I Just Got the Best Present Ever

Yes -- the best present ever, because when I opened the link Raina sent me I almost stroked out from the insanity of it all. I love art, I love houses, and when the two get together and do the horizontal mambo, they make beautiful, very expensive babies. Just how expensive?  Well, if you sold every organ in your body on the black market, you still couldn't afford any of the art in this house (plus you'd be dead).

I mean, you know you're rich when Warhol's rorschach paintings don't even rate a mention in the listed "pieces of note." And that's just the office.

Or maybe the author simply tired of referencing Warhol 8,567 times, since the home of fabulously wealthy psychiatrist Samantha Boardman and her real estate mogul husband Aby Rosen has more Warhol pieces in it than a museum.

Apparently they are also nonplussed by the proximity of so much fragile cash to two tiny toddlers. According to Boardman, “We have taught the kids how to live with [art]  and how to learn from it, but we have also taught them how to respect it.” That's code for: the nannies steer them around it. Because even the best kid will wait until you turn your back and then drive their Big Wheels into a temptingly towering stack of cardboard boxes... by Andy Warhol.

Still, you have to give the Boardman-Rosens respect for using their superrich powers for good and not evil. They probably could have single handedly bailed out Goldman Sachs, but instead they bought art. Really good art. Francis Bacon is perhaps my favorite painter in the whole universe, and that Damien Hirst sculpture ain't shabby, either. But that's not to say that I would have made exactly the same curatorial choices if I were obscenely wealthy.

William de Kooning + Richard Prince = Yes. The table is gorgeous, too, but that terrarium-as-art thingie confuses me.

Cy Twombly = hell to the yes, but Jeff Koons will never be my favorite artist. I know it's conceptual and all, but it still looks like they decided to hang the kids' pool toy next to one of the greatest painters of all time. The rug, however, gets my seal of approval (as if they need it).

Taxidermy may be out, but Maurizio Cattelan is the original gangsta. Props.

Check out the rest of the Vogue sildeshow, where you will learn that the kids are adorable but perhaps a wee bit spoiled (not judging -- I'd happily move into their life), the library is a hot mess (judging), and outdoor space is at a premium in NYC even for the uber wealthy.

Thanks again to Raina at If the Lampshade Fits for the tip!