife of the French president, American accents were scarce. Were American consumers of French décor avoiding Paris for political reasons, or have terrorist threats and the rising value of the euro scared them away? One dealer suggested that perhaps the rise of midcentury modern has dampened the American appetite for European antiques.
At the preview dealers stared with naked envy and expectation as Henry Kravis, the New York financier, and his wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, a French-Canadian economist, paused before a pair of sofa-size canvases by Jean-François de Troy with an asking price of $3.7 million. When the Kravises moved on, you could almost hear the dealer, Maurice Segoura, exhale.
Other participants whose every raised eyebrow and half-smile dealers scrutinized included Ronald Lauder, Christopher Forbes, Linda Wachner and Felix Rohatyn. But they were the exceptions this year, as Americans, who last year accounted for 60 percent of sales at the biennale, stayed away in droves.
Only 5 of the 56 members of the American Friends of the Biennale des Antiquaires, a six-year-old honorary committee that lends prestige to the fair, showed up for the opening, held in the bowels of the Louvre. (The show, open to the public, runs through Sept. 28.)
"America is the leader of the world economy," said Jacques Perrin, a leading purveyor of 18th- and early-19th-century French decorative arts. "But nobody is traveling."
Some blame Sept. 11, others a disdain for the French among supporters of the war in Iraq. With the added obstacle of a strong euro, the fair's organizers went to extravagant lengths to lure American collectors, offering them private peeks at the residences of Baron Guy de Rothschild and Count and Countess d'Ornano,
lunch with the United States ambassador, drinks with the French culture minister and an after-hours visit to the Fondation Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent and its retrospective of Saint Laurent's work.
These and dozens of other entertainments were free to a handpicked list of 78 curators and museum trustees and 42 influential decorators, including Jamie Drake, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's interior designer. Also on board were Brian McCarthy and Sandra Nunnerly, designers best known for using 18th- and 19th-century antiques in modern interiors.
The Americans who made the trip were able to wallow in the ministrations of French antiques dealers, who are among Europe's most adept flatterers. "We're making a big effort to welcome the Americans because we depend very much on the American market," said Christian Deydier, a dealer in Chinese antiquities and the president of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires, the group that organizes the biennale.
He brushed aside talk of tension between the countries, exerting championship-level charm. "We maybe had a bad position because we don't take part in the war," he said. "But when we speak about art, we forget all the trouble over the decision between our president and your president. Don't forget that the Americans were Europeans first, eh? They came from France, from Germany, from Italy, a long time ago.
"So we are cousins," Mr. Deydier added, rather emphatically. "Don't forget Lafayette!"
Still, General Lafayette might have been taken aback by the heavily guarded American embassy and by the nearby Rue Boissy d'Anglas, which is blocked to traffic. "My mother warned me not to come to Paris, and so did friends back home," said Sunny Brownstein, a Denver socialite, wearing giant pearl and diamond earrings as she chatted at the gala. Ms. Brownstein hit town with her 25-year-old daughter, Callae, staying at the Hôtel Georges V between shopping forays.
"I'm not hearing any American voices at the hotel," Ms. Brownstein said. "Just discreet Middle Easterners."
Low attendance by Americans may reflect a growing trend. "The pattern of the American collectors has changed," said Thierry Millerand, an antiques consultant with offices in New York and Paris. "They don't travel as much, period. And the market for good French furniture is very slow at the moment."
Mr. Millerand also noted with some distaste that "decorators have been pushing 1950's and 1960's things." He continued: "There's a strong market for museum-quality things bought by serious collectors. But it's a very small group. Maybe 20 in the world."
One of the museum-quality pieces on display at the biennale is an elaborate mechanical desk thought to have been made in 1755 by Jean-François Oeben, an important cabinetmaker. Shown by Philippe Perrin, it is made of oak, amaranth, tulipwood and ebony, with ormolu mounts. It went to an anonymous Parisian buyer for $1.85 million.
Galerie Vallois, which specializes in early-20th-century furniture, is presenting a rare suite of furniture designed by Armand-Albert Rateau. It includes an oak desk with ebony marquetry, topped with leather, and it has never before been on the market. A drawer-pull bears the initials of its original owner, Marie Jeanne Lanvin. The entire stand was sold out on opening night. The buzz was that the mystery buyer was Mr. Kravis, who dined with the gallery owners, Bob and Cheska Vallois, at the gala. (Mr. Kravis declined to comment.)
The relative quiet meant plenty of elbow room for serious buyers. The interior designer Lee Mindel purchased a 1962 table by Charlotte Perriand that was fashioned from a single piece of 13-foot-long wood. He declined to disclose the selling price, saying only that the desk was for an important American client.
Another designer, Charlotte Moss, went back to New York with a list of items to propose to clients who had stayed home. She was at Jorge Welsh's stand admiring a blue-and-white Ming platter when a friend, Ann Nitze, walked by. "That'll look wholesome at someone's next barbecue," Ms. Nitze, an art dealer, said dryly.
Ms. Moss and Ms. Nitze said they wouldn't dream of skipping the biennale. "How could you be in my business and not be here?" Ms. Moss said.
For some, the real excitement lay across the river, at a palatial building on the Quai Anatole France, where J. Kugel, a third-generation antiques business, opened its luxurious new showroom the night of the gala. The shop, in three floors of a riverfront hôtel particulier clearly involved a sizable investment, but Alexis Kugel, 38, and Nicolas Kugel, 41, the brothers in charge, seem optimistic about finding buyers for their most expensive wares. "The market for masterpieces is booming," Alexis Kugel said. He acknowledged that "the market for middle-range items has never been so bad.
"For me it shows that collectors are much more careful," he continued. "We're trying to sell the highest quality in an appropriate setting. I'm very confident and optimistic. Of course if we weren't, we wouldn't have gone to all this trouble."
At the opening reception Pierre Merle, a New York lawyer, was being led around by Baroness Hélène de Ludinghausen, the president of a foundation that is financing the restoration of the Stroganoff palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. Was Mr. Merle thinking of snapping up a 1755 ormolu candelabrum for the palace, with a price tag of $518,300? "It's out of my league," said Mr. Merle, who went home empty-handed.
Nicolas Kugel observed that there were fewer Americans than expected. "We have a lot of French dukes and duchesses," he said, studying the crowd. Among the few Americans was Dodie Rosekrans, the San Francisco socialite, who peered at a huge Louis XVI bed, circa 1785, of royal provenance and attributed to G. Jacob, from the collection of Baron Guy de Rothschild. The price is about $395,000. "I came just for this," she told Mr. Kugel, referring to the new gallery.
John W. Teets, a former chairman of Greyhound and of Dial Soap, and his wife, Nancy, marveled at the Kugels' wares. "I collect French Empire clocks," Mr. Teets said. "I've got about 60 of them. All 1810-1820, gold ormolu." Three clocks were on display, but Mr. Teets, too, left without making a purchase.
The Teetses are members of the American Friends of the Louvre, a group that raises money for the museum. They had been weekend guests of Mr. Forbes, the chairman of the group, who had rounded up 22 lively prospects at his family's chateau in Normandy. So far, so good. Mr. Forbes has already raised nearly $1 million.
He said that he had qualms initially, given the tensions between the two countries, but found that his fund-raising met with no resistance, even when he requested a minimum gift of $10,000 for those wishing to join the chairman's circle. "Maybe people have forgotten that the Louvre's in France," he said.
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Shopping with William I. Koch: Everything is Hardly Enough

Thu, 5 Feb 2004 17:31:52 -0500

''DID someone famous die in it?'' William I. Koch asked, sounding hopeful.
Mr. Koch (pronounced coke), the multimillionaire investor and yachtsman, was inspecting a carved mahogany four-poster bed at the Palm Beach Classic International Fine Art and Antique Fair on Sunday -- price, $855,000.
Ultimately, the Chippendale period bed, adorned with rose silk damask, was a bit too grand for Mr. Koch, 63, a plain-spoken oilman and entrepreneur who was raised in Wichita, Kan. He also passed up a George I carved gilt gesso bureau for which Mallett, an English dealer, was asking $2.66 million.
The people at Mallett seemed oblivious to the identity of the 6-foot-4 fellow with the aw-shucks Midwestern accent, white hair and rumpled khakis. Too bad. Mr. Koch is one of the most prodigious collectors of wine, art and antiques in the United States. Merchants with antennas for passing multimillionaires quiver at his approach. In this instance, dealers rushed up to ply him with compliments.
''You have impeccable taste,'' François Graff, a well-known jewelry dealer, said after planting a kiss on Mr. Koch's fiancée, Bridget M. Rooney, who was trying on a new 31-carat yellow diamond. Mr. Graff dispensed flattery, solicited dating tips and whispered about cut-price deals for loyal customers.
It's no wonder that Mr. Graff was atwitter. William Koch's spending habits are legend. Two years ago, he and Ms. Rooney made three major purchases at the fair: a giant yellow diamond ring from Graff that was already on Ms. Rooney's hand; Magritte's ''L'Embellie,'' a 1941 painting of three seminude women that now hangs in the Koch mansion on South Ocean Boulevard here, on the waterfront stretch known as Billionaires' Row; and a pair of two-foot-tall silver centerpieces for elaborate flower arrangements, made in 1860 by Queen Victoria's silversmiths, R.&S. Garrard & Company. Mr. Koch bought them from Marks, an English dealer, for $240,000, and they now sit on his dining room table.
The couple were now back at Marks, admiring a vast silver centerpiece created to accompany the two pieces at home. The price was $595,000 (or merely $418,000 with the loyal-customer discount).
''Would you like to see it in situ?'' asked Anthony Marks, who offered to deliver the piece. Mr. Koch seemed unsure. ''We've got two already,'' he told Ms. Rooney. ''And I can't see you across the dinner table.''
Ah, well.
At the stand of Axel Vervoordt, a Belgian dealer, Ms. Rooney spotted a Roman bust of Venus for $375,000. ''This would work in the antiquities room,'' she said, referring to the mansion's repository of ancient statuary.
Mr. Koch's seemingly limitless budget stems in part from the immense fortune amassed by his father, Fred Koch, a founder of Koch Industries, a diversified oil concern that is now the second-largest privately owned company in the United States. William and his three brothers each inherited stakes in the family oil business. But an epic family feud ensued, with William Koch accusing his brother Charles and William's twin, David, of shortchanging him and their older brother, Fred, in a deal to sell a portion of the company's stock. With Fred and William on one side and David and Charles on the other, William Koch filed a series of lawsuits aimed at Charles, the chief executive of the family firm. In 1981, he also sued his 82-year-old mother, Mary, compelling her to take the witness stand shortly after suffering a stroke.
The brothers finally reached a settlement two years ago, ending two decades of recriminations. Mr. Koch says that ever since, he has been on good terms with his brothers. Last Saturday, David and his wife, Julia, dined chez Koch under Queen Victoria's silversmith's centerpieces.
William Koch cannot be accused of merely mooching off his inheritance. He has been busy since quitting the family firm in 1983. He spent $68 million to win the America's Cup in 1992 -- just one of his interests. ''My brother Charles collects money,'' Mr. Koch said dryly. ''David used to collect girls, but not anymore. Fred collects castles. And I collect everything.''
As a chemical engineer with three degrees from M.I.T., including a Ph.D., William Koch founded and remains the owner of Oxbow, North America's largest importer and exporter of petroleum coke, a byproduct of the refining industry. Oxbow generates nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.
Such wealth has not protected him from trouble, a dazzling array of lawsuits and romantic misadventures that have landed in the gossip columns. In 1995 he filed suit to evict a former girlfriend, Catherine de Castelbajac, from his 3,700-square-foot apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. In Boston Housing Court, normally reserved for disputes over rats and malfunctioning boilers, an array of sexually explicit faxes from Ms. Castelbajac were given as evidence, including one hailing him as ''the greatest lover this side of the Rockies.''
On the face of it, Mr. Koch is a guileless, happy-go-lucky guy who always seems to land in hot water. But with Palm Beach haute society awash in suntanned felons and assorted miscreants, and with the imprimatur of sexual high jinks established by Roxanne Pulitzer in the 1980's, there is nothing particularly unusual about Mr. Koch's domestic arrangements. He fathered a son, now 17, with a previous wife, Joan Koch. And he is raising a daughter, Charlotte, now 7, whom he had with a long-ago girlfriend, and two other children -- William, 6, and Robin, 4 -- by his ex-wife Angela Koch. Also part of the household is Liam, the 7-year-old son Ms. Rooney had with Kevin Costner.
It's a version of domestic bliss that might have startled Marjorie Merriweather Post, but these days it's just par for the course. And Ms. Rooney certainly seems a suitable match. She is independently wealthy. And together they claim to be uninterested in the ways of high society.
Mr. Koch's 36,000-square-foot mansion, a three-story quasi-Colonial house on a four-acre ocean-to-lake lot 1,500 feet long, is a testament to his seemingly unquenchable desire to collect. While leading this writer on an encyclopedic tour last weekend, he lamented that the house is ''too bloody big.'' To track down his family and household staff, he complained, ''I have to use the intercom.''
The house's vast size, he said, ''is dictated by the size of my collections.'' The dining room is festooned with nautical paintings, ship models and a cannon. And the 31-by-21-foot living room is crammed with signature works by Monet, Modigliani, Matisse, Renoir, Corot, Chagall and Degas. A state-of-the-art wine cellar holds roughly half his collection of 35,000 bottles. And a loggia that seats 70 for dinner is equipped with ceramics by Léger, Braque and Picasso.
''I've got so much art I've started putting it on the ceiling,'' Mr. Koch said. He wasn't kidding. A Sioux wedding dress hovers above the leather chairs in the Western room, sharing space with an Indian beaded child's shirt and a buffalo hide painted with animal scenes. The Western room contains what is said to be the finest collection in private hands of works by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. And there's plenty of other valuable memorabilia, including General Custer's hunting rifle and the pistol that killed Jesse James. Recent additions to the collection of Western memorabilia are the bead belt and breastplate that Sitting Bull wore at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
After 20 years of Mr. Koch's collecting, it is not surprising that the house is bursting at the seams. ''I have a new rule,'' he said. ''Every time I buy something, I sell something.'' Whether that rule will endure remains to be seen. But on Tuesday, Mr. Koch sold a painting by Balthus -- ''Nu aux Bras Levés'' -- at Sotheby's in London for $3.7 million. The day before, he had taken possession of a 1913 masterpiece by Charles Russell: ''Caught With the Goods (Whiskey Smugglers).''
''It's one of the top three Russells in private hands,'' said Baird Ryan of the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., who sold the painting to Mr. Koch.
And where are the other top two? ''They're already in his collection,'' Mr. Ryan said.
Not everything is perfect in this earthly paradise. Billionaires' Row lies beneath the flight path of the busy Palm Beach International Airport. Mr. Koch was in midsentence when a jumbo jet roared overhead. ''That's called the Palm Beach pause,'' he explained.
For a house that holds more than $100 million in art and furniture, the atmosphere seems astonishingly laid-back. It's a house that is definitely lived in, with four children under age 8 in residence. Liam's favorite party trick is to hide under the table and snatch napkins from the laps of dinner guests. Ms. Rooney has also discovered him doing cartwheels on a leather sofa in the Western room among Mr. Koch's multimillion-dollar Remington sculptures. And she says she was initially terrified when they moved into Mr. Koch's mansion nearly three years ago. ''There was an ancient bust of Caligula outside Liam's room,'' she recalled. ''And the first year we were together, I was sure it was going to fall over.''
She is more comfortable now. ''I saw that Bill's so relaxed about it,'' she said. ''So why should I worry?''
In the past three years, Mr. Koch has opened his home to several charity events -- a trend he now hopes to reverse. On Friday night, he was the host at a dinner to benefit the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Benefactors who paid $25,000 got six tickets to the gala opening of the Palm Beach antiques fair and to Mr. Koch's dinner, underwritten by Christie's.
Mr. Koch and Ms. Rooney have decided to cut back on charity events at the house, vowing to focus only on those benefiting children, art or medicine.
Do they enjoy attending the grand charity balls that are the mainstay of social life in Palm Beach during the season? ''I go to about one a year,'' Mr. Koch said. ''I always ask, 'How much will it cost me not to go?' ''

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Where Everybody Has a Name

Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:33:20 -0500

TERRY STANFILL found what she was looking for her name -- before she got as far as the Henry Mancini Family Staircase and the Ron Burkle-Ralphs/Food 4 Less Foundation Auditorium. When you donate only $50,000, all you get is your name two inches tall on a stone paver of the terrace garden at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall here.
It was the hall's long-awaited opening night on Thursday, and an impromptu ballet of ball-gowned philanthropists had begun at twilight as bejeweled women darted about searching for their names, in stainless steel letters set in stone. Men in black tie were corralling their women, reminding them that the inaugural concert was about to begin.
Disney Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, is not just an architectural tour de force. With a budget that ballooned from the original estimate of $110 million to $274 million, it became a rare naming opportunity, a kind of permanent billboard for wealthy people to have their names inscribed. Every atrium, every staircase, every reception room, even every escalator in and around Disney Hall carries the name of a benefactor.
The size of the lettering and the space occupied by donors' names corresponds to the scale of their munificence.
The names of major donors -- Alfred E. Mann and Ron W. Burkle -- are six inches tall. Those who contributed a mere $100,000 -- like Bram Goldsmith and William Siart -- had to be content with inch-and-a-half-tall letters on the Donors Wall.
The new hall, which will be home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is not only an architectural triumph for Los Angeles, it gives well-to-do Angelenos a chance to preen and to foster the pursuit of excellence in classical music in a city not known for its love of high culture.
The upper echelon of New York society has long revolved around philanthropy. Those in its ranks who dismiss Los Angeles as merely a society of celebrity, movie mojo and clogged freeways are missing out on an intriguing cultural shift taking place in the city.
''This building is a statement to the fact that there's a society here based on philanthropy,'' Andrea Van de Kamp said. ''Apart from Disney, there's very little movie money here.''
A fund-raising campaign led by Ms. Van de Kamp -- a blond dynamo with persuasive charm -- drew 283 donors who gave at least $100,000 to have their names honored. ''I would call and say, 'I have a live one. What can we name after him?' '' Ms. Van de Kamp recalled. ''And I was running out of options. A urinal, perhaps?'' she said, jokingly.
Efforts to accommodate the whims of wealthy patrons have resulted in some odd nomenclature. Take, for instance, the Henry Mancini Family Staircase. You might imagine that it is reserved for the perambulations of the composer's family. But no. It is open to all comers.
There is also the peculiar name of the auditorium itself: the Ron Burkle-Ralphs/Food 4 Less Foundation Auditorium. Does that sound like a mouthful? Don't quibble. Mr. Burkle donated $15 million to the hall, half from his personal fortune, half from the discount food chain he used to own.
And you can't miss the Edward D. and Anna Mitchell Family Foundation escalator cascade. Nor the Edythe and Eli Broad Reception Hall, for a gift of $15 million, and the Founders, a retreat for major contributors, suitably vast and exquisitely designed.
The surprise about this great preponderance of names is that it is all so decorous. No ugly bronze plaques wreck the sculptural beauty of the interior. Far from it. Some names are etched in glass. Some in stainless steel letters set in stone, some in white plaster.
''It's elegant, not gauche, and it's nice for the donors,'' Ms. Van de Kamp said. The Toronto-based designer Bruce Mau developed the system for displaying the donors' names at the behest of Mr. Gehry.
The cavorting women on the terrace are members of the Blue Ribbon, the city's exclusive all-women charity, which raises money for the music center's constituent groups: the Philharmonic, the Center Theater Group, the Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
''It's the charity that all the ladies want to get into,'' noted Peter Dunham, an English interior designer based in Los Angeles.
The evening attracted an unusually varied group. Some traveled from New York to attend, including Ben and Donna Rosen. Mr. Rosen is on the board of the New York Philharmonic. Michael Eisner was there with his wife, Jane. They were sitting with Mercedes and Sid Bass, Barry Diller, and Candice Bergen and her husband, Marshall Rose. Bob Graham, the sculptor; Jodie Foster; and Denise Hale, the San Francisco socialite, were there. Arianna Huffington, dressed in black lace, stopped to blow a kiss to Edythe and Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and philanthropist who played a major part in the building of Disney Hall. And Ginny Mancini, the widow of Henry Mancini and the chairwoman of the inaugural gala, shimmered in light gold chiffon and diamonds.
Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, noted a shift in Los Angeles society. ''Traditionally in L.A., there hasn't been this kind of mix,'' she said. ''The city is so fragmented, which has a lot to do with geography. But Disney Hall brings everyone together. Frank has made a breakthrough.''
After the concert, revelers headed to dinner in a transparent tent, the better to admire the curves of the building and the fireworks that erupted before dessert, which came in the shape of the building.

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At Home With Slim Aarons: Teaching the Rich to Say Cheese

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:45:38 -0500

''THIS fireplace heats the whole house,'' Slim Aarons said, pointing to the ravenous fire warming his book-lined living room on a frigid afternoon earlier this month.
Mr. Aarons, 85, the photographer whose images of the beau monde at leisure appeared in Town & Country and Life magazine for nearly half a century, was extolling the design of his 1782 clapboard farmhouse, where he has lived since 1953.
''The farmers were so smart,'' he said, referring to the original owners. ''They planted black walnut trees in front because their leaves were the first to shed in the fall. So the house gets the warm winter sunlight when it needs it.''
For Mr. Aarons, adroit planning is crucial. ''I'm a great believer in form and design,'' he said. That guiding principle is apparent in his kitchen, where a drawer next to the oven is impeccably organized, with every conceivable implement for baking. Similarly, the stairway to the cellar is lined with virtually every household necessity, including various types of glue, all tacked to the wall.
That organizational zeal is also evident in Mr. Aarons's photos of swells. Once, he dragged away a giant freezer blocking a 15th-century mural that made a splendid setting for a portrait of a Roman princess.
Frank Zachary, the former editor of Town & Country and Mr. Aarons's former boss, called him ''the photo laureate of the upper classes.'' After a stint as an Army photographer, Mr. Aarons was sent around the world by Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar. ''Once Upon a Time'' is a somewhat tardy follow-up to Mr. Aarons's first book, ''A Wonderful Time (Harper & Row, 1974), which is similarly filled with pictures of beautiful, wealthy, famous people having fun. Today it is a cult object. Yesterday, Jane Stubbs, the rare book dealer, had two vintage copies for $1,325 each in her store at Bergdorf Goodman.
''It's selling for $2,000 on eBay,'' Mr. Aarons declared proudly, more than once. ''I'm just trying to figure out why they're buying it,'' he added, with more than a whiff of false modesty.
''I'm just an ordinary guy,'' Mr. Aarons said. ''I just picked a niche nobody else did.''
Luckily, it was a world that everyone wanted to read about. The society beauties Mr. Aarons photographed were gossip-column celebrities of their day. ''Every woman in America wanted to be Babe Paley, C. Z. Guest or Gloria Guinness,'' he said.
Those glory days have passed, and Mr. Aarons has bid adieu to the city. He said he now preferred living in the country and rarely ventured into Manhattan, only an hour away. ''I don't go to New York anymore,'' he said. ''I went when it was great and beautiful.'' He was referring in part to the 1950's, when he paid $32 a month for a one-bedroom apartment with a terrace on 57th Street, near Park Avenue.
Mr. Aarons's society portraits include the now familiar image of Mrs. Guest, blond and icily beautiful as she holds the arm of her 5-year-old son, Alexander. They are standing at her mother-in-law's Palm Beach estate, where a fanciful temple to the goddess Diana stands sentinel between pool and ocean. That image adorns the cover of Mr. Aarons's new book, ''Once Upon a Time'' (to be published next month by Abrams), which has become an inadvertent memorial to Mrs. Guest, who died on Nov. 8.
In Katonah, Mr. Aarons, who claims to abhor personal publicity, was ready to roll. An interview with him is not for the fainthearted. Nor the hungry. I arrived for lunch at 12:30, and there was no sign nor mention of food until 4:30, when a lunch of locally smoked salmon was served. At last.
Mr. Aarons likes to talk. After a marathon six-hour soliloquy, during which he scarcely stopped for a breath, I was a nervous wreck. But Mr. Aarons was just getting started. ''Don't you want to see the rest of the house?'' he asked.
Wearing a light-blue shirt, open to reveal an old-fashioned blue-and-white polka dot ascot and chinos long enough to accommodate his prodigiously long legs -- he is 6 feet 4 inches -- Mr. Aarons led me upstairs to his workroom. There, surrounded by old-fashioned projectors, were boxes of negatives labeled ''Arizona Millionaires,'' ''Hugh Hefner & Chicago Playboy Club'' and ''Bahamas and S. America'' -- images that might end up in another volume of photographs.
In the living room, where a pair of gleaming English hunting horns stood ready to be sounded. Mr. Aarons showed off his books. ''I have every single thing Mark Twain ever wrote,'' he said.
''No fancy words,'' he added, admiringly. ''Every trip I traveled, I always carried Mark Twain with me. The greatest read in the world. I read 'Tom Sawyer' every year.''
The house contains an eccentric assemblage of trophies and memorabilia. In a dark hallway, Mr. Aarons pointed a flashlight at a wooden weather vane. ''Desmond Guinness gave me this,'' he said, referring to the scion of the Irish brewery fortune. ''It used to hang on his door at college.'' The inscription, in bold letters, said: ''It's a Lovely Day for Guinness.'' Another tour revealed a mural depicting Mr. Aarons' farmhouse and the countryside around it. ''I got tired of putting up wallpaper,'' he said.
Mr. Aarons said he liked living in Katonah, near Bedford. ''All the movie stars have moved in,'' he said, chuckling. ''Ralph Lauren lives just across the lake from here. Bob Pittman lives right here on the corner, and the grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt lives just over there,'' he said, pointing to a nearby field.
Last weekend, Mr. Aarons attended the funeral of C. Z. Guest, an event that inspired many of the congregants to remark afterward that her passing signaled the end of an era of grace and style.
Embodying that nearly extinct era, Mr. Aarons was something of a star at the luncheon that followed at Templeton, the Guest estate in Old Westbury, on Long Island. Everywhere he turned Mr. Aarons was in demand. John Olsen, a senior marketing executive at Tommy Hilfiger, came up to pay homage. ''We have copies of your first book around the office, and we refer to it all the time,'' he said.
''No matter your background or your walk of life or circumstance,'' he continued, Mr. Aarons's pictures evoked ''a simpler time when everyone looked very happy.''
''And obviously very rich, too,'' he added.
Mr. Aarons had spent two hours standing on his feet, reminiscing about Mrs. Guest. Suddenly, he looked dizzy and on the verge of losing his balance.
He accepted an offer to accompany him to his car, where a driver awaited him.
In the doorway, he fainted and collapsed in my arms. When the cry went out for a seat for Mr. Aarons, Jane Holzer, the former Warhol superstar, obliged by fetching a leopard-skin armchair.
''I'm 85,'' he declared. ''Can't stand up that long.'' After regaining his composure, Mr. Aarons climbed into a waiting car for a good snooze. He was driven home, and two days later he was eager to talk some more about his book.

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London Calling: Everything Was Groovy

Sun, 16 Nov 2003 11:56:52 -0500

WEARING his trademark thick black spectacles and a boldly striped charcoal-and-white shirt as he sat at the head of the table at a dinner party held in his honor last month, Peter Schlesinger looked distinctly uncomfortable.
''I'm not used to being the center of attention,'' he said, in his usual languorous monotone.
A shy, self-effacing California-born ceramic artist and former painter who has lived in New York for 25 years, Mr. Schlesinger, 55, was referring to the hoopla surrounding the publication, in October, of ''Checkered Past'' (Vendome/Abrams, 2003), a book of his photographs from 1968 to 1978. (An exhibition of those photographs opened last night at the Gavin Brown gallery on Greenwich Street in Manhattan.)
In his youth, Mr. Schlesinger was the lover of David Hockney, the straw-haired Yorkshire-born artist, with whom he lived in London from 1968 to 1971. (Hockney aficionados will be familiar with Mr. Schlesinger's buttocks, which were prominent in many of the artist's pool paintings of the 60's.)
''Checkered Past'' evokes the haute bohemian world of London in the 60's and 70's, when Sir Cecil Beaton and Lady Diana Cooper, the society beauty, cavorted with a wild assortment of characters including Paloma Picasso and Wayne Sleep, the star dancer of the Royal Ballet. It was a world also peopled with legendary figures like Peter Berlin, the star of several pornographic films.
As Mr. Hockney's companion, Mr. Schlesinger entered a glamorous world of larger-than-life characters. He dined at Chateau Lafitte with Baron Philippe de Rothschild, took tea with Sir John Gielgud in Mr. Hockney's studio and attended the premiere of Stravinsky's opera ''The Rake's Progress,'' for which Mr. Hockney had designed the sets and costumes.
Happily, Mr. Schlesinger always had the presence of mind to bring along his camera.
''I took pictures to do paintings from them,'' he said. ''But I haven't painted in a long time.''
One of the most eccentric characters in his book -- and subject of one of its most striking photographs -- is Maureen, the madcap Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, whom Mr. Schlesinger photographed wearing pink lipstick, a fur stole, a green floral-print dress and jet-set granny glasses (with sparkling blue frames). She is shown clutching a spangled handbag as she stands in the garden of her town house in Knightsbridge, where she frequently entertained her intimate friend, the Queen Mother.
The blond Marchioness, who lived for fun, fun, fun, was one of the three golden Guinness girls -- brewery heiresses who in 70's London defined eccentric style and high-class high jinks for a generation.
And why did he call the book ''Checkered Past''?
''It's just a catchy title,'' Mr. Schlesinger admitted. Actually, the story goes that an art consultant arrived at his studio one day, and in perusing his photos noted that he had a checkered past. ''And the light bulb went off,'' Mr. Schlesinger said.
The truth about his life is quite different. Despite his mostly nude appearance in ''A Bigger Splash,'' an art-house movie about Mr. Hockney's life in which Mr. Hockney and his friends played themselves, Mr. Schlesinger has led an alarmingly stable, respectable life.
''I didn't have any money, but it was lots of fun,'' Mr. Schlesinger said.
He started putting his book together a little over a year ago, and it prompted more than a twinge of nostalgia for the lighthearted mood of his days in London. ''Social life was much less commercially orientated,'' Mr. Schlesinger said. ''People arrived for a big party and there weren't photographers. It was much more spontaneous. We'd have a scream dressing up, and it was just to go to lunch.''
Even though he has lived quietly in Manhattan since 1978 with Eric Bowman, a blond Swede who is an accomplished commercial photographer for House & Garden and other magazines, Mr. Schlesinger's colorful past has a way of catching up with him.
He appeared to be mortified, for example, when told that ''A Bigger Splash'' is still in video stores.
''Oh dear,'' he said. ''How embarrassing.''
At a party held at Sotheby's on Oct. 29 to celebrate the publication of the book, guests snacked on food that evoked London in the late 1960's. Waiters served dainty little Yorkshire puddings filled with roast beef, scones with smoked salmon, macaroni and cheese and paper cones filled with fish and chips.
''It's the first time I've ever seen Wayne Sleep in the nude,'' said Mr. Hockney's former picture dealer, who is known simply as Kasmin and who was visiting from London. He was referring to a portrait of Mr. Sleep, the ballet star who is currently appearing in London's West End in a theatrical revival of ''Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.''
In choosing images for the book, Mr. Schlesinger said, he realized that ''quite a lot are no longer with us: Ossie Clark's dead. Nureyev's dead. And so is Christopher Isherwood.''
Mr. Clark was stabbed to death in 1996 by a former lover, Diego Cogolato. ''It was very grisly,'' Mr. Schlesinger said. ''He'd been with this guy for a couple of years, but it was very off and on. A messy end.''
Not everyone is dead, to the joy of all. ''The wonderful part of doing this book was I had to get in touch with some of the people I hadn't seen or talked to for three decades,'' he said.
He said he tracked down Gala Mitchell, a Vogue model who worked for Mr. Clark and Anthony Price, in Palm Springs, Calif. ''I found her online,'' he said, ''and I hadn't talked to her for 23 years.''

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A Ball Like Grandmothers, With Skimpier Clothes

Sun, 9 Nov 2003 23:24:19 -0500

AS guests arrived for a Halloween party at Bacchus House, the Greenwich Village mansion of Enrico Marone Cinzano, they were greeted by young women clad in wisps of lingerie, who led them up a spiral staircase to the drawing room.
''The concept was a little bit like the balls my grandmother used to give,'' explained Mr. Cinzano, 40, an heir to the Italian Cinzano liquor fortune. ''You're greeted properly, someone takes your coat, you're escorted to the host, and then you're offered a drink. Within my own madness, I try to make it as civilized as possible.''
The greeters in virginal white negligees, he explained, were ''something sexy to get the mood going.'' Also, he noted, ''there's a couple of boys running around in their underwear, to get the other side of the crowd going.''
Mr. Cinzano, who described his outfit as ''Vietnam vet would-be psycho pimp,'' was wearing an Afro wig and a green military jacket, open to reveal a garland of fossilized shark's teeth. About 350 guests showed up, some from as far as England, Italy and Germany. They included muscle boys dressed as gladiators, Mr. Cinzano's favorite drag queens and Lady Gabriella Windsor, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who exuded royal charm in a green wig and red sequins.
''I don't have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, and my family are geographically split apart,'' Mr. Cinzano said. ''So my friends are everything to me. They're my religion, and my support system.'
To keep them happy, Mr. Cinzano hired a staff of 61. White-gloved waiters, each with a gardenia pinned to his lapel, kept the libations flowing at four well-stocked bars, and security guards, similarly adorned with gardenias, kept an eye out for rowdy guests. (There were none.) In a quaint, old-fashioned touch, waiters carried silver trays bearing Altoids and cigarettes -- regular and low tar. Ashtrays were fashioned from miniature pumpkins, scooped out and filled with sand.
Mr. Cinzano said the spark for the party occurred over the summer when he was on the dance floor at a disco on the island of Ibiza. ''I was having such a beautiful time, with nice people,'' he recalled. ''And I thought, 'I want to recreate this in Manhattan.' '' So he had disco music pulsating throughout his five-story house, which has a four-story bamboo atrium and a series of outdoor garden terraces.
''I feel like it's the 70's again,'' Fernando Sanchez, a veteran of the good old Studio 54 days, said approvingly. ''It's the bizarre mixture of people and these extraordinary apparitions.'' Mr. Sanchez was staring at a bearded, shoeless youth who resembled Jesus and at Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, who was waiting in line for the bathroom dressed in a Los Angeles police uniform.
Adding to the merriment was Baby Marcelo, a celebrated drag queen from Ibiza, whom Mr. Cinzano flew to New York first class for the occasion. Baby Marcelo spent much of the evening navigating the spiral staircase on stilts, steadied by a succession of attendants, some in tuxedos and others merely in skimpy briefs.
Meanwhile, around midnight, a Harlem gospel choir belted out songs of praise like ''My God Is a Washing Machine.''
Kim Cattrall wore white leather mittens, silver space boots and a white leather jacket. ''Oh, really?'' she replied laconically, when told that Jason Lewis, who plays her paramour on ''Sex and the City,'' was also present.
Luigi Tadini, 19, a film student with Tadzio-like looks, was the youngest reveler present, wearing a white tunic and a red cape as he danced with his mother, Stella Tadini, a curvaceous woman with a permanent friendly smile, who was visiting from Brazil.
''How cute is my mom?'' Mr. Tadini asked, as Ms. Tadini repinned a green breastplate to her son's tunic. The Tadinis were the guests of Carmen d'Alessio, the legendary disco diva and former promoter of Studio 54, who clearly has no intention of relinquishing her position at the epicenter of Manhattan nightlife.
''You must write that I brought the most beautiful boy at the party!'' Ms. d'Alessio demanded with proprietary glee. Timeless in silver lamé and a matching wig, she watched hawklike as her words were transcribed.
A newly brunette Sophie Dahl towered sweetly over her beau, Dan Baker Jr. They were not in costume. But Murielle Arden, an aspiring actress in beige leather thigh boots and a matching breastplate, had tucked a cappuccino-color vintage skirt into her corset. With a pen and pad in hand, she dashed off 30-second portraits, which she presented to her subjects.
At 4 a.m., the party was still going strong. A school bus showed up to transport the remaining revelers -- 40 or so -- to the Arc, the disco formerly known as Vinyl.
''It was fun,'' Mr. Cinzano said. ''I'll have to do it again.''

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George Trescher: A Party Man Who Moved the Furniture

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 23:44:24 -0400

THE vast dining table in Brooke Astor's Park Avenue duplex was covered with seating charts on a crisp spring morning in 1987 as George Trescher, Mrs. Astor and I mused over the placement of some 400 guests for a gala dinner honoring a bevy of Nobel Prize winners that was to take place the following evening.
Suddenly Mr. Trescher grabbed a place card. ''You can't possibly seat him next to her!'' he announced. ''Don't you know he's sleeping with her husband?''
Mr. Trescher's familiarity with the sleeping arrangements of New York society was just one weapon in his sophisticated arsenal as a fund-raiser par excellence. A half-Irish, half-German native of San Francisco with a fiery temper and the soul of an unrepentant New Yorker, Mr. Trescher died of emphysema on June 5 at 77. On Tuesday night he will be honored at a $1,000-a-person fund-raiser for the Municipal Art Society at Capitale, and will be posthumously awarded the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal for his contributions to New York City.
The consummate ringmaster in the giddy triple-ringed circus of social life and philanthropy in Manhattan for more than three decades, George Trescher was also my first real boss. In 1985, fresh off a 747 from London with a degree from Cambridge, I stumbled into a job at George Trescher Associates as a fledgling fund-raiser, party planner and public relations flack for worthy charities. I was immediately dazzled by George's encyclopedic knowledge of the peccadillos of the city's most prominent citizens: the stodgy old guard; socialites wielding their husbands' newly minted fortunes in a frantic quest for acceptance; celebrity decorators; helmet-haired grandes dames who lunched at Mortimer's or Le Cirque; and corporate chieftains who rode around town in traffic-clogging limousines.
George had a devastating shorthand for each offender. Self-important ladies and gents who lacked the crucial ingredient of charm were derided as ''heavy furniture,'' doomed to be seated near the kitchen next to some thrifty plutocrat who ''wouldn't give you ice in winter.''
I was a mere minion in his little empire; still, the view couldn't be beat. On the day that he was bickering with Mrs. Astor about seating, for example, that 85-year-old reigning doyenne of New York philanthropy had descended the stairs in a short black leather skirt, declaring that she had just finished a workout with her personal trainer.
On April 26, 1986, I handed out the place cards at the wedding of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was then riding high on his cinematic triumph as ''Conan the Barbarian.''
George was a stickler for timing and propriety. White stretch limos bearing the wedding party were just starting to arrive when we spotted a couple of guys in Austrian national costume struggling up the hill toward the cocktail tent carrying what appeared to be a large coffin. ''Get out of here, you idiots!'' he yelled, chasing them away.
During lunch, Mr. Schwarzenegger revealed the contents of the ''coffin'': a life-size statue of himself dressed as Conan, holding Maria in his arms, action-hero style. ''This is a gift from a great man who will be the next president of Austria,'' he announced gleefully. ''Kurt Waldheim!''
The bridegroom's body-building confreres applauded wildly. The bride's Kennedy cousins seemed less enthusiastic (at the time, Mr. Waldheim was denying accusations that he had concealed knowledge of war crimes committed by his German Army unit in World War II).
Three months later, on July 19, I found myself doling out the place cards again -- this time at the nuptials of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin A. Schlossberg on Rose Kennedy's lawn in Hyannis, Mass.
On that occasion, a spectacularly naked John Kennedy Jr. streaked across the lawn after taking an early morning splash in the sea, his towel draped casually around his neck.
George, the soul of discretion when it came to his clients, issued an edict that no one was to breathe a word of their glimpse of Mr. Kennedy's attributes. And we were forbidden to do anything so vulgar as to leak any news to the press.
It was a roller-coaster education in the arts of planning, coordination and public relations that Elizabeth Rohatyn, the philanthropist and the wife of Felix G. Rohatyn, the former United States ambassador to France, once described as George Trescher University. (For fun, T-shirts were printed up bearing the name of that imaginary institution for its multitudinous alumni.)
I was hardly a grade A student, but I learned some invaluable lessons: how to cajole liquor companies into donating wine and Champagne for a worthy charitable cause; how to ensure that the iceman cometh an hour before the waiters arrive to set up the bar; how to write solicitation letters; and how to sign them, as I was asked to do on one occasion, faithfully forging the signature of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis a thousand times on missives addressed to prospective ticket takers.
Unlike social life in other cultural capitals around the world, New York's has long revolved around philanthropy, which made George an often-crucial cog. He counted Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Onassis and Liz Smith, the syndicated columnist, among his closest circle of friends, and they were devoted to him. His firm was hired to organize Mrs. Astor's 90th birthday party, a benefit for 930 guests. ''My mother was very fond of him, very fond indeed,'' said Anthony Marshall, Mrs. Astor's son, ''and she relied upon him for the organization of events. Not only personal, but events down at the New York Public Library, or wherever else.''
To some observers, George was a puffed-up, name-dropping ''special events'' planner with a fancy Rolodex. Or worse, just a party planner. ''George hated to be called a party planner,'' Ms. Smith said, ''because he was so much more well-rounded. He understood that the party was just the vehicle for raising money. And he was looking to the future. He was really very smart about how to raise money, and how to fund things and get people involved. He did everything. The party, the money, the tickets, the lists.''
George's romance with New York began in 1945 when, as he liked to say: ''The Navy dumped me in Bayonne, N.J., and I saw the skyline of lower Manhattan slowly appear like a mirage as the fog rose off the upper bay. I knew I'd come home.'' He spent his first 19 years in New York working for Henry Luce at Time Inc., first in a junior position at Life and later as the promotion director for Sports Illustrated.
He then left to mastermind the 18-month-long centennial celebrations for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he started the museum's fund-raising department from scratch. He raised some $5 million to defray the prodigious expenses of the centenary celebrations, and used the exercise as an opportunity to discover what he called ''new checkbooks.''
In 1972, he hung out his own shingle and single-handedly altered the course of charitable fund-raising in New York by hiring high-end caterers, florists and popular entertainers, and by devoting endless hours to seating arrangements.
''George took parties out of the horrible world of chicken and peas at the Hotel Biltmore into events that made sense, and were more focused, that people didn't hate going to,'' said Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society.
The results were good news for the charities who engaged his services. ''Of course, in making better parties, we were able to charge higher prices,'' George told W magazine.
To the bewilderment of his wealthy, pedigreed friends who owned mansions in Southampton and East Hampton, George insisted on renting a house in the more downscale Hampton Bays. He summered there for five or six years, beginning in 1986.
''He called it Quogue,'' a friend said, giggling. ''But it was really Hampton Bays.''
Thrifty by nature, George abhorred the notion of renting in the smarter Hamptons, where, he complained, stores charged $12 a pound for potato salad. ''That drove him crazy,'' said Robert Isabell, the florist, with whom George worked closely for more than 23 years. ''His face would turn red, he'd get so mad. Every time I see potato salad at Loaves and Fishes for $18, I think of him.''
But George would never skimp on service. ''Success or failure occurs in the first 10 minutes,'' he told W magazine in 1995. ''In that length of time, if you can arrive, get out of your car, come through the door, surrender your coat, pick up your escort card, go through the receiving line and pick up a drink, then the party has a chance of success. It's like a hard-boiled egg -- every minute after that, the party is harder to retrieve.''
''It's a combination of show business and a military maneuver,'' he said. ''Someone asked me, 'Why do you constantly use warlike terms to discuss a party?' Well, as far as I'm concerned, it is war; separating people from their money is a battle.''
George inspired devotion even from those who were on the receiving end of what Ms. Smith called his ''black Irish temper.'' Paul Gunther, the president of the Institute of Classical Architecture, recalled receiving a sharp rebuke when he first went to work for George in 1982. ''I had never figured out how to tie a bow tie,'' the Yale-educated Mr. Gunther said. ''When we went into the men's room to change into our tuxedos, George screamed at me because I was fumbling with my tie.''
''In five minutes I learned,'' Mr. Gunther added, laughing. ''I was so scared. If there was any doubt about the role of fear in education, it was disproved immediately. George was very demanding, and he had very high standards.''
Weakened by the emphysema that eventually killed him, for the last year of his life George was obliged to wear an electronic device that supplied a steady flow of oxygen into his nostrils.
''It obviously irritated him to no end,'' Peter Rogers, an old friend, said. ''But it did not keep him at home. He did not miss an opening or a closing. And he had it right there as if it were a Judith Leiber bag.''
Paradoxically, one of the most accomplished and imaginative event organizers of all time was adamant that he did not want a funeral or a memorial service in his honor.
''George didn't suffer any of us for long,'' Kent Barwick said. ''He thought that brevity was the soul of wit, and the idea of his friends, after a couple of drinks, intoning for hours the virtues they were manufacturing I think just offended his whole sense of theater and promptness.''
''I think he really wanted to spare everybody,'' he added.

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Nobles in Coaches, Blood on the Street

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 23:52:33 -0400

EVERY eye was on Elizabeth Fondaras as, bejeweled and resplendent in a fox-fur collar and a silk Balmain suit, she stepped from her limousine onto the bloodstained cobblestones of Gansevoort Street. She picked her way over a metal ridge in a concrete floor and into the fanciest showroom in the meatpacking district.
Mrs. Fondaras was a new type of blood for the neighborhood: blue blood. A philanthropist with homes on Fifth Avenue, in East Hampton and in Paris, she was one of dozens of merry plutocrats making the pilgrimage from the Upper East Side, Europe or Palm Beach to the official opening of Lars Bolander N.Y. Mr. Bolander's elegant shop, a former meat storage locker, is filled with vintage French and Swedish furnishings, in a neighborhood that not too long ago was cozier with Ikea.
Mrs. Fondaras, a former chevalier (recently upgraded to officier) of the French Légion d'Honneur, wore the little red rosette of her rank pinned to her couture lapel. ''She looked like Gloria Swanson,'' Mr. Bolander said the following day. ''She was a star.''
The 2,300-square-foot store is the latest manifestation of the inexorable gentrification of Gansevoort Market, whose neighborhood has just been designated a historic district by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Mr. Bolander, a dapper decorator and tastemaker from Sweden, owns stores in East Hampton and Palm Beach, where he also maintains a large interior design studio. Wherever he alights, Bronfmans and Vanderbilts follow.
His decorating clients include Patty Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo, the Venezuelan potentate. Mr. Bolander designed a handful of thatched houses for the couple in the Dominican Republic, and Mrs. Cisneros was at the opening on Wednesday, looking youthful in pleated silver-gray taffeta.
''I'm crazy about him and his taste,'' said Jean Vanderbilt, who drove in from East Hampton for the opening. ''And Nadine's input is important,'' she added, referring to Mr. Bolander's wife, Nadine Kalachnikoff, who, along with her sons Christopher and Howard, helps runs her husband's business. Ms. Kalachnikoff was born in Paris to a Russian father and a Spanish mother and previously owned a catering concern in New York. ''They work wonderfully as a team,'' Ms. Vanderbilt said.
Even though the area has been colonized by the young and trendy for several years, some Upper East Siders still approach a visit there as a foreign expedition. ''It's an interesting, gritty area,'' Ms. Vanderbilt said. ''You go from one block where people are eating outside in a wonderful restaurant, then a block where you might get your throat cut, and then you arrive at Lars' shop, and you're in Sweden. It's astonishing.''
Amid the industrial-looking steel beams and soaring 15-foot ceilings, Ms. Vanderbilt coveted a huge pair of butterscotch-colored Venetian marble urns -- the most expensive items in the store, at $125,000. Mr. Bolander's wares are an eclectic mix: French and Gustavian painted furniture, including library ladders from Paris and Swedish grandfather clocks; an Italian zebra-colored chest of drawers in highly lacquered pigskin suede; and bold figurative drawings by Bard, an up-and-coming contemporary artist in France.
Rolf Sachs, a son of the German playboy Gunter Sachs, showed up with a young aristocrat, the Comtesse de Lesseps, who caused a sensation in her provocatively low-cut dress and knee-high leather boots. For many years after the elder Mr. Sachs's marriage to Brigitte Bardot, Mr. Bolander worked full time for him, helping design the interiors of his home in Paris, his ranch in Palm Springs, his cottage in Vermont, his mansion in London and a modernist town house off Park Avenue that formerly belonged to Halston, which is filled with large-scale artworks. ''Lots of Andy Warhols,'' said Mr. Bolander, who can still be impressed. ''It's quite amazing.''
Gianpiero Dotti, a multilingual man of leisure and a legendary social figure in Paris, made the trip, as did Catherine Cahill, a stylish Park Avenue hostess, and her husband, William Bernhard. She was confounded when a factotum at the door asked, ''Are you on our list?''
''No,'' she retorted. ''I came all the way down here to crash.''
Earlier this year Ms. Cahill visited the meatpacking district to investigate the hullabaloo surrounding Jeffrey, the fashion emporium, two blocks away on West 14th Street. That visit was notably brief. ''It was everything I hate,'' she said. ''Loud music, ugly clothes and indifferent help.''
Mr. Bolander's shop was more to her liking. ''Lars' taste is fantastic,'' Ms. Cahill said. ''The Swedish look is now extremely popular. But Lars was one of the pioneers.''
On Mr. Bolander's block of Gansevoort Street, near Washington Street, crack dealers do a brisk trade on the corner, and a stream of transsexual prostitutes strut up and down the street, their 24-hour catwalk. These burly ladies of the night are accompanied by pimps who spew epithets and look menacingly at passers-by.
''The police never do anything about it,'' Mr. Bolander said languorously. ''We're thinking of getting together to pay for a guard.''
He was referring to other new upscale businesses on the block, including Karkula, a sleek contemporary design store next door, and Lucca & Company, an antiques store across the street that is run by Ted Wolter.
Mercedes Bass and her husband, Sid Bass, the Texas oil billionaire, missed Wednesday night's opening. So they had a private audience with Mr. Bolander and Ms. Kalachnikoff on Thursday night. With the neighborhood going to the tiara set, a wise partygoer said, ''just wait -- I guarantee that within a year, Prada, Gucci and Coach will be opening stores here.''

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$1,000 Prk Vu, Dinner and Wine Included

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 20:33:41 -0400

''THE dog just ate my shoe,'' Eleanore Kennedy told John Loring, the patrician design director of Tiffany & Company, as he arrived at her 23rd floor apartment at Hampshire House, on Central Park South, on Monday afternoon. He had come to put finishing touches on decorations for the dinner party she was giving that night for nine guests, including Sigourney Weaver and Bianca Jagger.
A chewed-up shoe was the least of Mrs. Kennedy's problems. How about organizing what had swelled to 160 fetes in one night? Moguls, movie stars, politicians and plain old Central Park-loving billionaires were converging for $1,000-a-head repasts that would turn the park itself into a dinner table -- an upscale version of Leonard's of Great Neck, the Long Island banqueting palace.
It was Mrs. Kennedy who had come up with the idea of holding dinner parties at apartments with views of Central Park (and Cai Guo-Qiang's light show over the reservoir) to raise money for the Central Park Conservancy. But the real feast would be on the views inside the hosts' lavish homes.
Troubling news arrived at 4:15 p.m., when Mrs. Kennedy got word about the eagerly anticipated dinner party scheduled to take place at Bill Clinton's office in Harlem, with its splendid view of Central Park. Not only was Mr. Clinton detained in California and unable to attend, but now, she was told, everyone had to be out by 9 p.m., which meant that Star Jones, Representative Charles B. Rangel and the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, were to be sent packing, Cinderella-like, at an hour when most good parties would just be shifting into second gear.
Was she planning to intervene on the conservancy's behalf? ''I'm up to my ears in gardenias right now,'' Mrs. Kennedy said with a sigh. ''I'm not going to start tracking down Hillary Clinton.''
Downstairs, on the 19th floor, Baroness Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò, the founder of the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, the center for Italian studies at New York University, discussed the lobster and Champagne risotto with the caterers from Acquolina before dashing off to Mass at the United Nations, where she is a member of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See. She had never met most of the people who had booked space at her three tables. ''I couldn't ask my friends to pay $1,000,'' Baroness Zerilli-Marimò said. ''So I'm meeting very nice people who are surely nice because they help the park.''
Others were understandably cautious about inviting strangers into their art-filled homes. Eliot L. Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, was giving a dinner with his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, in their Fifth Avenue apartment. But white collar criminals under threat of indictment who hoped to cozy up to the attorney general over fireworks, Champagne and supper catered by ''21'' were out of luck. The presumably felon-free soiree was open only to friends of the Spitzers.
At 6:30 p.m., a Party Rental truck festooned with pink hippopotamuses was double-parked outside 1040 Fifth Avenue, and florists, caterers and party designers were scurrying to put last-minute touches on the five benefit parties being held there.
In the penthouse, Tina Flaherty was trying to switch from Scott Joplin to music befitting a dinner catered by La Grenouille. ''We've got French food and French flowers,'' Mrs. Flaherty told her husband, William E. Flaherty. ''Put on the Aznavour.''
While Charles Aznavour was thanking heaven for little girls in the penthouse, bird song was being piped throughout the 15th-floor apartment of Julia Koch and David Koch, the investor, an apartment that had formerly belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and had undergone two years of multimillion-dollar renovations. It was one of the hottest tickets in town.
Guests entered an Egyptian-themed hallway with a pair of enormous, second-century marble statues of Isis and Antinous excavated from Hadrian's Villa; waiters offered drinks on silver trays. Off the drawing room, guests on the slender terrace admired the views of the reservoir and the Temple of Dendur. The most spectacular sight of the evening, however, was the dining room: a sylvan paradise conjured up by the designer John Christensen, who had laid a green English raffia carpet, to simulate grass, over the polished wooden floors; swathed the entire room in a whimsical tent of yellow and white organza; and hung hand-painted lime-green and yellow silk butterflies from branches of wildly out-of-season apple blossoms suspended from the ceiling.
On the 16th floor, the actress Candice Bergen and her husband, Marshall Rose, a real estate developer, were poised in that tense moment just before the first of their 16 guests (including Bette Midler and Tom Brokaw) were to arrive. Ms. Bergen had a moment of panic at 7 p.m., when the doorman announced that Liz Smith, the syndicated columnist, was downstairs.
''Oh, dear,'' Ms. Bergen said, excusing herself for a minute. ''I haven't put my shoes on.''
On Friday afternoon, Norma Dana, one of the two chairwomen of the event, was asked what the weather was going to be like on Monday. ''Perfect,'' Mrs. Dana said, in a tone that brooked no dissent.
Mother Nature was not so obliging. At the InterContinental Central Park South, Mrs. Dana's party was swarming with baronesses from the Garden Club of Bavaria when, at 7:45 p.m., the skies opened for a torrential downpour.
''Great! I love it!'' said Dr. Maria Theresia von Wietersheim, visiting from Munich, as she stood in the pouring rain watching the fireworks. Noelle Nikpour, a member of the Central Park Conservancy from Arkansas who was watching safely from behind glass, said that she had flown from Little Rock on her Gulfstream IV to attend the party.
Wasn't that a long way to come to watch 4 minutes and 30 seconds of fireworks?
''Once my pilots are fired up, we go 500 miles an hour,'' she explained, cheerfully, ''so I'm here in an hour and 45 minutes.''
Was that faster than flying commercial?
''I don't really know,'' Ms. Nikpour replied, sweetly.
By 8:30 p.m., celebrities were sitting down to eat at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, still under construction in the AOL Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle. The dinner was being underwritten by Steve Ross, the chairman of Related Companies, the developer of the building. Stanley Tucci -- so memorably naked on a Broadway stage last year -- sat fully clothed, and surrounded by Robert Duvall, Michael Caine and Will Ferrell of ''Saturday Night Live.''
The guests in Harlem were honoring the 9 p.m. curfew imposed by Mr. Clinton's staff -- despite much good-natured pleading from Sherry Bronfman, who gave the dinner with Robin Bell-Stevens, the new executive director of Jazzmobile. Nevertheless, Ms. Bronfman declared the evening a success. ''It was beautiful, and very romantic,'' she said the next day, ''with lots of flowers and votive candles, white wine and green-apple martinis. ''We were not pushed out,'' she insisted, diplomatically. ''The evening petered out and it was graceful.''
It was 10:30 on a school night, but at Hampshire House the party at Eleanore and Michael Kennedy's apartment was still in full swing, with Sigourney Weaver and Bianca Jagger sitting side by side. Julian H. Robertson Jr., the philanthropist, who lives in the former Alice Tully apartment on the 27th floor, had already bid his 30 guests adieu.
''Wasn't that the worst thing you ever saw?'' Mr. Robertson asked departing dinner guests, firmly clutching his dog's leash. Like many people, he was dismayed that the much-touted halo of fire that was to linger a thousand feet above the reservoir had fizzled into a haze of black smoke.
Was Mr. Robertson, who with his wife, Josie, had contributed at least $4 million to redo the pond at the southern end of Central Park, planning to walk his dog there now?
''No,'' Mr. Robertson said, a bit petulantly. ''I'm so disappointed in the park this evening, we're avoiding it.''

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Out There in Venice: Art, Commerce and Tons of Parties

Sun, 17 Jun 2001 20:45:03 -0400

AS Venice shimmered beneath a pale full moon last week, it was gridlock time on the Grand Canal, with water taxis laden with American plutocrats and their couture-clad inamoratas racing from palazzo to palazzo to attend dinners and receptions to mark the opening of the 49th Venice Biennale. Also making a splash was a gaggle of more than 350 New York swells and assorted European royals, in town for Venetian Heritage, a four-day, $4,000-a-head extravaganza of private tours and black-tie balls.
Never was La Serenissima -- as Italians call Venice -- less serene.
Revelers were forced to make daunting Scylla-and-Charybdis choices between simultaneous events, a conundrum with thwarted social opportunities at every turn.
While some inexhaustible New Yorkers like Kenneth Jay Lane, Nan Kempner, Lynn Nesbit, Hamish Bowles and Peter Bacanovic were clearly relishing the cultural and social cornucopia, others seemed frustrated by the cheek-by-jowl frenzy.
''On the way back from the Biennale this afternoon, it was more crowded than the New York subway at rush hour,'' lamented John L. Loeb, a former American ambassador to Denmark. After braving hour-long lines for the American and German pavilions at the international art fair, Mr. Loeb seemed more relaxed at a buffet supper at Palazzo Sernagiotto, the magnificent palace of Laurence D. Lovett, an heir to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket fortune.
''Venice has become St. Bart's -- without Puff Daddy, thank God,'' said Douglas Cramer, an art collector and producer whose credits include ''Dynasty.'' ''I've never seen so many boats,'' he added, and indeed, the city's harbor was clogged with luxury yachts for the week.
''It used to be about the important jewelry,'' he said. ''Now, it's about important boats.''
One of the most talked-about vessels in town was Kisses, a private yacht belonging to Norman and Irma Braman, Miami-based philanthropists, whose on-board art collection included works by Miró, Magritte and Duchamp. Larger still was Lone Ranger, a 255-foot former tugboat belonging to Peter B. Lewis, the chairman of the Guggenheim Foundation, who was the host to a contingent of Guggenheim board members and who pledged $250 million last week toward a planned Guggenheim museum designed by Frank Gehry for downtown Manhattan.
As at many black-tie events, some men appeared to be having less fun during the parties than their wives. ''I wouldn't be here under normal circumstances,'' said Paul Soros, the New York financier and philanthropist, who is the brother of the hedge-fund manager George Soros, ''but my wife joined the board of Venetian Heritage, so I have to come.''
Venetian Heritage is an organization jump-started two years ago by Mr. Lovett -- an elite, not-for-profit alliance based in Manhattan, whose goal is to preserve Venetian art and architecture in Venice and other endangered sites throughout the former Venetian empire.
It was born out of a schism within an older philanthropy, Save Venice, that erupted with brief fury on the society pages in the fall of 1998. Mr. Lovett and a cluster of socially prominent New Yorkers and their titled European friends resigned from the board of Save Venice during a power struggle with Dr. Randolph H. Guthrie, its chairman. Dr. Guthrie had objected to the many royals Mr. Lovett included in Save Venice's trips, and to the fact that some were invited as social adornments rather than having to pay the hefty ticket prices.
Now, the two groups go their separate ways, with Venetian Heritage holding its every-other-year benefit jaunts to Venice in June -- in order to coincide with the flurry of the Biennale -- while Save Venice holds its trips to the city in August.
''I think it's wonderful that there are two groups raising money for Venice,'' said Mrs. Kempner, the peripatetic New York social force, who arrived in town for a five-day visit with five Louis Vuitton cases brimming with couture outfits. ''But my friends are all with Venetian Heritage, so I'm loyal to them.''
With such a panoply of international big spenders in Venice, every leading auction house executive, contemporary art dealer and luxury goods purveyor worth his salt was in town shilling for business.
There were lavish, publicity seeking banquets, including one given by Bloomberg L.P. and the British Council in honor of the British pavilion. Although Michael R. Bloomberg was not present -- he was occupied in New York running for mayor -- his company gave a festive bacchanalian romp with Chinese lanterns adorning the trees, late-night dancing and cocktails on a former quarantine island.
Alternately, some companies were underwriting lavish events for Venetian Heritage. Harry Winston lent diamonds, and Frette, the Italian linen company, underwrote a Saturday night black-tie ball for the charity at Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a restored palace with ceilings painted by Tintoretto. (By the end of the evening, several wealthy New Yorkers and titled Venetians were observed stuffing their pockets with the silver-cased scented Frette candles. One man pinched a linen napkin to wrap up five candles before negotiating a leap onto a water taxi.)
For another conspicuous fete, Sotheby's persuaded Count Giovanni Volpe to lend his magnificent palazzo for a cocktail roundup of some 400 souls, offering profuse apologies to David Furnish, a Canadian-born filmmaker, who was at first refused admittance at the dock because he had neglected to bring either his invitation or his instantly recognizable roommate, Sir Elton John.
The following day, a contingent of Sotheby's socially agile top brass, including Laure de Beauveau Craon, the president of Sotheby's France, were having lunch amid potential consigners and other plutocratic prey by the pool at the elegant but ruinously expensive Hotel Cipriani. Within waving distance were major American collectors like John and Frances Bowes and Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie Seymour, the model, who aroused audible gasps when she strutted around the pool in an eye-catching pink-and-white swimsuit and high heels.
For many who were in town to check out the contemporary art and do some serious art-world mingling, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum on the Grand Canal was the chic Venetian equivalent of Leonard's of Great Neck, the glittery Long Island banqueting hall famous for its nonstop events. At a lunch honoring the Korean-born artist Do-Ho Suh on June 7, 150 guests were invited, but 375 showed up. ''We didn't run out of pasta, thankfully,'' said Rachel Lehmann, Mr. Suh's New York dealer.
By the following night, the roof of the Guggenheim -- which has one of the most dazzling views in Venice -- had been strikingly reconfigured for a dinner given by Tom Ford of Gucci. Although the party was ostensibly in honor of Richard Serra, who is one of Mr. Ford's favorite artists, there was no mistaking the fact that Gucci was seizing on the currently fashionable status of contemporary art to organize a major marketing event.
With its custom-installed parapet-to-parapet black carpet and handsome musclebound greeters, the evening had the charged, anticipatory feel of the prelude to a fashion show, with the dock to the Grand Canal as the ultimate runway for guests like Bianca Jagger, Mrs. Kempner, Mr. Bowles, Jacqueline de Ribes and Countess Giorgina Brandolini.
Aside from all the frivolity, major philanthropic and business transactions were clearly being accomplished all week. ''It's amazing how much gets done in two days,'' said Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, who blew into town with a group of members of the museum's International Council and attended a dinner given by Larry Gagosian, the New York dealer.
''Besides the art, it's about communicating with people,'' Mr. Lowry added. ''It's also quite a circus.''

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That Cool, That Suit - Sothebys 007

Sun, 20 May 2001 00:02:31 -0400

I WAS so nervous that my mouth dried up completely and I was unable to speak,'' Tobias Meyer said, recalling the terror of conducting his first auction eight years ago during his first week on the job at Sotheby's in London. ''I had to say, '13,000' and I couldn't. There was a glass of water on the rostrum and I was shaking so much I couldn't pick it up.''
At Sotheby's in New York over the last two weeks, Mr. Meyer appeared formidably suave, poised and confident, as he auctioned off a Jackson Pollock for $7.9 million at a packed sale of contemporary art on Tuesday night, and a Francis Bacon triptych for a record $8.58 million the week before. So, it is hard to imagine him as a quivering wreck.
Mr. Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's since 1997, plies his trade with a potent combination of business smarts, grace at the rostrum and cocktail-party diplomacy. Although not unique in being both art expert and gavel-wielder, Mr. Meyer, 38, has emerged in the past two years as Sotheby's star auctioneer, charged with conducting not only contemporary sales in London and New York but also important and potentially lucrative Impressionist and Modern art auctions in New York.
''He's a fantastic auctioneer,'' said Rafael Jablonka, a German collector, who bid successfully for several Warhol portraits on Tuesday from the back of the room at Sotheby's on York Avenue, prompting Mr. Meyer to admit he could not read Mr. Jablonka's paddle number. ''His pace can be a little slow,'' he added, ''but he lets the bids emerge and he has a great sense of humor.'' During a tense, protracted pause 20 minutes into the sale, attended by 1,200 bidders, nervous consigners and gawkers, Mr. Meyer attempted unsuccessfully to tease a bid from a reluctant participant: ''You look stressed -- would you like to bid?'' he inquired, eliciting a burst of laughter from the crowd.
Tall, slender and determinedly cool, Mr. Meyer is not unaware of his effect. When seeking to exert his persuasive charm for maximum impact, he has a habit of tilting his forehead forward and fixing his victim with an unrelenting stare through furrowed, Wagnerian eyebrows. ''Are you sure?'' he asked when a woman hesitated before raising her paddle for a $3.2 million bid.
''In my opinion, Tobias is the James Bond of the art market,'' said Peter Dunham, a Los Angeles-based decorator and collector. ''He's beautifully dressed, has beautiful manners and he's honest, straightforward and always does the right thing. But he's also tenacious and, I suspect, ruthlessly efficient in getting the deal done. His skill lies in his ability to make collectors and buyers feel comfortable.''
Adjectives like ''honest'' and ''straightforward'' have been rare in the scandal-plagued auction world of late. For the past 17 months, Sotheby's and Christie's have been embroiled in a federal investigation of price-fixing. Diana D. Brooks, Sotheby's former chief executive, has pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing; A. Alfred Taubman and Sir Anthony Tennant, the former chairmen of Sotheby's and Christie's, respectively, have been indicted.
Several Sotheby's executives noted that while the specter of scandal has often been tough on morale, Mr. Meyer's acuity and reputation for honesty have stood him in good stead. The departure of Ms. Brooks, who was renowned as a brilliant and effective negotiator with clients, has left Mr. Meyer with new challenges and broader responsibilities to shoulder.
As a result, Mr. Meyer's profile has risen in a business based not only on art expertise but on social prowess. He is expected to be a front man -- and not just in the auction room or when he is in negotiations with potential consigners. He must also shine while working a party packed with potential bidders. Last Sunday, as guests at a Sotheby's brunch preview of works for sale sipped bloody marys and juggled bagels and smoked salmon, pausing to admire Calder mobiles and silk-screened Warhol soup cans, Mr. Meyer was on hand to greet the assembled throng, switching rapidly from his native German to French to Italian to English. The art connoisseur overcame the debonair host momentarily when two Gucci-clad guests flung their arms wide open and embraced one another in harrowing proximity to a Gerhard Richter painting of three candles, estimated at $4 million to $6 million. ''No damage, I hope,'' Mr. Meyer said, wincing. (Unscathed, the picture sold two days later for $5.39 million.)
To compete with his formidable but non-gavel-wielding rivals -- Philippe Ségalot at Christie's, who will give up his position next month to Amy Cappellazzo, a well-connected art adviser and curator from Miami, and Michael McGinnis, who left Christie's to run the contemporary department at Phillips in 1999 -- Mr. Meyer and his team of experts are forever dialing for dollars. Part of the drill, he explained, involves calling collectors out of the blue to convince them of the wisdom of parting with a Pollock or two.
''You have to be shameless,'' he said. ''Because if you don't, somebody else will.''
To land prize consignments, Mr. Meyer is often obliged to act fast. A typical situation: ''At 5 o'clock you suddenly realize you have to fly overnight to Geneva and then take a taxi into the mountains near Lausanne and stand there, bleary-eyed, with a contract in your hand,'' he said.
''I wish I could travel less, but I can't,'' said Mr. Meyer, who coordinates his efforts with a worldwide team of 29 art experts based in 18 offices around the world, including Paris, Tokyo and Tel Aviv.
Some of the most spectacular lots in the contemporary sale this season were gathered by members of his team, Mr. Meyer noted, most notably by his deputy, Laura Paulson, who is head of the contemporary department in America. Helyn Goldenberg in Sotheby's Chicago office was instrumental in the consignment of ''Michael Jackson and Bubbles,'' an über-kitsch life-size sculpture of the King of Pop and his pet chimpanzee by Jeff Koons, which sold on Tuesday for $5.6 million, a record for a work by Mr. Koons.
But perhaps the season's most spectacular coup was the success of ''The Eye of a Collector,'' a two-day single-owner sale of 129 works from the collection of Stanley J. Seeger, which sold on May 8 and May 9 for $56.6 million.
For a year before the sale, Mr. Meyer spoke with Mr. Seeger, an American collector who is heir to an oil and lumber fortune, on an almost daily basis. He oversaw the design of the catalog, putting an Egon Schiele watercolor of a man turning away from the viewer on the cover in order to reflect Mr. Seeger's reclusive nature.
''The success of the Seeger sale last week was attributable to a mutual trust between myself and Tobias,'' Mr. Seeger said in a faxed comment from his home in London. ''I have profound respect for his knowledge, dedication and sincerity. His wit and sensitivity were added bonuses.''
Echoing the opinion of several art dealers, Abigail Asher, a prominent New York dealer, said: ''Tobias is very focused, immensely intelligent and has a way about him that you know he's telling the truth and he really knows what he's talking about. He also has an incredible eye.''
That eye was apparent at an early age. Mr. Meyer recalled being taken to his first auction at 14 by Maria Le Brock, the Pygmalian-minded mother of a friend, while vacationing in the English countryside.
''I wanted to buy a Victorian silver clock, but the auctioneer wouldn't take my bid,'' he recalled. ''So Maria held up my hand and then he took my bid. And that's when I really got hooked.''
At 18, Mr. Meyer took a course in the auction business at Christie's in London before going on to study medieval illuminated manuscripts at Vienna University. In 1989, he took an entry-level job in the contemporary art department at Christie's in London on the strength of his knowledge and ability to converse in German, but he soon became frustrated by his failure to impress Christopher Davidge, Christie's managing director at the time. ''I was pointless in his eyes,'' Mr. Meyer recalled with a sigh. ''So it was very tough. He felt I had nothing to contribute.'' Relegated to performing uninspiring tasks, he came close to despair about his future. At Christie's, he recalled, ''I'd just sit in the basement cataloging one bad painting after another.''
When Lucy Mitchell-Innes, Sotheby's former head of contemporary art worldwide, offered him a job in 1992 as head of contemporary art in London, he didn't have to think twice.
''That was my big break,'' he said.
Since the shock of being asked by Ms. Mitchell-Innes to begin conducting auctions, Mr. Meyer has worked at improving his technique, mindful that he may not yet be in the league of Christopher Burge, Christie's seasoned and distinguished auctioneer, who has commanded the rostrum for more than 25 years, or John Marion, who retired as Sotheby's chairman and chief auctioneer in 1994.
''I luckily have a deep voice,'' Mr. Meyer said, ''and I think that's an important tool for an auctioneer, because it carries and it creates also an element of calm. One of my biggest challenges as an auctioneer is to appear relaxed.'' Any sign of anxiety when lots fail to sell can spell disaster. ''And that's tricky, because you're so emotionally involved,'' Mr. Meyer added. ''It's very difficult to portray the opposite of what you feel.'

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Decorators Report Card: the Good, the Bad, the Dirt

Thu, 30 Nov 2000 00:18:59 -0500

INTERIOR design is notorious for its divas and spoiled, exacting patrons. So no surprise that an ambitious new Zagat-like guide and Web site called The Franklin Report has come along to rate more than 1,100 of New York's home-service providers. It is also no surprise, given some of the alarming egos involved, that a tsunami of response -- and a flurry of threatened lawsuits -- greeted the occasionally withering reviews of architects, decorators, upholsterers and contractors when Elizabeth Franklin, the founder of the report, sent them draft copies in September.
''Our goal is to be helpful and to empower the consumer,'' said Ms. Franklin, 43, a former investment banker at James D. Wolfensohn Inc. and the first woman to be made a partner there, during lunch last week with her 14 researchers in attendance. The setting was the luxuriously appointed dining-room-cum-boardroom of her Park Avenue triplex apartment.
''We're certainly not out to hurt anyone,'' she added in a rapid, businesslike staccato while eating Thai curry, ordered in, with a silver fork.
Such assurances may be of scant comfort to vendors in 27 categories -- from air-conditioning repair to window washing -- whose performances have been reviewed for public scrutiny. The Franklin Report seeks and summarizes praise and complaints from clients, does spot checks if there is a divergence of opinion, and rates vendors from 1 to 5 for quality, cost and value. While some receive accolades like ''highest quality, reasonable prices'' (D&F Workroom Inc.), others are faced with ''took his time'' (Finesse Cleaning Service), ''did not return phone calls very quickly'' (St. Charles Kitchens of New York Inc.) and ''did what I asked of them, but no more, and without a nod of goodwill'' (ABC Carpet & Home's rug cleaning service).
Stephanie Stokes, an interior designer, took exception to having her skills rated like a trattoria. ''We're not selling 100 dinners a night,'' said Ms. Stokes, who was irked to receive a mixed but mostly positive write-up and a 3.5 rating for quality. Unlike service in a bistro, she observed, ''decorating is about long-term personal relationships.''
''By the time you finish, you know where their pills and underwear are,'' she said of her clients' habits.
The proud motto emblazoned on the cover of the plump, purple 386-page Franklin Report and on each page of its online counterpart, www.franklinreport.com, reads ''Et Veritas Liberabit Vos'' -- and the truth shall set you free. The question is, whose truth?
''If you asked my three ex-husbands, you'd probably get one opinion,'' Ms. Stokes said, rolling her eyes. ''My clients are mostly old money, who don't want their names known. So how The Franklin Report found them, I don't know.''
Ms. Franklin politely refuses to tell, citing the firm's policy of protecting its sources' anonymity. But she claimed that each rating reflects a consensus derived from multiple interviews, and insisted that the credibility of each testimonial was carefully assessed and cross-referenced.
Excoriations are the exception, not the rule. ''It's a worthy endeavor, but I think they're treading in dangerous waters,'' said A. Michael Krieger, a well-established interior designer, who received a favorable review, 3.5 for quality and 4.5 for value, but has some qualms nevertheless. He said he was ''irritated'' to find his work judged for quality. ''It's so intangible,'' he said. ''Is it the quality of the carpet? The quality of my creativity? It's all so subjective.''
Wired for high-speed Internet access, Ms. Franklin's 14-room apartment is research central for the report, which she founded in February with a network of successful businesswomen friends. (The report, $22.50, is published by Allgood Press. It is available at Lexington Gardens, Kate's Paperie and Sam Flax, or from the report's Web site or at 866-990-9100.) The group is expanding its reports to other metropolitan areas, beginning with Chicago and Los Angeles.
A daunting amount of research is key to their endeavors, Ms. Franklin said. ''We're not going to let one crazy housewife change anyone's ratings,'' she said. During the summer, ''I had this horrific reference report on a very high-end New York decorator from a woman who had tears in her eyes telling me about a botched paint job.'' To do what she called ''due diligence,'' Ms. Franklin went to inspect the offending walls, and found nothing wrong. She subsequently received a fax from the woman's husband, praising the designer. ''It turned out that the wife is a high-strung person who gets very emotional about the stress of redecorating,'' she said. ''So we had to eliminate her testimonial.''
In 1989, Ms. Franklin pretty much appointed herself as a judge of truth in decorating. At the time, she was a co-head of staffing for Lehman Brothers' mergers and acquisitions department. She recalled, ''All I did all day was evaluate people, and sit them down to talk about their job performance, and simultaneously, I was in the middle of renovating our apartment.'' Moreover, she acted as her own contractor.
That intriguing confluence convinced her that some vendors were wonderful, others not. ''I had one horrific experience with a very well regarded decorator who pretended he was an architect and took $50,000, then walked off the job halfway through,'' she said. ''It became very obvious to me that these people should be evaluated and that there should be some sort of guide to help people make informed choices.''
Her report did not attack the decorator. ''He's in the book, but he's not rated,'' Ms. Franklin said. ''I'm not going to let my personal experience color the report.''
And then there's the case of Richard Mishaan, an interior designer, who also received a blank listing. Mr. Mishaan refused to supply a list of his clients because of a social fatwa imposed by his wife, Marcia. Last winter, when the couple's chauffeur collected Ms. Franklin and her daughter for a play date with their son, he recalled, ''in the 10-minute drive from Park Avenue to Fifth, Betsy managed to steal our driver.''
''My wife's still furious, so I'm basically forbidden to have anything to do with her or The Franklin Report,'' he said.
When asked about the chauffeur-poaching incident, Ms. Franklin insisted that the driver left of his own accord, and explained that Mr. Mishaan is in the report without an evaluation because her researchers had not gathered sufficient client information for a complete summary. ''If a vendor is included in the book, it means that they were recommended by people we respect who thought highly of them,'' Ms. Franklin said, diplomatically. ''We're hoping that everyone will see it as a badge of honor to be included, because we're offering a lineup of the top vendors in the city.''
In case you hadn't guessed, the online version of the report is designed for expanded business opportunities. For $200 a year, Ms. Franklin plans to offer ''portfolios,'' to encourage vendors to post photographs of their work and summaries of their design philosophies, with slick layouts. She claims this kind of advertising on her site would not compromise her report, since $200 merely covers costs. But it does raise eyebrows.
Even though she has not yet begun promoting the online portfolios, she said, 20 designers have already signed up. One of the most elaborate and fanciful is posted by Robert Denning of Denning & Fourcade, the upscale decorating firm. Eager to show himself to the best advantage, Mr. Denning has judiciously supplied a dashing, youthful photograph of himself, taken in 1956.
Even a glowing review is no guarantee that a vendor will be thrilled to be in the report. ''Conceptually, it's a good thing and it might become a useful tool, but it's not really for me,'' said Stephen Jonas, whose firm, Jonas Upholstery, is described as ''one of the best in the city, providing the highest-quality custom upholstery and curtains to the most discriminating of customers.''
Mr. Jonas's complaint is that he works exclusively for designers. ''I'm only interested in working with people who've cut their teeth in the business,'' he said. ''I don't want to have to deal with some lady who wants a sofa.''
Ms. Franklin said, ''We want to be a useful resource for people in the design business, too.'' Upholsterers, she noted, were among the most contentious group to deal with. ''Some were outraged, and I think they've overreacted,'' she said. ''But we did respond. One guy insisted he should have a higher rating, so we tracked down another 15 of his clients to interview. After hearing a lot more positive testimonials, we agreed with him. We're not bullheaded. We're just trying to find the truth.''
She says the quest has cost her peace of mind. ''We had several people wanting to sue us,'' she said. ''But they spoke to my lawyer for a minute and realized they didn't have a leg to stand on. If they called, I read them what people had said. If there's one sentence that wasn't great in the report, it's because there were 20 nasty things we'd heard. I think everyone who talked to me realized we've been very generous.''
Maybe so, but frustrations in the invariably maddening world of design are rarely one-sided. Mr. Krieger, the designer, noted that the dynamic between a client and a decorator is often pure chemistry and little to do with talent.
''I have some clients who are a nightmare,'' Mr. Krieger said. ''I'd like to have a chance to rate how dreadful they are, too.''

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Shops Founded on the Prophet Motive

Thu, 30 Nov 2000 00:12:07 -0500

IF all else fails, I can always turn this into an after-hours gambling club,'' Richard Keith Langham said mischievously.
The poker crowd may have to wait while Mr. Langham, an Alabama-born interior designer, wagers on his own future. Last week, he opened a 4,000-square-foot showroom on East 60th Street that is part Englishman's drawing room, part emporium.
''Everything's for sale,'' Mr. Langham noted. Everything, that is, except an array of correspondence from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a revered client. ''You have such a sorcerer's eye,'' she wrote to him one Christmas, on a postcard that is framed and displayed atop a 19th-century mahogany chest of drawers priced at $7,500.
Mr. Langham's debut as a shopkeeper comes at a time when a growing number of decorators are opening their own signature stores -- an intriguing trend that signals the reprise of a tradition that flourished in Manhattan during the first half of the 20th century. ''It's back to the days when every designer had their own little shop,'' Mr. Langham said, referring to the prewar glory years when the legendary decorators Elsie de Wolfe, Ruby Ross Wood and Rose Cumming opened uptown stores that helped to expand their reputations and lure top-drawer clientele. They lured great decorators, too: Billy Baldwin graduated from arranging fabric samples in Baltimore to teaching the society set about modernity and restraint while working for Mrs. Wood in the mid-1930's.
In the last 18 months, Vicente Wolf, Richard Mishaan, Todd Romano, Christopher Coleman and Sabrina Schilcher have opened stylish stores around town that are like perennial show houses in their lively originality. Offering everything from $44 Murano glass vases to pricey Lucite coffee tables, along with their own signature lines of furniture or flatware, the new ateliers give even those on a modest budget access to the personal stamp of a designer. The decorators Greg Jordan, Tony Ingrao, Carlos Aparicio and Len Morgan plan to follow suit through the fall and spring. (Report, Page 9.)
Many factors have contributed to the rise of decorators' stores, which waned during the 1960's. That era saw prohibitive Manhattan rents and the popularity of to-the-trade design malls like the Decoration and Design Building at 979 Third Avenue and the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue, with a wide variety of sources under one roof. Later, Mario Buatta, Barbara Barry and the late Mark Hampton opted for the potentially more profitable alternative of licensing their designs for furniture and fabrics to large companies, which marketed and produced them.
''I think the reason more decorators are opening stores is that we see the incredible demand for well-designed furniture and accessories, and we're feeling braver about doing it ourselves,'' said Mariette Himes Gomez, an interior designer whose showroom-cum-design-office at 504 East 74th Street has been open to the public since 1992.
''In the past few years, stores like Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel have expanded people's access to good design, and they've influenced the idea of being able to take it home right away,'' Ms. Gomez added. ''For designers with stores, it's a perfect opportunity to respond to the need for great furniture and objects, while allowing us to expand our creativity.''
OF the new crop, Mr. Langham's store at 153 East 60th Street, just east of Lexington Avenue, is the grandest and most ambitious to date. The handsome two-story building, with new Palladian windows, black shutters and a vermilion front door, is a chic presence on a somewhat insalubrious block. A pizza parlor bustles next door; the loading dock of Bloomingdale's clatters across the street. ''Probably another delivery of Hanes underwear,'' Mr. Langham said blithely, as a delivery truck shuddered into reverse.
Stepping inside, it is startling to discover an opulent haven of quietude, with a 22-foot ceiling, an 18th-century tall-case clock, comfy velvet sofas and a fire roaring in the grate. It's the quintessential country house salon, mirrored in high-voltage colors -- peacock-blue pillows, walls a jaunty shade of mango. Besides antiques, Mr. Langham is showing his own line of upholstered furniture, based on classic English shapes.
Having a store that vaunts his whimsical style is the culmination of a longtime dream for Mr. Langham, who recalled being delighted some 20 years ago by Nancy Lancaster's famous ''buttah yellow'' drawing room upstairs at Colefax & Fowler, the fancy London decorating shop where Camilla Parker Bowles, mistress to Prince Charles, once worked as a receptionist.
''With this place, I'll be able to do some one-stop shopping with clients, and there'll be things that appeal to other people who wander in,'' he explained.
No appointments are needed in the new ateliers, and designers say the walk-in trade has been a boon for their decorating businesses.
''Having a store gives you a bigger exposure and can broaden your image,'' said Sabrina Schilcher, who owns Salon Moderne and is a co-owner of Property, two shops in SoHo. ''A lot of people have said: 'I love your style; it's exactly the look I want. Can you furnish my apartment?' ''
For Todd Romano, a designer who recently opened a tiny but tasteful shop on East 71st Street, playing shopkeeper is an opportunity to give his imagination free rein. ''No matter how great the client, there's always a certain amount of compromise in our work,'' he noted. ''Here, I can paint the walls chartreuse anytime I want.''
Realizing his own goal of an urban Xanadu was somewhat torturous for Mr. Langham, who bought his building in July 1997 for the bargain sum of $730,000. It was constructed in 1930 as a branch of the Provident Loan Society of New York, serving for 63 years as an upscale pawnshop where distressed gentlefolk could discreetly hock the family silver. (''Now I know where to come,'' Bunny Williams, the interior designer, said with a laugh on a recent visit.)
Like many renovators, Mr. Langham found the going ridiculously slow. He was intent on making significant structural changes, including the creation of an 18-by-20-foot curved mezzanine and two working fireplaces. ''To me, a room without a fireplace is like a person without a heart,'' he declared. But getting the requisite permits without an experienced and well-connected contractor was no easy feat.
''I chose to subcontract it myself, to save money,'' the designer said. ''Architect friends of mine said, 'You don't know what you've taken on.' I wept every night for two years. I had to go down sheepishly to the Buildings Department with my drawings rolled up, weeping my thick Alabama tears.'' He waited an entire year before getting his first permit.
Meanwhile, the building was virtually unusable. ''There was an acoustical-tile suspended ceiling and a huge lead vault with walls two feet thick,'' he said. ''It took six men two months to demolish it, using sledgehammers.''
Various contractors demanded payment in advance, then promptly disappeared without a trace. More trouble ensued when a nearby construction crew began issuing novel threats to persuade Mr. Langham to engage union workers. ''They'd put metal slugs in the key slot, to jam the door,'' Mr. Langham recalled. ''We had to call the locksmith to change the locks every morning for months.''
Ultimately, the ugly, cracked terrazzo floors were replaced with beautifully irregular 100-year-old white pine planks, stained ebony. And now Mr. Langham and four assistants work in offices concealed behind a James Bond-like bookcase door incorporated into an elegant U-shaped library.
Since most of the accents in his design studio are also Southern, and given Mr. Langham's propensity for melodrama and quips that spark laughter, the atmosphere is oddly reminiscent of the sitcom ''Designing Women.'' ''For a person who's so hard to work for, Keith has a really loyal work force,'' observed Kathryn Tatum, who has worked for him since 1997.
In an era when sleek monochromatic interiors inspired by midcentury modernism are all the rage, Mr. Langham's taste remains resolutely classical and exuberantly colorful.
''Good old-fashioned traditional English rooms aren't going to go away,'' he said defiantly. ''Even my younger clients, who grew up in blatantly traditional houses, still want that kind of luxury, with a bit of modern thrown in.'' Past and present clients include Pat Buckley and Hilary Swank, the Oscar-winning star of ''Boys Don't Cry.''
His own line of 28 made-to-order sofas and chairs comes in varying sizes. ''I've played with the scale,'' he said. ''They're made in the classic tradition, with hand-webbed burlap and platforms covered in jute. All the cushions are down, and the backs and arms have down pads, on hardwood frames.''
The prices are correspondingly hefty, from $1,300 retail for a side chair to $9,400 for the most deluxe sofa, but he promises delivery in only six weeks.
Besides his furniture, Mr. Langham has stocked the new emporium with antiques gathered from his travels, including a set of four red faux-bamboo English chairs in the Brighton Pavilion style and a 19th-century serpentine sofa upholstered in snappy white-and-mango satin stripes. Mr. Langham's creative eye was evident early on, while he was growing up in Brewton, Ala., a town near the Florida border with 8,000 residents. Barbara Burton, who grew up next door and has remained a close friend, says she always knew he would be a decorator.
''One day, when we were 14, I arrived home and smelled paint -- Keith had walked into our house and painted all our lime green wicker furniture black, without asking,'' she recalled. ''I said, 'What have you done? You're going to get us into so much trouble!' But my mother loved it. Until she lifted up the sofa and realized he'd rearranged the furniture to hide a big splotch of black paint on the living room carpet.''

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Paris Biennale: Where U.S.A. Meets F.F.F.

Thu, 5 Oct 2000 00:31:26 -0400

THIS is just a little pied-a-terre,'' said Susan Gutfreund, the New York hostess and aspiring decorator, thus stretching the credulity of more than 40 attentive American interior designers ogling the palatial splendor of her triplex in the chic Seventh Arrondissement.
Furnished by the legendary designer Henri Samuel with exquisite 18th-century paneling and objets d'art, Ms. Gutfreund's apartment was delectable bait used to attract young, successful designers from across the United States to the Biennale International des Antiquaires, the world's most glamorous -- and outrageously expensive -- antiques fair.
The three-day romp was part of an aggressive marketing campaign conceived by the Biennale's organizers, the National Antiques Dealers Syndicate, who hoped to lure record numbers of platinum-card-wielding American customers.
''Let's face it, Americans are the ones who are buying,'' said Brian McCarthy, a New York designer who travels to Paris every six weeks for clients who lust for Louis XV commodes. ''We're their bread-and-butter.''
Judging by the Dallas drawls and Yankee twangs on opening night, the syndicate's efforts paid off. The exchange rate of the franc to the dollar -- seven to one -- didn't hurt, either.
By the time the two-week fair closed on Oct. 1, several dealers reported that more than 60 percent of their sales were heading for the United States, including a $1 million Chinese bronze lamp bought from the Brussels dealer Gisele Croes. ''I think we speak more English this evening than French,'' said Jacques Perrin, a leading Paris dealer and a vice president of the syndicate.
Mr. Perrin sold a magnificent Louis XVI gilded bronze clock and a pair of elaborate 18th-century armchairs to a New York financier during the gala preview of the show, held at the Carrousel du Louvre, a subterranean sprawl beneath the museum's Pyramid. ''All exceptional objects, museum quality,'' he said.
Out of 116 hand-picked dealers, only 10 were purveyors of 20th-century objects. Nonetheless, that was twice as many as last year, and the booths offering French furniture from the 1930's and 40's proved wildly popular, perhaps inspired by Karl Lagerfeld's abrupt switch from collecting 18th-century gilt to the clean, lean contemporary lines of furniture by Jean-Michel Frank. ''It's a style that feels totally right today, the perfect antidote to all the clutter we had in the 80's,'' said John Barman, a New York designer.
''Everything I sold this evening was to Americans,'' said Pierre Passebon, a first-time Biennale participant, whose spectacular lineup included a rare Surrealist chandelier by Giacometti in the shape of a woman's breast, and a pair of gleaming hall chairs designed by Emilio Terry for Carlos de Beistegui's home in Paris ($71,000). Equally intriguing was the booth itself, which was also for sale: a handsome padded-leather smoking room designed by Frank in 1935 for the Paris home of Jean-Pierre Guerlain, the perfumer.
Mr. Passebon declined to reveal which Americans had bought his treasures. But Leon Black, an insatiable New York collector of French decorative arts, was seen gazing at two vertical Giacometti lamps with proprietary ardor.
Some American plutocrats chose to stay home, to the chagrin of their decorators. ''One of my clients wouldn't come because of the Concorde,'' lamented Matthew Smyth, a New York designer, who nonetheless shopped with Wall Street titans brave enough to endure the trans-Atlantic trip in first class.
The inconvenient suspension of supersonic flights to Paris didn't deter Darlene and Anthony Soave, a couple from Michigan, who were shopping up a storm with their New York decorator, Tony Ingrao, and his partner, Randy Kemper.
''It's our first Biennale,'' Ms. Soave said, flashing an ice-rink-size D-flawless diamond ring as she passed the stand of Francois Leage, a Parisian dealer who specializes in 18th-century objects. ''They're doing all the paneling for our ballroom in Grosse Pointe.''
A French 18th-century ballroom in suburban Detroit? ''The panels are Louis XIV, from a town house in the Place Vendome,'' Mr. Ingrao explained. ''But we have to make more, because their new ballroom is so huge. It's a three-year project -- the whole house is going to be 18th century.''
Mr. Soave, the son of a grocer who worked his way up to a scrap-metal fortune, also hired Mr. Ingrao to design the Soaves' apartment in Naples, Fla., and a modern Manhattan duplex in the new Trump World Tower across from the United Nations. ''We're on the 88th floor, the same as Bill Gates,'' Ms. Soave said sweetly.
Larry Laslo, a New York designer, was aghast at the multimillion-dollar prices. ''All I've bought so far is a jambon sandwich,'' he said.
Given the astronomical sums involved, some designers on a Biennale trip organized by Elle Decor were shopping elsewhere. ''You see the prices and cringe,'' said Charles Spada, an interior designer from Boston, who keeps a small apartment in Paris as a base for his frequent shopping expeditions.
''They're definitely not going to get any money out of me,'' Mr. Spada said cheerfully during a lunch at the Louvre underwritten by Hachette Filipacchi, Elle Decor's parent company, to introduce designers to top dealers at the Biennale. ''I'm heading for the flea market,'' he said. Two days later, he had filled an entire 40-foot container with treasures to be sent by his shipper, Camus, to his antique stores in Boston and on Nantucket.
For some designers, the trip was a novel opportunity to engage the attention of Margaret Russell, Elle Decor's new editor in chief, who inherited the Paris trip when the magazine's former editor, Marian McEvoy, left to take charge at House Beautiful in mid-July.
While Ms. Russell is revered for her clean, American taste and her gimlet eye for identifying designers of promise, she made no claims to being an antiques aficionado. When asked her reaction to the Biennale's impressive array of F.F.F. (the industry shorthand for fine French furniture), Ms. Russell looked bewildered. ''What's that?'' she asked.
On matters like this, she defers to Angus Wilkie, Elle Decor's well-connected antiques columnist, whom she recently promoted to editor at large. ''Angus's expertise is a wonderful asset to the magazine,'' she said. That expertise will presumably come in handy when Elle Decor succeeds Town & Country as the main sponsor of the Winter Antiques Show at the 67th Street armory in January.
Among the American designers with clients in tow spending serious sums was Scott Snyder, who is based in Palm Beach and Manhattan. ''We just bought a beautiful 18th-century black lacquer gaming table,'' said Mr. Snyder, who was accompanying his client Lewis Foman, elegantly attired in a black silk suit. Like just about every other American of means at the Biennale, Ms. Foman owns a house in Palm Beach and an apartment in Paris, where she intends to install her gaming table.
''With the American economy so strong, we're inundated with clients from New York and California looking for apartments in Paris,'' said William Holloway, who set up the Paris office for Sotheby's International Realty two years ago.
''Usually, we show apartments in the half-a-million-to-a-million-dollar range,'' Mr. Holloway explained. ''But with everyone in town for the Biennale, there's more demand for apartments and houses from $1 million to $15 million. I guess when people buy furniture at the Biennale, they figure they need somewhere to put it.''
To the glee of Parisian dealers, Henry and Marie-Josee Kravis recently purchased an enormous apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement. The New York financier and his French-Canadian wife discreetly prowled the aisles of the Biennale one afternoon with their French decorator, Francois-Joseph Graf, selecting furniture of impeccable palace provenance.
Such is the awe -- and sense of financial expectation -- the Kravises aroused that dealers swiftly drew gilded ropes across the entrance of their booths to keep the less affluent away as the formidable threesome stepped in.
For some, the exotic spending was a little disconcerting. ''The problem is, our museum is so poor,'' lamented E. John Bullard, the director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, after touring the Biennale. ''As a lady on this trip said, 'Twenty-five million dollars barely furnishes a room, does it?' ''

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Christopher Gibbs: A Parting Embrace For a Lifetimes Quirks

Thu, 21 Sep 2000 00:40:19 -0400

I RATHER like the idea of a whole new phase of life, with fewer possessions,'' Christopher Gibbs said, somewhat unconvincingly. Mr. Gibbs, 62, was gazing wistfully at the handsome stone exterior of the Manor House at Clifton Hampden, a rambling three-story house in Oxfordshire, built for his family in the 1840's, which he reluctantly sold in July.
An inveterate collector, antiques dealer, bibliophile and provenance fetishist, Mr. Gibbs plainly has mixed emotions about bidding adieu to the house and most of its contents, which Christie's will auction off in 802 lots on Monday and Tuesday in a vast tent on the lawn. ''I wish I could stay here forever,'' he admitted. ''But it's quite a caper to keep a place like this going.''
Visitors from as far as Cairo and the Upper East Side of Manhattan are expected to show up at the manor, an hour from London, for the four-day viewing of one of the most intriguing and eccentrically diverse English country house sales in years.
A connoisseur of the weird and wonderful -- among the items for sale is a Victorian stuffed two-headed lamb (estimated at $300 to $600) -- Mr. Gibbs is something of a legend in British and international circles as a style guru and playmate to everyone from John Paul Getty Jr. and Lord Rothschild to Bob Geldof and Mick Jagger, whose various mansions he has stocked with treasures.
He is also a leading proponent of that elusive brand of anti-decoration, high-bohemian taste favored by self-confident Englishmen, a look based on well-worn grandeur, disarming charm and unexpected contrasts. The magic is in the mix of masterpieces and oddities -- like an assemblage of refined and wild-card house guests who mysteriously combine to create the ideal convivial country-house weekend. The allergy here is to the banal, not to dust. ''It's an aesthetic that emanates from great culture and personal passions -- not from merely traipsing around the D&D Building,'' said Peter Dunham, a Los Angeles-based interior designer, who planned to trek from Beverly Hills for the sale. ''I'm going not just because there are wonderful things to buy, but because I expect it to be an incredible learning experience.''
Much of that learning comes from seeing the items in situ. Mr. Dunham had previously seen them only in the plump Christie's catalog, though as a schoolboy he often visited Mr. Gibbs's London store. ''It was an education in an alphabet of style quite particular to Christopher Gibbs. A for atmosphere. B for beauty. C for culture. And some would add D for decayed and E for expensive.''
In the last category might be the dining table cut from a slice of wood, thought to be one of the first pieces of mahogany transported to England from the New World by Charles II's navy in the 17th century. It should fetch $30,000 to $60,000, by Christie's estimate. ''Pepys would probably have sat at this table,'' Mr. Gibbs said.
He is besotted with objects that possess illustrious or peculiar histories. One object of desire is an embroidered Elizabethan purse that belonged to the first Lord Yarmouth, treasurer to James II, containing a talismanlike fragment of the monarch's blue silk garter enclosed in a wisp of paper bearing the words, ''King James's Garter -- I touch and God cures'' ($15,000 to $30,000).
''Chrissie even knows the provenance of a pebble,'' said Min Hogg, the editor of The World of Interiors and a friend of more than 40 years. ''Taste is impossible to define, but his is absolute perfection. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of sales and catalogs, but I love that he can also be entranced by the beauty of a simple glass cabinet full of nothing in particular.''
Indeed, Mr. Gibbs plans to hold on to several objects that possess no discernible value but delight. ''Oh, I could never part with that,'' he said, pointing to a faded 1930's metal hamper in his bathroom, bearing the words ''Soiled Linen.'' His favorite treasure, also not for sale, is a fragment of a statue of a Greek youth, or kouros -- ''you know, those young men with slanty eyes and narrow hips.''
''It's the waist to top of the thigh,'' he added. ''It was found under a table at Villa Malcontenta by Bruce Chatwin, from whom I bought it. It's always called 'Chatwin's Bottom.' ''
Although ostensibly of sound mind, Mr. Gibbs appears to dote on artworks that depict madness. ''There are lots of freaky people here,'' he noted, alighting on a series of framed pictures adorning the cluttered upstairs hall. One favorite is a 19th-century portrait of John Nichols Thom, a onetime Cornish wine merchant pictured in a dashing scarlet Maltese costume.
''He was a famous con man, a deluded person who went under many names,'' Mr. Gibbs said. ''He called himself Sir William Courtenay, Knight of Malta, the Earl of Devon, and Count Moses Rothschild. It all got a little out of hand when he tried passing himself off as the King of Jerusalem and the Messiah.''
Nearby is a hand-colored lithograph of Dennis Collins, a 19th-century peg leg and rogue charged with trying to kill William IV in Abingdon, a few miles down the road from here. ''Every loony must go,'' Mr. Gibbs said, pointing to a red Christie's label attached to the frame. (It is expected to bring $300 to $450.)
While he will clearly miss the manor house and its contents -- as well as the statuary-filled garden he has created along the Thames since he inherited the property in 1980 -- Mr. Gibbs is hardly homeless. He has four residences, including two houses in Morocco, a splendid pied-a-terre in historic Albany (the traditional London residence for those with grand country estates) and a thatched cottage he has rented in Clifton Hampden. For now, he also has no intention of giving up his celebrated antiques shop in Dove Walk, just off Pimlico Road in London. Recently, it was full of carved Jacobean ebony chairs, Moroccan tribal rugs and gargantuan 18th-century bookcases.
Still, the sentimental attachment to his ancestral home, where he went to live at 8, will be hard to shake, Mr. Gibbs said, noting that the 12th-century church next door holds the remains of numerous forebears. (He traces his aristocratic pedigree to the 16th century, with various titled ancestors along the way who topped up the family fortunes by marrying heiresses.) But as a single man, he said, ''there comes a moment in life that you feel rather absurd living in a great big house on your own.''
Until this summer, the only other habitual occupant was Louisa Wagland, his housekeeper of 25 years. Shelves in the kitchen hold photographs from the 90th-birthday party Mr. Gibbs gave in her honor in June, in a spectacular Moroccan tent he purchased for the occasion, with all her great-grandchildren and friends from the village. ''She died two days later, which was very elegant,'' he said.
She had insisted on making his cups of tea to the very end. ''I thought I was going to be arrested for employing someone so antique,'' he said. The night before he was due to move to his new cottage, he scattered Mrs. Wagland's ashes in the manor garden, in accordance with her wishes.
Mr. Gibbs clearly has a taste for grand gestures. In a meadow at the edge of the garden, overlooking a gentle bend in the Thames, he recently erected a pinnacle from the roof of the College Chapel at Eton. ''I thought I'd leave something behind,'' he said of the architectural fragment, which sits on a pedestal engraved with a Latin inscription explaining that both the pinnacle and Mr. Gibbs himself were expelled from Eton. The pinnacle was timeworn, and had to be replaced. But why was Mr. Gibbs obliged to leave?
''Various offenses,'' he said cheerfully. ''Illicit drinking, panty raids of other boys' rooms -- that sort of thing.''
Fittingly, the new monument was installed just days after Mr. Gibbs completed paperwork to sell the estate, an event he referred to as ''signing the terrible deed.''
''It was just terribly surprising to me,'' he recalled. ''I thought lots of people would come and be instantly bewitched by the place. Instead, they asked, 'Is there only one radiator in this room?' ''
(A Danish couple showed the appropriate enthusiasm and will take possession of the property after the Christie's traveling circus of security guards, auctioneers and packing crates has departed.)
Like many aristocratic Englishmen reared mostly in shivering-cold private schools, Mr. Gibbs seems to find a desire for central heating faintly embarrassing. Objects that smack of newness or have a gaudy shine are similarly infra dig. An elegantly faded George II gilt wood girandole in the front hall has clearly not been regilded since the 18th century -- the way Mr. Gibbs likes it. Similarly, a tatty Victorian buttoned-leather chesterfield sofa beside a William IV red-painted mahogany library table has a faded patina that the catalog politely refers to as ''distressed.''
Still, the estimates are hefty: Christie's predicts that the table will bring $3,000 to $4,500. Hardly surprising, since beaten-up treasures from Mr. Gibbs have never come cheap -- a phenomenon he explained by insisting that he generally pays handsomely for things himself, and has to make a profit.
''I like things in their natural state -- people especially,'' he said with a chuckle. ''As life goes by, that's what I admire. Objects and people that are unmonkeyed with, that are themselves, not trying to be something else.''
Mr. Gibbs has recently been preoccupied with decorating his latest house in Morocco and his new cottage in Clifton Hampton, in anticipation of his retirement. ''Sixty-two is old enough to focus your mind on the span that's likely to be allotted to you,'' he said. ''The sense of mortality homes in.''
Milly de Cabrol, a New York interior designer who visited him in Tangier with mutual friends in August, was struck by how content Mr. Gibbs seemed in his new mountainside home -- a simple but exquisite house with an enormous garden overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. ''He was wearing wonderful caftans,'' she recalled. ''And he looked like Moses walking in the olive garden -- very peaceful, and looking forward to spending more time there.''
Whether he will achieve such sublime contentment on weekends at his new Oxfordshire digs remains to be seen. After living in tall-ceilinged splendor, he will have to adjust to the charming but minuscule two-up, two-down cottage, which is notably smaller than his former kitchen. Downstairs, the living room is barely taller than his 6-foot-2 frame, and getting from his bedroom upstairs to the bathroom requires bending almost double to clear the four-foot-high doorway. Mr. Gibbs acknowledged that it was absolutely tiny. ''But never mind,'' he said brightly.
Gesturing to the ornate but faded Moroccan textile fragment he has pinned up on two sides of his cozy bedroom, he added: ''I've started doing a bit of nest making. Hopefully, with a few new pretty bits and pieces, it'll be all right.'

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At Home with Candace Bushnell: Sex and the Sitting Room

Thu, 7 Sep 2000 22:17:48 -0400

Come On Down For a Tan and a Sofa: Miami Design District

Thu, 4 May 2000 22:21:02 -0400

AFTER an exasperating search in New York for a set of dining chairs for a Sunday night dinner party at his Riverside Drive apartment, Augustus Butera was exhilarated when he found the perfect chair at Room -- a sleek new store in Miami.
''I ordered six, and they were delivered in three days,'' marveled Mr. Butera, a commercial photographer who stumbled onto the Miami design district, a formerly desolate home-furnishings quarter north of downtown, while shooting an advertising campaign nearby. Since 1998, more than 50 stores, many of them beacons of fresh, new design, have opened in that 10-block area.
When Milly de Cabrol headed to Florida not long ago to unwind from the cruel vexations of life as a New York interior designer, she paid a first-time visit to the newly dynamic district and was startled by what she saw. ''I found a fantastic mix of ethnic and contemporary stuff at incredibly reasonable prices,'' she said. ''And I discovered that it's a lot more fun to shop in Miami. The sun's shining, everyone's helpful and you get to see a lot in a short time because everything's concentrated in one area.''
At Orson, a store crammed with decorative American and French furniture, Ms. Cabrol found a 1940's sofa for $2,400. It would cost, she said, $8,000 in New York. In June, she plans to come to Miami again, bringing a client who has a Park Avenue town house. ''We're going to fly down there, fill a container and have it sent,'' she said.
Until recently, the notion of traveling to Miami for furnishings would have struck many as preposterous. But with the expanding lineup of sophisticated stores and with cheap round-trip air fares, the design district is emerging as a mecca for those in search of high style, welcoming the public with none of the to-the-trade restrictions of many New York showrooms.
''Spectacular, huh?'' said Craig Robins, the neighborhood's foremost developer, as he bounded up a glass stairway at the new Holly Hunt store, designed by Alison Spear. Mr. Robins is leading an ambitious effort to revitalize the formerly woebegone district, once plagued by muggings and burglaries.
For Mr. Robins, 37, a Miami Beach native, the opening of Ms. Hunt's showroom is a remarkable coup. Just two years ago, he said, the building was a dark, dilapidated quilting factory. Over the last year, however, news of the 25,000-square-foot Holly Hunt store has spurred confidence in the district. It has become a gleaming showcase for the wares of innovators like Rose Tarlow and Christian Liaigre, current darlings of design. These days, there are 120 or so storefronts in the district, many concentrated along Northeast 40th Street and Northeast Second Avenue -- the principal thoroughfares of an area that is now abuzz with commerce.
In a controversial move, the Chicago-based Ms. Hunt has abandoned to-the-trade-only rules for her Miami showroom. Like Mr. Robins, she believes that the best way to expand the market for upscale furnishings is to admit the public. Such populist tactics are crucial to Mr. Robins's agenda, which has been driven by past successes. In 1987, he was one of the first to redevelop the shabby, boarded-up Art Deco hotels of South Beach and to reap a handsome profit when the area became a booming resort. Now, in his efforts to reinvigorate the design district, he hopes to capture some of the dynamism of South Beach, a five-minute drive across Biscayne Bay.
''The goal is to be a place that inspires creativity, where it's fun for the public to come and check out great design and hang out at cool cafes,'' Mr. Robins said. So far, however, the cafes are in the planning stage. And just how eager Miami's thong, sarong and bikini set will be to abandon the beach and come ogle furniture remains to be seen.
If anyone stands to profit from that eventuality, it is Mr. Robins. Through Dacra, his real estate company, he has since 1994 bought 18 buildings in the area, investing about $25 million, which makes him its biggest landlord. ''To me, it's not about what percentage we own,'' he said, earnestly. ''What's important is that the whole neighborhood be vibrant and successful.''
RENTS in Mr. Robins's buildings in the district are $20 to $25 a square foot, he said, and 85 percent of the 500,000 square feet he controls is rented. When Dacra began investing in there, 50 percent of the neighborhood was vacant, and rents were about $5 a square foot.
At the end of the 1980's, when the district took a nose dive, store owners fled to the Design Center of the Americas, an immense, corporate-looking edifice on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale. The 120-showroom center is, like the Design and Decorating Building in New York, open officially to the trade only. Anyone wishing to view or buy its upscale wares must be accompanied by an interior designer, a restriction that has long exasperated sellers and buyers. An April visit to the fortresslike Design Center of the Americas proved how intractable the to-the-trade-only rule can be.
This writer, intent on shopping, was met with questions and comments like these: ''Are you a designer?'' ''You can't come in without an appointment.'' ''Are you registered with us?'' ''If you need any help, I have to have a letter from your architect or designer.''
By contrast, at Sola Topee, in the Miami design district, where Indian daybeds, arches and columns summon up tropical splendor, a jug of fresh iced tea awaits visitors who wander in from Northeast Second Avenue. Espresso, wine and Champagne are also available.
''If our guests are furnishing their home, we want them to feel at home, so they can experience what it's like to live with our furniture,'' said Bruce Platt, the store's sales director. A former model, Mr. Platt worked at the Polo Ralph Lauren store on Madison Avenue before moving to Miami in 1996.
That Miami is a resort destination for visitors with large disposable incomes has contributed to the district's rising fortunes. Mr. Platt said that a majority of Sola Topee's out-of-town clients are from New York, Europe and South America, either vacationers or owners of second or third homes. ''Because of where we are, we're tapping a huge audience,'' he said. ''The design district is only five minutes from Miami Beach, the airport and the port of Miami, so it's easy for people to drop by.''
After 5 p.m., the district is usually deserted. But lately, openings for photography exhibitions in the neighborhood have drawn large crowds after dark. So far, Room, the smallest of the furniture showrooms, is making the biggest splash. It is run by Juan-Carlos Arcila-Duque, an interior designer who furnished a waterfront home in Coconut Grove for the architects Laurinda Spear and Bernardo Fort-Brescia, founders of Arquitectonica. Room recently played host to a packed reception for Fernando Bengoechea, a New York-based interiors photographer.
Unlike South Beach, with its winning cluster of Art Deco buildings, the design district holds little appeal beyond the convenience of storefront buildings within easy walking distance of one another.
Determined to transform the district and set the design standard for others to follow, Mr. Robins hired the New York architect Walter Chatham in 1997, starting him with a slender budget of $1 million to spruce up Dacra properties.
''The first time I saw it, the district was completely shabby and deserted,'' Mr. Chatham said. ''So we began by giving the buildings a fresh coat of paint, putting on awnings, adding new signs and planting trees in order to cultivate a sense of neighborhood.'' Mr. Chatham's efforts with Dacra properties have prompted others to play catch-up.
Mr. Robins persuaded city officials to underwrite a detailed plan for improvements conceived by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the Miami-based urban designers known for their New Urbanist plans for Seaside, Fla. The design district plan, based on a workshop held three years ago, takes note of Little Haiti, a low-income community to the north, and sets guidelines for everything from street plantings and improved signs to the creation of public spaces and improved access from the expressway.
Mr. Chatham has also worked on the art-filled waterfront home on nearby Sunset Island that Mr. Robins shares with his Cuban-born wife, Ivelin, and their two young children. That house has been furnished with acquisitions from the design district. A family favorite, Mr. Robins said, is a new living room sofa from Dilmos, a fashionable Milan-based company that has opened a showroom on Northeast Second Avenue. The sofa has surprisingly comfortable clear-plastic cushions stuffed with straw. ''I love it,'' he said. ''Because it makes you ask, What's art, and what's furniture?''
Visitors intrepid enough to venture into the design district before last year were unlikely to come away with anything resembling a chic straw-filled sofa. In 1994, the area was mostly composed of showrooms and quiet antiques stores. Mr. Robins lured his first tenant, Knoll, with an offer of a prime corner and, as he put it, ''an extremely affordable rent,'' roughly half the market rate. Jim Lutz, the national sales manager for KnollStudio, said that the gamble paid off. Since the store relocated from upscale Coral Gables in June 1998, he said, retail sales have doubled. Since Knoll's arrival, other well-known showrooms have followed, including ICF and Waterworks, where gleaming faucets designed by Thomas O'Brien of Aero Studios are on display.
Mr. Robins also rented the Moore Building, a majestic four-story 1921 structure at 191 Northeast 40th Street, to Leah Kleman, who arrived from Lincoln Road in Miami Beach in 1998 with a following for a mad mix of neo-Classical-style, vaudevillian and Deco antiques. ''For me, the design district is a major gig,'' said Ms. Kleman, who counts Sylvester Stallone, Cher, Elton John and Michael Jackson as clients.
Ms. Kleman has observed a turnaround in the district in two years. ''First off, it was like a war zone,'' she said. ''But I started renting out my space for events, and everyone came.'' In 1999, she was one of the first in the district to open her store on Saturdays for weekend visitors. ''The South Americans love glamour, and they're compulsive buyers,'' she said. ''They all have pied-a-terres, and they come in on Saturdays in the complete Chanel hardware, his and hers couture.''
Leading Miami interior designers have also set up offices in the district. ''It's handy, having everything on the doorstep,'' noted Peter Page, a New York transplant, whose projects include elegant redesigns of the Astor and Nash hotels in South Beach. ''Without getting in my car, I can check out samples at Knoll, ICF, Dilmos, Waterworks or Holly Hunt. And I can walk my clients over to check out the marble for their bathroom without having samples shipped in.''
When Alison Spear, a celebrated interior designer, architect and social force in New York, relocated to her native Miami in 1998, she was reluctant to take an office in the district. She said: ''A friend told me, 'You can't do that, it's too dangerous. You could never bring your kids there.' ''
But she has seen the neighborhood improve. Much of the turnaround, she noted, is owed to the marketing and advertising by Mr. Robins's company. ''It makes you wonder -- is the hype driving the success, or is the success driving the hype?'' Ms. Spear said. ''Whatever it is, it seems to be working.''

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Fearless Vision Brings an Artist Home: John Dugdale

Thu, 25 Nov 1999 22:24:39 -0500

WE grow accustomed to the Dark --/When Light is put away,'' wrote Emily Dickinson, one of John Dugdale's favorite poets.
Mr. Dugdale sat, seemingly entranced by the glow from a fire lapping in the grate one afternoon last week. Auburn leaves were scampering past a window of the austerely beautiful blue parlor at Lockwood Farm, his 18th-century retreat in Ulster County, N.Y., but he could not see them.
Mr. Dugdale, 39, a fine-art photographer who lost almost all his sight following an AIDS-related stroke six years ago, has much to celebrate this Thanksgiving. Last Friday evening in Manhattan, he attended the packed opening of an exhibition of his recent still lifes, nudes and portraits. (Seventeen of the 65 pictures sold went to Elton John, a Dugdale collector.)
And today, Mr. Dugdale will have the pleasure of welcoming his family, who have stood by him during his harrowing odyssey of suffering and recovery, to their first Thanksgiving at Lockwood Farm.
''The reason I love this house so much is that it has given me a purpose,'' he said.
''I'm planning to roast chestnuts in the fireplace, then paint my mother, sister and brother with cyanotype chemicals and watch them turn blue,'' he joked, alluding to the signature azure tint of his photographs, whose vintage allure derives from an obscure process invented by Sir John Herschel, the 19th-century British philosopher and astronomer.
A deep affinity for the spare rural aesthetic and customs of the mid-19th century informs the life and work of Mr. Dugdale, who recalled being aghast at the monstrous sea of shag carpeting, linoleum, Formica and Venetian blinds that greeted him when he first visited the house, in 1982.
''It was completely entombed in hideousness,'' Mr. Dugdale said. ''But the location, surrounded by cornfields, was wonderful. And I knew that if I stripped it to its bare bones, the house could be beautiful.'' Taking on a $110,000 mortgage with money scraped together working as a waiter, he purchased the ramshackle farmhouse and barn with 12 arable acres in 1983 and attacked the house ''with a crowbar and hammer and went berserk,'' he said. When the coal furnace gave up the ghost three days later, Mr. Dugdale installed a forced hot air system whose 20th-century hum so offended him that he ripped out the boiler: he traded it for a moth-eaten but splendid 19th-century wing chair. Relishing the spartan thrill of making do with two modest wood stoves to heat the 14-room house, he discovered that few friends were willing to join him for freezing winter weekends at Lockwood Farm during the eight years he lived there in its unfurnaced state. Even during the spring and summer, visitors were puzzled by Mr. Dugdale's decision to extract every electrical wire and light fitting from the house because he preferred the more authentic glow of kerosene lamps and candles.
''I'm such a despot about what I like and what I surround myself with,'' he admitted. ''Even as a child, I felt I was born in the wrong century. Plastic gives me hives and modern design leaves me cold. But the simplicity of rural America between 1820 and 1840 slays me.''
Offended by the presence of the 1950's windows, he replaced them with 19th-century frames he painstakingly reglazed with pieces of antique glass found in local junkyards. ''I'm a maniac for wavy glass,'' he said of the windowpanes in the cozy basement kitchen, which appear to sag with age.
When a relative of a previous owner offered him photographs of Lockwood Farm from 1880, showing a porch that had long since vanished, Mr. Dugdale faithfully recreated it, along with its traditional carved acorns, symbols of thrift. Slowly, he began adorning the house with treasures, including a rectangular 1856 Chickering piano for the blue parlor (a gift from a neighbor) and the results of many happy hours of scavenging -- a beautiful old sink discovered amid straw in a friend's barn, an ever-expanding collection of pink lusterware and blue Davenport china, housed in a rustic peeled-paint cupboard in the basement dining room.
Working for several years as a successful commercial photographer (the only plastic object to be found at Lockwood Farm is the salad spinner he shot for his first assignment, in 1983), Mr. Dugdale and his dog, Juno, happily divided their time between an apartment in Manhattan and Ulster County. ''I named him after a Currier & Ives print I have called 'Juno: A Celebrated Pointer,' '' Mr. Dugdale said. ''He's actually a springer, but never mind.''
THIS rural idyll was interrupted in 1993 when he developed AIDS, along with a grim assortment of opportunistic illnesses, including cancer, viral meningitis, several bouts of viral pneumonia and a stroke that left him deaf in one ear and coincided with cytomegalovirus retinitis, which deprived him of all of his vision in one eye and 80 percent in the other (the result, he says is like looking through six Baggies). All this took place within two years.
''When I was in the hospital, what kept me going was thinking what I'd do to the house,'' Mr. Dugdale recalled. ''I paced the property daily in my mind, determined to finish what I'd started, convincing myself that I was the only one who knew what had to be done.''
After a wrenching year away that included a seven-month stint in St. Vincent's hospital in Manhattan, Mr. Dugdale returned for an emotional visit.
''Everything was just as I left it,'' he said. ''My teacup on the desk, the newspaper on the kitchen table, my pajamas on the bed.'' The house was unaltered, but he was profoundly changed. ''I came back almost blind, walking with a cane,'' he recalled. ''My sister, Kathleen, who's my best friend, was so patient. I said: 'I have to leave. It's too sad.' But she kept bringing me back here, and slowly I began to adjust.''
Upon regaining his strength, he dug a deep grave for the cast-iron bed in which he had endured five terrifying bouts of viral pneumonia that brought him close to death. ''I buried that bed in the yard so no one would ever have to sleep in it again,'' he said.
Reacquainting himself with the house while continuing to live there alone, Mr. Dugdale hired Lynn Snow, a local craftswoman, to paint every second step in the narrow stairway leading from the basement to the front hall a dark shade of gray in order to help him distinguish it from the existing white steps. And heeding the danger of knocking over those kerosene lamps, because of his impaired sight, Mr. Dugdale broke down and had the place rewired, installing 1890's Thomas Edison carbon filament light bulbs he found in a theatrical prop house. ''With my sight, they look like blurry fireflies,'' he said, admiring a bulb dangling from the ceiling in the front hall that casts an antique glow over a valuable 14-foot-long ochre-colored parson's bench he purchased in pieces from a homeless vendor on Houston Street for $200. ''These lamps are ideal for me because they don't create a glare,'' he explained, noting that the bulbs also last for 35 years.
And finally succumbing to his mother's pleas that he install a heating system, Mr. Dugdale bought a quiet furnace that now warms a collection of vintage cast-iron radiators he had accumulated from junkyards all over Ulster County. (In deference to her, he also installed a telephone, concealing the irritating apparatus in an antique closet in the kitchen.)
In Manhattan, Mr. Dugdale was obliged to make similar 20th-century adjustments. His apartment, which doubles as his photographic studio, is the top floor of an 1828 town house on a picturesque tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. To the consternation of his landlord, Mr. Dugdale had ripped out old electrical wiring and relied on candlelight, adding his favorite 1890's light bulbs and new wiring when it became necessary.
His passion for historical authenticity occasionally exasperates even his most ardent supporters. ''When John disappeared off to some obscure school in Massachusetts to learn how to construct a 19th-century fireplace for his studio I really thought he'd lost it,'' said John Wessel, who, with his partner, Billy O'Connor, gave Mr. Dugdale an exhibition at their Chelsea gallery, Wessel & O'Connor, after his stroke in 1993.
''One day, John came into the gallery, peering at photographs with a magnifying glass,'' Mr. O'Connor recalled. ''He explained to us what he had been through and asked if we would give him a show.'' They agreed to take a risk. ''A torrent of ideas came pouring out,'' Mr. O'Connor recalled. ''For John, this was clearly another chance at life.'' The work was full of lyrical images inspired by his intense experiences in the hospital.
Since then, Mr. Dugdale has had 38 exhibitions on four continents, with framed prints selling for between $800 and $2,500. ''I've been so blessed since this dismal thing that happened with my sight,'' he said. ''It means I'm able to complete projects on my house, which makes me very happy.''
USING a sense of composition honed during his years as a commercial photographer, he conceives of a picture first of all in his mind's eye. Fortuitously, the obscure cyanotype process Mr. Dugdale had been experimenting with before his illness turned out to be the safest method for an artist who could no longer tolerate toxic modern photographic chemicals. The results have the mysterious hue of architectural blueprints.
To capture his images, Mr. Dugdale usually uses a large, unwieldy wooden-framed 19th-century camera that dominates a corner of his high-ceilinged studio. To gather inspiration, he listens to books on tape from Recording for the Blind: he is a passionate devourer of the writings of Whitman, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.
''Either the Darkness alters --/Or something in the sight/Adjusts itself to Midnight --/And Life steps almost straight,'' she wrote in a poem that accompanies the current exhibition.
Mr. Dugdale is happy to say his health has been excellent for the last four years, thanks in part to the 40 pills, including protease inhibitors, he takes daily.
He showed off a prized possession, an upright piano given to him by the performance artist John Kelly, an old friend, who informed him that it had previously belonged to Lypsinka, the legendary drag performer, and Robert LaFosse, the New York City Ballet dancer. ''How's that for a provenance?'' Mr. Dugdale said, laughing, before launching into a Bach toccata.
Remarkably, the determined Mr. Dugdale has only learned to play the piano since losing his vision. ''I'm not able to read sheet music, but I can play eight minuets, one prelude and one toccata by Bach,'' he said. He learns by listening intently as his piano teacher, Fernando Torm-Toha, plays for him, then he retraces the notes with his own hands.
At a dinner in his honor at a friend's SoHo loft following the opening of his exhibition, Mr. Dugdale was coaxed into an impromptu concert. It was the first time he had performed before an audience. After a tentative solo, Mr. Dugdale began accompanying Mr. Kelly, who sang ''Ave Maria.'' More than a few piano notes were mangled, but tears began to stream down the face of Mr. Dugdale's mother, Rose.
''You know what's wonderful?'' Mrs. Dugdale said afterward. ''My son never gave up hope.''

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Real Charm and Fake Jewels Society Ladies Cannot Resist

Sun, 10 Oct 1999 22:42:14 -0400

PRINCESS MICHAEL OF KENT is coming to town, but alas, I'm going to be in London, doing my bit on QVC,'' Kenneth J. Lane, the costume jeweler, announced to guests assembled for lunch at his baronial Park Avenue duplex last week.
Formidably suave and peripatetic at 67, Mr. Lane thrives on a social and professional schedule that would daunt the chief executives of most companies. Determinedly debonair, self-assured and almost absurdly well connected, Mr. Lane has long been a fixture of New York and international high society, living the cultured, civilized life that most people may have assumed had ceased to exist.
And on Oct. 12, Mr. Lane's 40-year career as the king of costume jewelry will be celebrated with an exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Called ''Dazzling by Design: Fashion Jewelry by Kenneth Jay Lane,'' it includes more than 500 fabulous and beguiling fakes, arranged thematically, from chinoiserie to Egyptomania to jeweled insects. There will be a gala benefit for the Museum on Oct. 13.
An indefatigable escort of Princess Margaret, Brooke Astor and Nan Kempner, Mr. Lane admits to being something of a fabulous fake himself. As long as even his oldest friends can remember, he has spoken in the plummy, languorous tones of an English duke, an amiable affectation that betrays little of his native Detroit.
As Denise Hale, the Serbian-born San Francisco hostess, who has known Mr. Lane for 40 years, said: ''What I love about Kenny, he never changed. He's outrageous, he's charming. And you know what? He was exactly the same when nobody knew him.''
There have been some bumps along the road since he quit Motown for Manhattan, including the 1994 bankruptcy of a company that operated 20 lucrative franchise stores bearing his name in America and Europe. But Mr. Lane seems to have relegated these to distant memory. ''You lose some, you win some,'' he said airily, adding that he now pulls in $300,000 an hour during appearances every other month on QVC, with which he has had a contract for eight years.
Unlike his palatial apartment, a stage set for the high life crammed with treasures from his far-flung travels, Mr. Lane's showroom-factory in the garment district is clearly intended for commerce, with its worn beige carpet and ungainly Formica fixtures. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Lane entertaining grande dames like the Duchess of Windsor, Babe Paley, Nancy Reagan and Mercedes Bass there, or helping Barbara Bush and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis select their ''pearls.''
''It might not seem quite the place to receive the ladies,'' Mr. Lane noted, ''but nobody buys jewelry because you have a lovely carpet.''
''Besides,'' he added with a wicked grin, ''if it was glamorous, they wouldn't think they were getting a bargain.''
It was Coco Chanel who, in the 1920's, pioneered the notion of creating costume counterfeits of her expensive signature jewelry for wealthy clients to mix and match with their genuine diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires. But it was Mr. Lane who, in the 1960's, Americanized and democratized this tradition by copying jewelry worth tens of thousands of dollars by Cartier, Verdura and Van Cleef & Arpels and bringing them in for under $50.
With a potent combination of craftsmanship, design and an eye for just the right originals to copy -- in addition to his own persuasive charm -- Mr. Lane swiftly ingratiated himself with influential fashion editors, notably Diana Vreeland, whose support spurred his career. He won over the necks, wrists and hearts of stylish women who could afford the real thing but who were equally pleased, if not more so, to wear their ''Kennies.''
Rival costume jewelers have come and gone. Mr. Lane's longevity would appear to be based not only on his clever copies and artful rearrangements of original designs, but also on his marketing skills. By gaining the devotion of first ladies, socialites and movie stars, he has become good copy himself (magazine copy, that is). He has also accrued a repertory of conveniently entertaining anecdotes that he frequently trots out while hawking his wares on QVC.
Last week at home, Mr. Lane told the story of the Duchess of Windsor's visiting his showroom one morning and snapping up an elaborate ''diamond'' belt. That night, he took his mother and an aunt to dinner at La Grenouille, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were installed in the corner banquette. ''The Duchess got up, did a little shimmy and declared, 'Look at me, I'm Mrs. Kenneth Jay Lane,' '' Mr. Lane recalled. ''My mother's mouth fell open! Before we sat down at our own table, I introduced my aunt and my mother, and the Duke said to my mother, 'Mrs. Lane, your son is ruining me.' ''
In one corner of Mr. Lane's showroom is a photograph of Marella Agnelli, the aristocratic wife of Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, wearing a long multistringed necklace of Indian rubies that Mr. Lane copied and has since sold all over the world. ''Marella's always saying, 'Naughty, naughty,' '' Mr. Lane said, chuckling. ''I have to confess, I design with a photostat machine, Scotch tape and scissors.''
Kohle Yohannan, a design historian who proposed the exhibition (which runs through Dec. 31, cheek by jowl with the Bob Mackie show) and is one if its curators, said Mr. Lane's wide range of influences and solid craftsmanship distinguished him from the competition. ''It's heavy duty, not lightweight junk,'' said Mr. Yohannan, who collected Mr. Lane's work for years at tag sales. ''And his pieces allow women to play Cinderella for the night, because they have the sparkle of good jewelry. He also makes things fun.''
In his book, ''Faking It'' (Harry N. Abrams, 1996), Mr. Lane offered readers a colorful romp through his professional triumphs. Has he considered a more candid memoir?
''I might do it, if only because I've been fortunate enough to know a lot of interesting people,'' he said. ''I knew the world in the 50's, which was very glamorous. And I knew the swinging 60's in London.'' Not to mention the Rolling Stones when they first came to New York, a city he thinks is not so interesting now.
''Walking down Fifth Avenue today, I noticed it's altered quite a bit,'' he said. ''It looks like the boardwalk in Atlantic City.'' Of course, he knows one solution: ''A bit of jewelry would certainly help.''

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Orchestrating the Camilla Parker Bowles Visit

Sun, 26 Sep 1999 00:51:07 -0400

EAGERLY awaiting the arrival of Camilla Parker Bowles, guests at a Manhattan cocktail party on Wednesday night were curious to determine the reason for the alarming 30-minute delay of the Prince of Wales's longtime paramour.
Reports that she was stranded in traffic caused by the motorcade of Hillary Rodham Clinton -- another famous 50-something consort visiting New York City, ostensibly to forge a new identity for herself -- proved inaccurate.
''It wasn't that,'' said Peter Brown, a British expatriate who helped to mastermind Mrs. Parker Bowles's four-day sojourn, which included a visit to friends in East Hampton, a trip to see ''Cabaret,'' a lunch with Brooke Astor and a walk through SoHo galleries. ''There was a call from a certain gentleman in London,'' Mr. Brown added wryly, ''so of course she was late.''
Mr. Brown, a partner in Brown Lloyd James, a London-based public relations firm the Prince hired to revamp his image after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, largely orchestrated Mrs. Parker Bowles's New York visit. He even helped to select the guest list for the much-publicized luncheon given on Wednesday by Mrs. Astor, which included Oscar de la Renta, Michael R. Bloomberg and Barbara Walters.
Success in conquering New York by charm has long been regarded as a crucible for establishing the popularity of England's royals in their native land. In her curious and still evolving role as the mistress -- if not queen -- of the future king, Mrs. Parker Bowles must inevitably feel daunted by the example of Diana, who dazzled Americans from her first official solo trip to New York in 1989 until her last visit in June 1997, just weeks before her death.
All this year, the Prince, with the advice of public relations experts, has eased Mrs. Parker Bowles into the spotlight. In January, he allowed himself to be photographed with her for the first time. She regularly visits with Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. And then there was the New York trip -- billed as a private visit, but remarkably reminiscent of a royal tour. It was occasionally a tough sell.
''I would have liked to meet Camilla, but I only caught a glimpse,'' said Dominick Dunne, the writer, who left Wednesday's cocktail party to attend another party. ''If it had been Princess Diana I might have stood in line for an hour,'' he added. ''No matter how crazy she was, she was a star.''
Diana may have been more glamorous and vivacious a presence, but many New York swells attending the Wednesday party -- promoting a new line of fabrics by Robert Kime, the Prince of Wales's good friend and decorator, at the Third Avenue showroom of John Rosselli, an antiques dealer -- seemed perfectly enchanted to converse with the woman whom the late Princess famously derided as ''the Rottweiler.''
''She and I chatted for 10 minutes -- much to the chagrin of several ladies,'' Kenneth J. Lane, the jeweler, noted gleefully. ''Camilla's a very nice, normal, attractive Englishwoman,'' Mr. Lane added. ''She smiles, giggles, laughs -- all the things we like.''
Mrs. Parker Bowles seemed equally popular with other New Yorkers on hand, including Susan Gutfreund and Audrey Gruss, and the decorators Albert Hadley, Mica Ertegun and Mario Buatta, who was flattered that Mrs. Parker Bowles remembered him from her early stint as a receptionist at the London decorating firm of Colefax & Fowler.
''She said, 'You look familiar -- why do I know you?' '' Mr. Buatta recalled. ''I reminded her, and she said, 'My God! That was back in the 70's!' She couldn't have been more fun or gracious.''
Arriving at Kennedy airport by Concorde last Sunday, Mrs. Parker Bowles was accompanied by Mark Bolland, the Prince's deputy private secretary for communications, who has been identified in the British press as the spin doctor in charge of Mrs. Parker Bowles's image.
His stateside counterpart for the visit, Mr. Brown, is an impeccably connected public relations expert, whose clients include Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber and the BBC. A naturalized American from Liverpool, Mr. Brown is also a close friend and frequent New York host of the Prince's youngest brother, Edward, now the Earl of Wessex. Although Mr. Brown acknowledged that he had played a role in Mrs. Parker Bowles's visit, he insisted that his involvement was personal -- as a friend of hers and Prince Charles -- and not professional.
''I did it as a friend,'' he said. ''I got involved because I know them very well and they asked me to help. Camilla hadn't been here for many years and she thought she'd like to visit.''
''There was a certain amount of concern about how easily it could be achieved, and I said, 'New York's a wonderful place,' '' he continued. '' 'People are very open minded and hospitable.' The real point was that it could be done easily and without a fuss, and she clearly had a relaxed, wonderful time.''
Others who met with Mrs. Parker Bowles on her whirlwind visit seemed equally keen to stress their personal, not professional, links. Asked if she had requested an interview with the famous visitor when they lunched at Mrs. Astor's, Barbara Walters replied: ''No. Mrs. Astor asked Camilla if she was going to write a book, but I don't think she's going to. It was a strictly social lunch.'' Ms. Walters added: ''I've never asked her for an interview. I try very hard not to mix social with business.''
Mr. de la Renta, who sat next to Mrs. Parker Bowles at lunch, was clearly amused by press reports that he is giving her a fashion makeover. ''I wish I could tell you I was designing 100 dresses for her, but sadly it's not true,'' he said. ''I find her absolutely charming, but we never talked about clothes. She's very natural, with wonderful manners. She told me she hasn't been to New York in 25 years, and I told her she should come back.''
With new friends like these, she probably will.

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At Home With Isabella Blow: Playhouse For a Mad Hatter

Thu, 16 Sep 1999 07:42:05 -0400

''IT'S called Excessive Sensual Indulgence,'' Isabella Blow said, gleefully cranking up the electronic sequencer that regulates the pulsating fountain-shaped light sculpture in the Vampire Room of her new house in London's Waterloo.
By day, nothing about the conventional Georgian facade of the former artisan's cottage Ms. Blow shares with her husband, Detmar Blow, an art dealer, prepares visitors for the blazing modernity of the interior or the eccentricity of its inhabitants. By night, however, passers-by are often startled by the merrily demented light show emanating from the curtainless ground-floor windows, creating the impression that the house is throbbing with pleasure.
''It was originally a hatter's house,'' Ms. Blow said with a note of triumph, as she led a visitor on a tour of the couple's recently renovated home, where rooms are named after the art. Dressed somewhat alarmingly for breakfast in a burnished steel corset, Ms. Blow also sported a silver-disk hat created for her by Philip Treacy, the milliner, to celebrate last month's lunar eclipse.
A blue-blooded renegade, Ms. Blow, 40, is an influential stylist and fashion powerhouse, long celebrated and pilloried for her role as muse to fashion's avant-garde, including Mr. Treacy and Alexander McQueen, who is showing his spring collection today at Pier 94 in New York. Ms. Blow makes a point of wearing the fantastical outfits that critics often praise on the runway but are horrified to see in the street, especially when coupled with a very large hat.
But it is only with the purchase of her London home that Ms. Blow has focused her energies on inspiring young artists and architects to help conjure up a house for the new millennium, complete with a transparent bathtub and a see-through sofa through which movies can be projected. The result is no less outre than her garb, but it is clearly a stimulating playhouse for a woman who is passionate about forging connections between art and fashion.
When speaking of design, Ms. Blow often sounds as if she were declaring a cultural manifesto. ''I think the millennium is about reflections and light,'' she said, adjusting her steel corset. ''And that's what our architects gave us -- modernity and light.''
When the Blows bought their two-up two-down cottage for about $300,000 in 1997, it was woefully decrepit. ''It was dark, dingy, and the basement was flooded,'' Ms. Blow said. ''Someone said, 'All you need is a fishing rod.' '' The unfashionable neighborhood was a far cry from the swank of Belgravia, where the couple were renting, but its advantages were swiftly recognized by the surprisingly practical-minded stylist. ''It's five minutes from the Savoy and 10 minutes away from communion at Westminster Abbey,'' noted Ms. Blow, a devotee of ritual, who worships at an 11th-century private chapel. Furthermore, her office at The Sunday Times of London, where she is the fashion director, ''is only four quid away by taxi.''
To modernize and expand their hovel, the couple engaged Ferhan Azman and Joyce Owens, talented young architects, who added a starkly modern two-story glass extension to the rear of the house to provide a bathroom and a gleaming stainless-steel kitchen. The newly transformed house has just been nominated for an award from the prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects.
''We've been very fortunate to work with Isabella, especially when she has wild ideas,'' said Ms. Owens, who is currently designing a Surrealist-style chandelier for Ms. Blow that will jut horizontally from a wall in the Vampire Room and cascade in crystals to the floor.
''Ferhan and Joyce told me, 'This house is going to be like a piece of couture,' '' Ms. Blow said. ''They asked to see all of my hats and shoes, and they measured them. Detmar asked for a place to keep his cuff links and ties, and said he wanted a house where he could run around naked.'' Practiced at exuding an air of aristocratic nonchalance, the couple seem to extend their artful public exhibitionism to their private life. Drawn blinds in the bedroom preclude curious glances, but much of the house is open to inspection -- a sort of blue-blooded reverse of ''The Truman Show.'' ''I'm a voyeur,'' Ms. Blow said. ''I think everyone in fashion is a voyeur.''
To transform the gloomy basement, Ms. Azman and Ms. Owens came up with the ingenious idea of installing three glass panels in the floor of the two original ground-floor rooms. Now awash with natural light during the day, Ms. Blow's subterranean office is lined along one wall with floor-to-ceiling stainless-steel closets that bespeak a desire for uncompromising efficiency.
When Ms. Blow introduced the architects to Ben Curnow, an artist whose work she had admired, Ms. Owens suggested incorporating one of his sculptures into a glass floor panel in the sparsely furnished living room. Mr. Curnow's sculpture, composed of a water tank and a powerful blue light, creates the mesmerizing effect of waves lapping toward an ever-elusive shore.
''At night, the whole place is blue,'' Ms. Blow said, referring to the living room, hallway, basement and street. ''I think blue is a spiritual color -- it purifies you.''
Climbing the stairs, visitors come face-to-face with five horizontally stacked portraits of Andy Warhol, who befriended Ms. Blow in the mid-1980's during her stint as an assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue, after noticing that she was wearing one pink shoe and one purple shoe. At the top of the stairs is Ms. Blow's pristine dressing room, for which Ms. Azman and Ms. Owens designed sleek glass-fronted closets to create a gallery-like setting to display hats and shoes from her collection.
''I love that it looks like an accessories shop -- it could be Prada or Gucci,'' Ms. Blow said.
For the bathroom, the architects designed a voyeuristic glass-sided tub and a transparent rear wall. ''We came up with the idea because we thought it would be a bit over the top,'' Ms. Owens said with classic understatement. Ms. Blow, describing the spectacle of her husband enjoying a soak, noted, ''It's like having a little Botero in the bath.''
So what do their friends make of it? ''Having a glass bathtub is one thing, but having a glass-walled bathroom that the neighbors can peer into is pretty wild,'' Mr. Treacy said. ''It's fairly explicit at night, I'm sure.'' (Artfully concealed roller blinds protect their modesty, but the Blows clearly enjoy visitors drawing the same conclusion.)
For Ms. Blow, the house's lean modernity is a welcome antidote to tragedies in her family's past and to the pace of her professional life. ''I want it to be like a hotel you check into with no memories,'' she said.
With its compact size, bright white walls and eye-popping contemporary art, the Blow's London cottage is a striking contrast to Hilles, the majestic Arts and Crafts manor house in Gloucestershire, where they entertain on weekends. Built in 1913 by Mr. Blow's grandfather, a distinguished architect also named Detmar Blow, Hilles is an imposing and somewhat theatrical confection of yellow stone, Tudor portraits, 17th-century furniture, William Morris carpets and Burne-Jones tapestries. Perched on a plateau overlooking the rolling Malvern Hills, it offers a romantic, bird's-eye view of the winding Severn River and of Gloucester Cathedral, where the couple were married with giddy pomp and ceremony in 1989.
''What I love about Hilles is that it's one man's vision,'' Ms. Blow said, leading a visitor on a recent tour. ''Every stone, every hinge, was chosen by him. He designed it top-to-toe, as it were.''
Magnificent at night, the house is decidedly melancholic by day. Mr. Blow's father committed suicide there in 1977, and his heirs seem not to have gotten around to burying his ashes, which sit in an elegant box bearing his name on a desk by the dining table, in front of a gilded 18th-century French clock, which has not been wound since his death.
Escaping the house for a rambling country walk one recent afternoon, Ms. Blow introduced a visitor to a collection of splendidly plumed Japanese chickens lent by the English couturier Anthony Price. ''It's amazing they've got any feathers left,'' Ms. Blow said with calculated astonishment. ''Philip Treacy's always plucking them for hats.''
An inspection of the family's short-tailed Soay sheep in a nearby field prompted further sartorial anecdotes. ''Philip did a hat based on the ram's horn, and Alexander McQueen did the horns in gold for his first collection at Givenchy,'' she said. ''But I've lost my ram -- they die from too much sex, you know.''
Having decided recently to create a new entrance to Hilles, the Blows commissioned Roderick Gradidge, an expert on Arts and Crafts architecture, to design gateposts in Cotswold dry stone, topped with dovecotes. ''It was Detmar's idea, and I think it's so romantic,'' Ms. Blow said. ''When you arrive, you'll have this flutter of doves to welcome you.''
The Blows are legendary hosts, and the visitors' book at Hilles is a veritable Who's Who of Britain's youthful haute bohemia. When Mr. McQueen is in residence, he commandeers the vast Long Room, with its William Morris carpets and a magnificent 17-century Mortlake tapestry. Sophie Dahl and Honor Fraser, models whose careers were begun by Ms. Blow, are also frequent guests, as is Jasper Conran, the London designer, who is currently negotiating with Mr. Blow to occupy a sprawling house on the estate.
Although it is an impressive setting for house parties, Hilles is the antithesis to the Blow's serenely modern cocoon in London. ''It's very overpowering,'' Ms. Blow said. ''It's a bit like living inside a theater set.''
The experience of owning her own house in London has an emotional resonance for Ms. Blow. Her father, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, died in 1993, leaving her only about $8,000. Her stepmother, whom Ms. Blow described as ''a creature called Rona who he met on a bus in Hong Kong,'' inherited his country estate, which had been in the family since the 14th century, along with the tidy sum of $11 million. ''I was shocked, because I had loved him,'' Ms. Blow said.
Nevertheless, she seems to relish her role as a madcap chatelaine at Hilles. Some may opt for faded jeans or tweeds in the country, but not Ms. Blow. Wearing a frothy muslin floor-length dress by Yoshiki Hishinuma, Jungle Red lipstick and silver stilettos, Ms. Blow could hardly be mistaken for the housekeeper as she greeted house guests in the kitchen at 8 A.M. and inquired, saucepan in hand, ''Anyone for porridge?''

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