When Mario Buatta drew his last breath at 9:12 p.m. on Oct. 15 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the celebrated interior designer, 82, known for his exuberantly colorful work, riotous persona and matching sobriquet, the Prince of Chintz, seemed at peace.

In her heyday as the bejeweled empress of New York philanthropy, Brooke Astor entertained presidents, first ladies and a potpourri of pooh-bahs and literati at her elegant 14-room duplex on Park Avenue. And when she died on Aug. 13, 2007, at Holly Hill, her estate in Westchester County, at 105, she left behind two households’…

“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.”

John Hobbs, a London antiques dealer known for superb English and Continental furniture, has been accused by his longtime restorer, Dennis Buggins, of selling fakes.

“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…

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.

When 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.

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,…

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…

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,…

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…