He has been known to serve tuna on crackers during cocktail hour. He prefers diners to power-breakfast spots like the Regency. His sartorial style remains buttoned down, with a salmon-color crew neck and matching socks about as gaudy as it gets. But Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York, is certainly no everyman, jetting around the world in his own private plane and giving away hundreds of millions in charity. When it comes to real estate, his tastes run to the positively baronial, especially with two of his properties— a town house on East 79th Street and one in Cadogan Square in London— and, perhaps soon, a twenty million dollar Georgian mansion in Southampton, a 35-acre estate known as Ballyshear.Rico says tuna on crackers is good, no matter who you are. But Michael Rubens Bloomberg, with a net worth of $18.1 billion in 2011, thus the thirteenth-richest person in the United States, can certainly afford all this stuff. (And give the guy a break; with that much money, he can afford it like you can afford a new bookcase. Remember, even if you're a millionaire, which Rico is not, alas, this guy is 18,000 times richer...)
Throughout his tenure, the mayor has taken pains to protect his private life, refusing to divulge his weekend whereabouts, blocking aviation websites from tracking the movements of his private planes, and swearing reporters to secrecy before granting access to his homes. Yet examples of the grandeur in which he lives had, until recently, been in plain sight on the website of his longtime decorator, Jamie Drake, known for exuberance and who has overseen rooms for Madonna as well as restorations at Gracie Mansion and City Hall.
The photographs represent a strikingly public display of his most intimate spaces: one image captures his workout room, another shows a brown commode with a pink orchid nearby. Labeled only Townhouse, NYC, and Townhouse, London, without naming their owner, the images offer a virtual tour of two of Bloomberg’s residences, all done up with important art and expensive antiques in the English Regency style.
“It’s certainly not a budget-deficit look,” said Marian McEvoy, an author and former editor in chief of House Beautiful and Elle Décor. “This is not somebody who is interested in appearing less successful than he is, and rightly so. He appreciates, obviously, fine furniture and good art.”
Indeed, the houses are Old World and lavish, in stark contrast to the sleek, glassy modernism of the headquarters of the company he founded, Bloomberg LP. The houses have plenty of space for the frequent parties Bloomberg gives for members of the social, business, cultural, academic, or political circles that can help advance his agenda.
The mayor’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to discuss the properties or their furnishings, and Drake did not respond to phone or email messages seeking comment. Loeser would not say whether Bloomberg was aware that the photos were online, but they were soon removed from Drake’s site.
In the New York town house, the photos show that visitors are greeted by what appeared to be, in the eyes of one antiques dealer, a Dutch old master painting, an English Regency table that could be worth $90,000, and sconces that could go for $40,000 each. In another room sits what the dealer said was a one million dollar Georgian Chippendale couch beneath what appeared to be an eighteenth-century portrait by a prominent painter like Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough, which might be worth $450,000. Throughout the house are more sconces and chandeliers valued in the five or six figures, the dealer said.
Another room holds an antique snooker table that is worth at least $50,000, another expert said. Billowing drapes, an Egyptian marble foyer and French Savonnerie carpets all add to the centuries-old opulence. Three bathrooms, each appointed in a different fashion, are pictured.
“Michael wants to live large, like a nineteenth-century railroad baron,” Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair and a longtime friend of Bloomberg, told The New York Times in 2001. “He sees himself as very much like the Carnegies or Mellons.”
Still, some who have been to the house say they quickly became adjusted to it, because Bloomberg is so comfortable there and such an engaging host. “You don’t realize you’re in a very expensive town house; by the time we had dinner and conversation with people it was like being anywhere else, like a friend’s house,” Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, said of his one visit there. “I’ve had breakfast with him at the Viand coffee shop, and this was a step up.”
In London, where Bloomberg’s house sits on Cadogan Square and features a spiraling, filigreed central staircase, mahogany doors, and marble columns, the overall feel is similar, with expensive Georgian furnishings and fixtures. Drake, on his website, described his approach to the design without identifying the client: “For the across-the-pond residence of a New York-based businessman, we reveled in the possibilities of eclecticism. Iconic, American contemporary art jolts awake the international mix of exquisite furnishings.”
There is a portrait of Benjamin Franklin over a fireplace that an expert said could be by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (although others said it could be a later copy), but some of the art is much more contemporary, including a Marilyn Monroe work by Andy Warhol and a double flag and series of numbers by Jasper Johns, representing a divergence from how he described his taste in 2001:
“I like lots of old masters,” he said then. “I have some portraits, Italian. I don’t like the ones, when you’ve got a head on a plate, no, that medieval religious stuff that is so serious and so overdone. “Would I prefer to have Jasper Johns and de Kooning and Warhol stuff all around? I don’t know. That says less to me.”
Whether Bloomberg’s style will continue to evolve is not yet clear, though the Southampton house he is said to be buying, at 22,000 square feet, could offer an opportunity for change. He has also been buying up apartments in the building next door on 79th Street and combining them with his house, and one friend said he might eventually modernize both properties.
But, as physical manifestations of Bloomberg’s personality, they all are likely to remain lavish. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science writer and the author of a coming book, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, described the town houses as shown on Drake’s site as statement homes, saying they were “strong expressions of identity and very strong signifiers of status.” She said that it was “a sort of postmodern version of the sixteenth-century Italian merchant prince or maybe the nineteenth-century American robber baron,” and that the owner was “someone who can afford to express his wealth and taste and bold personality with the best that money can buy, the best art, the best design”. Judging by the furnishings and layout, she said, she would expect the person living there to be a chief executive type: confident, extroverted, decisive, optimistic, independent-minded, and preferring company to solitude. “This,” she said, “is not the broody, artistic Abraham Lincoln type.”
However, regardless of the rumors, Rico's not saying the guy's gay, and Wikipedia thinks not, but Next magazine sure thought so:
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