Travel: The Incidental Tourist/Getting Married in NYC

The Weekend Australian

Julie Earle-Levine | June 13, 2009

IT is a wet, cold day with a pale winter sky. Our white limo cruises up rain-slicked roads to New York's City Hall, where we are to be wed.

City Hall, in downtown Manhattan, is a fusty, dank, dark building. The kind of place where something horrible could be lurking in a corner. It is spectacularly inelegant.

To enter this archaic building (one floor has been used for weddings since 1916) you must pass through a metal detector and remove your jacket under the gaze of armed security guards. Then the long lines begin. I hop from one foot to the other, my painfully gorgeous white Manolo Blahniks crushing my feet as security guards patrol the room. (A friend later confesses he broke into a sweat over the mini bottles of champagne hidden in his briefcase.)

Eventually we are herded into a small room that overflows with couples waiting for their ticket number to be called. It is deliciously chaotic. Finally we reach the chapel, which has been given a lick of fresh paint. A vase of fake flowers stands on the polished marble, lending a slightly funereal air in spite of the happiness of such an occasion.

Jose, wearing a tight red sweater with an ID tag affixed, a huge split-melon smile and a big diamond earring, is the officiant, and wishes us luck. We spring out of the darkness and on to the street.

This is six years ago. Now the city has a new marriage bureau, at 141 Worth St (80 Centre St), another stern-looking edifice, which was formerly a motor vehicles department building and was given a $US12million overhaul. The bureau is part of a push by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to attract more tourists, to compete with Las Vegas, where weddings are down.

Michael McSweeney, the city's first deputy city clerk, enthusiastically shows me the new bureau. "See these double glass doors at the entrance? They swing open and drench the room in sunlight." If the bride and groom look heavenward, they'll see chandeliers and Italian handmade glass tiles. The hues are golden bronze, and gorgeous. The chandeliers are like giant golden jellyfish dancing on the ceiling.

There is an information desk and a number system. The website has been redesigned so couples can apply the night before and turn up with the paperwork. A new language line, with translators at the ready, caters for speakers of 170 languages. They take credit cards.

Even the bathrooms are stunning, with a full-length mirror for gazing at your gown (should you be wearing one) and a powder room. A woman, who later admits she is a model, emerges dressed in a floor-length ivory silk gown. She could be going to the Oscars ceremony. A kiosk sells fresh flowers and fake diamante rings at $US9 a piece. "We have real fancy stuff here now," McSweeney says. "There is even a space for couples to be photographed with a backdrop of City Hall."

But the best surprise is the two wedding chapels, where works on loan from the Brooklyn Museum of Art adorn the walls. The chic interiors are designed by Jamie Drake, who has worked for Madonna.

A bride in a pink tulle dress and gold sandals blinks back tears, her partner brushes his lapel. This is the polished and well-thought-out way to get married, and it is catching on. McSweeney says on a recent Friday 60 per cent more couples tied the knot compared with the same week a year ago.

But I miss the gritty authenticity of the old chapel and getting a security pat-down on the way to my wedding.

www.cityclerk.nyc.gov

Weekend FT: Nicaragua's Carlos Pellas

By Julie Earle-Levine

Carlos Pellas owns Nicaragua’s Flor de Caña rum distilleries, Toyota and Suzuki motor dealerships, an energy company and banks. The head of one of the country’s wealthiest families, he is descended from Italians who immigrated from the US in the 19th century. A frequent traveller, he has six homes dotted around the world in locations mostly close to the sea, to accommodate his love of fishing. He counts a family weekender in Lake Nicaragua’s “isletas”, reached only by boat with views of lush mountains, as his favourite.

Have you always lived in Nicaragua?

Yes, I was born here. During my early childhood I lived with my parents at our coffee plantation in San Marcos, about a 45-minute drive from Managua. The house was built in 1952 and it resembled the traditional Spanish haciendas. I have the best recollections of those times as there were 16 of us – between my brothers, my sister and cousins – who lived together. There was no TV then, so we rode bicycles and horses, and played board and card games. The home still serves as a weekend retreat for my cousins.

Then you moved to the city?

Yes, we moved to Managua when I was 10. My father built a beautiful house with lacquered Japanese-style doors and gardens with lakes with fish and oriental plants. In 1972 an earthquake destroyed it. I was at a party with my girlfriend, who would later become my wife. The house we were at caught fire. I told her my house was earthquake-proof. She was very concerned for her parents’ home. But it was my house that was destroyed. My parents and sister survived, miraculously. My girlfriend’s parents’ home was intact.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS

Old cards and ancient pots

My boat is customised to make it the perfect fishing machine. It has underwater fishing cameras. I never get tired of looking at the sea. I can spend hours just sitting in the mezzanine waiting for the fish to show.

A coin from Aristotle’s era given to me by my good friend Mike Wood, my roommate at Stanford, as a token of our 35-year friendship.

My top drawer in my closet, where I keep all the cards and notes sent to me by my kids. Frequently I open one and read it again. It brightens the day.

My hammock. I love to lay on it while watching the sunset and enjoying a 12-year old Flor de Caña Centenario.

My Nicaraguan stamp collection. I bought my first stamp 47 years ago, for $1. I own 18 of the first 20 stamps printed in Nicaragua. My collection is probably the only one of its kind in the world.

My pre-Colombian Indian artefact collection. I have more than 100 pieces of ceramic, dating back 1,200-2,000 years.

My wife’s picture when I first met her. Vivian still looks like that first day. It’s an inspiration. We have had three beautiful children together.

What about school?

I went to prep school in Woodside, California. It was my first time away from Nicaragua in a whole new world where I didn’t even understand the language. It was a great experience. Later, I attended Stanford [University], where I obtained my bachelor degree in economics and later on my MBA. During all these years I would come home to Nicaragua at Christmas and in summer, when I would go to the sugar plantation and the Flor de Caña distillery to work. Ironically, summer vacation was harder work than college.

Why is the isletas home your favourite?

It’s beautiful and peaceful. My family owns an island called Abuela Nena’s Island [Grandmother Nena’s Island]. There are mango and coconut trees, a domesticated white heron and two native parrots. My parents built a home that blends with nature in a very special way. It is a ranch that is made from local wood. It’s nice to sit on locally made, wood rocking chairs and hammocks right by the pool. We have another house there, too, which is two storeys with a balcony that overlooks the lake. The island has belonged to us since the early 1930s but it was confiscated by the Sandinistas in the mid-1980s. It was not until the mid-1990s that we got it back and began our building plans. My mother’s idea was to build a place where she and my dad could spend time with their children and grandchildren and enjoy the serenity of the lake and the beautiful view of the colonial city of Granada. That’s what eventually got her to rename the island El Descanso, which means “the resting place”. The views are amazing. On one side of the island you can see the Mombacho volcano and the city. On the other side is Lake Nicaragua, with its two volcanoes that are islands in the middle of it. The lake is so big that in some parts you cannot see where it ends and land begins.

How do you buy one of these islands?

Often by word of mouth. There are more than 360 islands, so sometimes there will be one for sale.

How often do you go to your island?

I try to go whenever I can. It is my favourite place to entertain my most important guests and closest friends who visit from other countries. I also love to spend time there with my children, brothers and nephews.

What about your main residence?

My home in Managua is where I have lived since 1978. It was meant to be a ”transition” home while I built my permanent home. But the Sandinista revolution changed those plans. As our family gradually grew, my wife and I decided not to move. I would best characterise it as a home in the city that makes you feel you are in a private resort in the countryside. It’s full of open spaces and has a pool, a cabana and a tennis court. Many trees are now close to 30 years old, which provide an ambience difficult to duplicate. I also have a beach home in San Juan del Sur, where I love to go on weekends when I am not fishing from my home in Tulemar, Costa Rica. The seven-bedroom house is right on the beach and it has a Caribbean feeling.

And your other homes?

My home in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica, is in the middle of a plush rainforest that serves as habitat to three different families of monkeys. The terrace is as high as the top of the trees, which makes you feel like you are flying on top of them. It is secluded and close to the best billfish action in the world. Deep sea fishing has been my passion since I was 13 years old. I have released over 1,500 sailfish and more than 300 marlin. I own a home on the San Juan river, close to an orange plantation where I am a partner. It’s more like a lodge, with great views of the river. My son Eduardo, 22, is the one who enjoys it the most as he is a keen tarpon fisherman. I also have an apartment at the Four Season Residences in Miami. It’s on the 55th floor and has a spectacular view of the port of Miami, the bay and Key Biscayne. My wife Vivian loves it for the privacy – no maids, no drivers, just us.

New York magazine: Murdoch selling North Shore home

Intelligencer: Rupert, Brangelina Beached Here

Julie Earle-Levine
June 5, 2009

(Photo: Courtesy of Prudential)

Rupert and Wendi Murdoch have put Rosehearty, their North Shore summer getaway, on the market for $12.8 million; they just weren’t using it enough, given all their other homes. In the meantime, they’ve been renting it to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for more than $100,000 a month. It’s set on around five acres, with eleven bedrooms, seven fireplaces, guest house, and tennis court, on its own stretch of beach, with a dock. A Murdoch rep declined to comment. The broker, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Dolly Lenz, wouldn’t identify the rental tenants, but noted it’s available for walk-throughs only when they’re out of town—like, say, at Cannes.

New York Times: Travel Nicaragua

Check In, Check Out

By JULIE EARLE-LEVINE

Published: May 10, 2009

THE BASICS Once a home belonging to Hope Somoza, the widow of the former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, this Pacific beachfront Victorian has been carefully restored into a comfortable, 21-room hotel, which opened a year ago. A suite has been named after Mark Twain, who arrived in San Juan del Sur by sea in 1886, and wrote that “bright green hills never looked so welcome, so enchanting, so altogether lovely.”

THE LOCATION San Juan del Sur, a perfect horseshoe-shaped beach and surfers’ haven nestled into the side of a lush mountain, has long been a refuge for wealthy Nicaraguans. The hotel’s sweeping verandas provide glimpses of these palatial beach retreats, including an eye-catching pink house owned by Eduardo Montealegre, a politician who ran for the presidency of Nicaragua in 2006. The hotel overlooks the beach, where couples in rainbow-hued T-shirts, arms linked at the hips, cuddle at night in the shadows of swaying palm trees. Also a port, the town is about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Managua airport. (A shuttle costs about $45 each way.)

THE ROOMS In spite of the Pottery Barn-like palette — cream-colored drapes with silk tassels, white walls and dark wood furniture — the Victoriano still feels Nicaraguan. The bedspread is a vibrant, orange and green hibiscus print, and the double bed is hand-carved teak, as is a large freestanding mirror and desk. Six rooms have French doors that open out onto balconies overlooking a small pool, with deck chairs and umbrellas, and the beach. Other rooms face a pretty courtyard.

THE BATHROOMS Tiny — the door will hit the sink if you don’t open it carefully — but have large shower stalls (no bathtub) with medium water pressure. The hotel provides a refreshing oatmeal-peppermint body bar, plenty of towels and a robe.

THE LOBBY Airy and spacious, guests can sink into a chocolate leather sofa or check e-mail (free Wi-Fi), with views of the beach and men on scooters selling milk, rice and beans. Paintings by Nicaraguan artists adorn the walls, and the polished wooden floors are covered with antique rugs.

ROOM SERVICE Available from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. It is best to speak some Spanish when in Nicaragua. One order over the phone, for coffee, was interpreted as tea, then finally a man arrived at the door to ask in person. Once it was understood what I was ordering, service was prompt, just 10 minutes ($1.50). And it was delicious Nicaraguan coffee. The food is excellent and fresh, a simple sandwich of ham and cheese ($4) was delivered in 20 minutes, but breakfast, which is included in the rate, is best en plein air on the veranda.

AMENITIES There is no gym, but San Juan del Sur is perfect for exploring on foot. Its streets are lined with cafes, bars, surf shops and a bookstore.

THE BOTTOM LINE With rates for double rooms starting at $100, this hotel is on the high end of the local spectrum (surfer-style accommodations can be found for as little as $20 a night), but no one could call it overpriced, given its idyllic location. While service is sometimes a bit slow — my checkout took 15 minutes, and involved much official stamping of a wad of receipts — the staff was friendly and helpful.

Victoriano Hotel; Paseo de la Mar, Costado Norte Enitel, San Juan del Sur; (505-2) 568-2006; www.hotelvictoriano.com.ni.

Weekend FT: Elemental Architecture

March 21, 2009

By Julie Earle-Levine

Architectural designer Todd Shultz searched for more than a year to find the perfect wood for his client’s basement wine room. The heart pine he found in a cotton mill in Eatonville, Georgia had a golden colour, tight growth rings and blue veins – signs of its authenticity and age.

But when the client saw the beams, he was horrified. “He was like: ‘What are these dark black marks? Can you get rid of that?’,” Shultz recalls.

It was only after the man heard about the wood’s history – the marks were caused by a rare mould that had formed in the tree more than 200 years before – that he became enamoured with it.

The story is a familiar one to Richard McFarland, who co-founded California-based TerraMai, a reclaimed woods company, in the 1990s. Homeowners appreciate the aesthetics and eco-friendly credentials of his products, he says, but mainly “it is the story behind it that they fall in love with”.

Finding the wood, processing it, then building from it can take years. Once a source is located, the beams are photographed and their history researched. Every piece is sorted, cleaned, graded and then de-metalled and possibly re-milled. “The first reaction of someone is: ‘There is a lot of damage to this stuff’. But once it is re-milled and the spike holes are plugged, the overall effect is stunning,” McFarland says.

He says about half of TerraMai’s projects are residential, including houses in Florida, New York’s Hudson Valley, Nevada’s Lake Tahoe and Aspen, Colorado. The wood is not cheap; flooring made from 100-year-old exotics sourced from as far afield as India, South America and south-east Asia cost about $15-$25 per sq ft, about 30 per cent more than floors made from new or “virgin” wood.

But McFarland insists that “people will pay for quality”. “Because it is reclaimed, old-growth tropical hardwood – among the hardest wood on the planet – will last much longer,” he says. “With proper care, these floors can last generations”, compared with about 20 years for just-cut alternatives.

Plus, the reduced environmental impact cannot be ignored. “With every foot of reclaimed wood, you are offsetting destruction of a forest.” Yes, there is a carbon footprint in securing the beams, he acknowledges, but specialists say it is insignificant compared with cutting down new trees.

Shultz grew up on a farm, where he was taught to recycle everything. “You didn’t tear down a barn because it was 100 years old, you painted it and fixed it,” he says. “Nothing makes me sicker than seeing a dumpster full of wood. I’m the one pulling up my truck and grabbing the stuff.”

Any surplus wood goes back to his studio to be repurposed for other projects, he adds. “It is not really for cost. It’s for karma.”

Jim Ruig is another reclaimed wood specialist whose business, Australian Salvage, harvests wood from old wharves, French oak wine barrels, old buildings and industrial factories. His first purchase was 10,000 tonnes of wharf timbers, which took 400 semi-trailers to deliver to industrial land he had bought on Brisbane’s outskirts.

But since then demand has been strong. He recently sold A$3.5m (£1.6m) of reclaimed wood to actor Hugh Jackman for his health resort on Queensland’s Gold Coast and outfitted singer Jack Johnson’s seaside home in Byron Bay. He also works with developers eager to add complexity to their building interiors, as well as exporting to the US. Clients choose from a “menu” of recycled timbers, including native blackbutt, spotted gum and ironbark, then decide the finish – raw, lime washed, oil, smoked or antique.

Given the popularity of reclaimed wood – more than 40m board feet is sold a year in the US, five times the amount sold a decade ago – some are concerned about supply. But McFarland is not one of them. “Yes, it is a limited resource but the timber will be recycled again,” he says. “There will be new stories to tell – so many lives from one tree.”

ends

Sunday Times of London: Bernie Madoff

Sunday, March 15 2009

By Julie Earle-Levine

By the time Bernard Madoff arrived at court last Thursday, two hours before his 10am hearing, an angry mob had gathered outside the Manhattan courthouse. The $64.8 billion fraudster wore a charcoal-grey suit but no wedding ring or one of his usual vintage watches. A first sign, perhaps, that he knew this was the end.

Three months after this fallen pillar of Wall Street’s scams were exposed, Madoff is now in jail awaiting sentencing. His crimes made headlines around the world and battered the fortunes of the rich and famous, including Steven Spielberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, as well as wiping out smaller savers and charities.

After last week’s dramatic court appearance, though, many questions remain unanswered. Could Madoff, as he claims, have orchestrated this giant scam alone? How much did his family know? And where is the money?

Prosecutors are no clearer about what role, if any, Madoff’s wife, Ruth, brother Peter, sons Mark and Andrew and his employees played in perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history. His family members have denied any involvement. In court Madoff gave no clues. Because he pleaded guilty without making a deal, he is under no obligation to co-operate. There is no guarantee he ever will.

Jim Cox, law professor at Duke University, said Madoff had refused to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy, which would have implicated others. “He has clammed up. It looks like he’s going to take the real story to his grave,” said Cox.

One lawyer there to observe the historic moment, Robert Mintz, white-collar crime expert at McCarter & English, said: “There was a palpable sense of frustration among defrauded investors.”

Inside the packed court, Madoff, flanked by his attorney, Ira Sorkin, and four FBI agents stood stony-faced as the judge reviewed all 11 counts, including security fraud, investment fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, international money laundering, perjury, making false statements, and theft from employer benefits.

The judge asked Madoff if he understood the possible sentence he faced — 150 years’ imprisonment. “I do,” said Madoff. “Do you understand you may lose the right to vote, the right to hold public office,” asked the judge to sniggers from the courtroom.

Once the formalities were over with, Madoff was given his chance to explain what had happened. It was the moment his victims and investigators had been waiting for. He held out his notes and read a 12-minute address.

“I am actually grateful for this first opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am deeply sorry and ashamed. As I engaged in fraud, I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal,” he said. “When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme.

“However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by, I realised that my arrest and this day would inevitably come.”

Madoff said he was in court to “accept responsibility” and explain what happened. But he gave little new information and may never publicly answer for his crime again.

The scam began in the early 1990s when Madoff was finding it hard to make the returns his clients wanted. He felt “compelled to satisfy my clients’ expectations, at any cost”.

Clients were told Madoff had a secret “split strike conversion strategy”. They were told he would invest their money — instead those funds were deposited in a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank.

When clients asked for their cash, Madoff took the money out of Chase, using cash that belonged to them, or to other clients, he confessed.

Madoff was at pains to claim that his investment advisory business, “the vehicle of my wrongdoing”, was the only part of Madoff Securities engaged in criminal activity. His brother and two sons ran the other branches of his business, proprietary trading and market making, and these were “legitimate, profitable and successful in all respects”, said Madoff.

Even concealing his fraud sounded simple. Madoff confessed he lied to the authorities on numerous occasions and cooked his own books. In recent years, Madoff said, he wired money between New York and his London office “to make it appear as though there were actual securities transactions executed on my behalf”.

He said the London office knew nothing of his crimes and was “a legitimately, honestly run and operated business”.

Mintz said prosecutors would be frustrated by Madoff’s testimony. He said it was a “road map” for the defence as investigations continue. “His strategy is to shield as many assets for his family as he can. He has fallen on his sword.”

While Madoff claims he co-ordinated this vast conspiracy alone, prosecutors seem less convinced. More prosecutions are likely, though they may be months away. “A lot of resources and effort are being expended, both to find assets and to find anyone else who may be responsible for this fraud,” prosecutor Marc Litt said in court.

“It seems to me that it would be difficult for one individual to pull this off. Especially on such a grand scale,” said Mintz.

Cox added: “You have got to think others were at least suspicious. It’s not just who was involved but where all this money went. Is there cash hidden in some Swiss bank account? My guess is we are not going to find much in the way of assets, but so far nothing has really been resolved.”

At the courthouse investors were seething. There was no sense of relief among the victims, many of whom call themselves survivors, a weighty word for this elderly, largely Jewish crowd.

One, Barbara Dweck, 58, had red paint on her hands and carried a billboard with newspaper headlines about the scam. “I wanted to express my feelings about this guy,” she said. “He has blood on his hands. He is equivalent to a murderer. He has destroyed lives. People are sick from this, people are committing suicide.”

The Madoff effect was even felt in the more serene surroundings of leafy north London. One couple, who asked to remain anonymous, tried to take their mind off Madoff by doing some gardening. When asked whether justice had been served at the previous day’s hearing, they just laughed. At best they hope to retrieve a fraction of their investment. Their retirement has been destroyed.

Ilene Kent, a paralegal who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said: “Justice has been served, but I can’t retire.” She said her family had lost their life savings. She is also a spokeswoman for the online Bernard Madoff Survivors Group, which has 350 members. She wants the government to investigate if others were involved. She said: “It was too complicated and the money too large for just one man.”

ends

Best of New York magazine: Reading Dogs

New York Magazine: Best of New York
March 3 , 2009

Best Reading Program

R.E.A.D. With Mudge

Story time’s fun and all, but it’s not nearly as mind-blowing as New York Public Library’s R.E.A.D. With Mudge program, which pairs kids ages 5 and up with trained dogs at six library branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. That’s right: They get to read with a dog. The program (named after a popular book series about a boy and his dog, Mudge) helps kids focus on reading by taking a little pressure off them. At the Mulberry Street library branch, a calm Border Collie-Greyhound mix named Theo curls up on kids’ laps for one-on-one reading sessions that last twenty minutes. When a kid forgets to read out loud, the dog nudges him gently. When the child struggles with a word, Theo puts his paw on the page. It’s almost uncanny, says owner Kimberly Wang: “Sometimes I think Theo really can read.

nypl.org or 212-275-6975

Julie Earle-Levine

Vogue UK: Ivanka Trump

Blonde Ambition
Vogue UK, GQ, Tatler, House & Garden Living
January 2009

By Julie Earle-Levine


IVANKA Trump, daughter of America’s real estate mogul, ‘The Donald’ takes long, stork-like strides towards me, her sky-high legs in six-inch heels gliding gracefully, her mouth slightly pouty, leaving a trail of remarkably shorter assistants in her wake. After all, Trump was a model before she realized her real estate ambitions.

The 26-year-old blonde has the impressive title of Vice President of Acquisitions and Development at the Trump Organization, in New York. She regularly appears in magazines offering tips on topics including ‘How to Be Rich, Sexy and Famous,’ but this Wharton graduate takes her career very seriously.

Trump is involved in 70 plus projects in the US and offshore, that require her to jet around the world, and to oversee meetings in the boardroom and on construction sites. How is she received? “Somebody may dismiss me because I’m young, blonde or female, but that can be used to one’s advantage,” she says, gazing coolly over her very large latte. Those close to her say she is also a fierce negotiator. “Ivanka holds her own in any meeting and what you see - a beautiful young blonde - is not what you get,” says Dolly Lenz, the top broker in America.

As a child, Trump spent some weekends on construction sites with her father or grandfather, often on a dump truck and she says she loved it. Some believe she may grab the top spot if her father ever hands over the reigns of the family’s real estate empire. Ivanka has two brothers, Donald Jnr, 30, and Eric, 23, who also work for Trump. She joined Trump in 2005, after working for developer Bruce Ratner on a large, mixed use shopping centre. “I wanted to get a sense of my self-worth and what I could accomplish, with or without my last name.”

It was not until she started working for her father, her “greatest mentor” that she really dug her heels in. “He has always pushed me to think, and dream bigger and bolder.”
In an interview in her 25th floor office with soaring views of Manhattan’s skyline and surrounded by photos of her family, layouts of a new development, and a thick manila folder marked with a long ‘to do’ list, Ivanka explained how her father convinced her to come on board. “He would send me renderings of the Trump Chicago project with a note – you could be working on this. Chicago was the siren call.”

She insists she is not just the pretty face in advertisements, but is involved in evaluating deals to pre-development planning, construction, marketing, operations sales and leasing.

What is she working on these days? Other than Chicago, Ivanka is spearheading a push by Trump to manage more of their new hotels. There are more than a dozen in the pipeline that are based on a template of Trump’s Central Park West property, including Las Vegas, a 1300-room hotel opening in March and a Fort Lauderdale, Florida that will open in January 2009. Offshore, there is Toronto, Cap Cana in the Dominican Republic, the just-open Istanbul Trump Towers complex in the city’s Sisli district and Dubai, a 61-story building and units. Trump also has its first project in Europe under way, in Scotland that will include a 450 room, five-star hotel, plus 500 single family homes, holiday homes, golf villas plus a golf course. Trump says she spends time on all of these but recently has been particularly focused on opportunities in China. “I have been going to China and meeting there with the ‘Donald Trump’s’ of those areas. It is a very important market and we want to do it right.”

Which brings us to a controversial project, Trump Soho, a 46-story building that has had a construction worker death, and upset locals who don’t like skyscrapers. It is five times the height of any building around it. Trump is naturally defensive. “There is a certain tone in the city due to a number of real catastrophies that are happening on a monumental level. We are being very cautious, and expect an elevated level of commitment to safety. We are certainly not exempt.”

She believes that Trump Soho is in fact “a great example of doing it right.” It is commanding $3,000 a square foot – top dollar – in a recession hit market. Some say the Trump brand has added $1,500 a square foot value. Trump said it is because there are 360 degree views from every floor with a hotel unit, and an amazing top floor penthouse. “It is very, very cool, Rockwell design.”

At a press conference with her siblings Trump emphasized that the company has an extremely solid track record, unlike many developers with no experience who were “just doing stuff” “We are building great hotels and now we are ramping up our hotel management position in the past two years. It has to be great. We can’t have failure.”

In August, Trump said that the building was about 57 per cent sold, mainly to European and South American buyers. The remainder are Americans, who want a chic pad in the city when they visit.

The ads for Trump Soho, plus others recently including Trump Ocean Club in Panama where she spills out of a strapless black evening dress wearing her jewelry (yes she has her own brand) are Trumpish, showcasing the biggest and best of everything you can get.

“I was part of marketing effort to appeal to a younger, more hip crowd.,
says Ivanka, who does live in a Trump building, but will not live in Soho. “I’ll be spending a lot of time at the Soho property because there is a great spa and restaurant.” The building is trendy, but elegant. “Really there is nothing five star downtown. You can stay at the Mercer – it is a great hotel but you are sacrificing amenities and space. It you are staying at Trump uptown, the difference is phenomenal. The views we are offering are not typical of the area.”

Sales are strong, she said. And what of the recession that is finally affecting even luxury real estate in resilient New York? Is the luxury property boom really over? In true Trump form, Ivanka says, “The world is changing. This brings both opportunities and challenges.”

ends

Travel & Leisure Australia: On the Road/Designing Woman

Stylish Traveler - Louise Olsen, Dinosaur Designs
January/February 2009

Jewelry and home wares designer Louise Olsen is an avid traveler, splitting her time in Sydney, Tokyo and in New York, where she has an apartment. Here she reveals some of her most treasured finds for global shopping. By Julie Earle-Levine


SINCE Dinosaur Designs’ launch more than 20years ago at Sydney’s Paddington Markets, stunning, hand-sculpted resin jewelry has been turning up on chic women (and men) all over the world. DD co-founder and Sydney-based designer Louise Olsen finds inspiration for the gorgeous, often vividly colored chunky bracelets, necklaces and lust-worthy home wares, in nature and art. When she shops for herself, she resists the ordinary. “I really try to stick to the rule of only buying a few very special pieces and leaving the rest for memory. I get a lot of pleasure from objects, so those I do buy, I must absolutely love.” Here, Olsen shares her top travel discoveries.

(extra if can include: Louise travels with her husband and business partner, Stephen Ormandy, who is also a painter, and their nine-year-old daughter, Camille.

The daughter of John Olsen, the renowned Australian landscape artist, Louise comes from a family that traveled a lot, living in London, Portugal and in Sydney. DD has stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Nolita in New York and sells at 20 stores worldwide, including Tokyo Design District, Bergdorf Goodman in New York)


HOTELS
My favourite hotels are in Bali. At Bali Amandari (Kedewatan, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia; (62) 361 975 333; www.amanresorts.com/amandari) you stay in these little huts right in the rainforest. It is very dense. There are these heady, incredible flowers, lush shaped leaves and Proteas, which are so wonderful to draw, so sculptural. I’m not a big beach person. Not a sun baker. More of a quick dip, then head off the beach and get into the sketching kind of person. The hotel is on the edge of a cliff, so you look down these valleys. It is so tranquil. It is lovely to go just for a lychee cocktail, or they do a beautiful range of Balinese teas. Oberoi Seminyak Beach ( Denpaser, Bali, Indonesia, (62) 361 73 0361; www.oberoibali.com) is another hotel that is very sensitive to its environment, to the Balinese culture, tradition and beliefs. My drawing book always comes back full after these hotels. I love spending time drawing the plants, insects and the most incredible butterflies. Both hotels are designed by the Australian architect Peter Muller, who worked with Jorn Utzon on the Opera House. He’s a wonderful architect who has lived in Bali a long time. The way he uses materials, like bamboo and grasses. It is just really beautiful.

FOOD
New York. I love to go to Bar Pitti (268 Sixth Avenue; 212-982-3300) I love the buzz and the energy of it. You get a great sense of New York there. The waiters are cheeky, but fun and nice. You have to go early to get a place. The food is wonderful, simple food. The truffled pastas, using very simple olive oil with white sauce and pasta with truffle on top is so good. It’s very rich. I usually get it and share it. I love Bar Pitti for lunch or dinner. It just has great street life. One of my favourites is Cafe Gitane (242 Mott Street, Nolita, 212-334-9552) I love the Moroccan and New York feel it has. It is just down the road from the store, and the apartment, so it has become a lovely local place. Makes me feel really great as well, we love the owner, Luke, we are always talking about the street and all the things we can do. I love their orange blossom waffles. If Yoshi is on the coffee machine, you are set. In Brooklyn, we go to Lucali, (575 Henry Street, Caroll Gardens; (718) 858-4086) The man who makes the wonderful pizza is Mark, and it’s his restaurant. The store that is the restaurant used to be his favourite lolly story when he was a kid living in Brooklyn. It is just amazing. They don’t have any refrigerators there. They bring it in fresh that day. They make tomato purees by hand. There are boccocinis in big white bowls, tomato puree on the bench, the pizza man is working on a wooden table making the dough, by hand. You can see the whole process. If you come in with kids, he’ll give them some dough to play with. The menu often doesn’t stay the same. It is a matter of what produce you can get that day. The mushroom is very good. So is pepperoni. I go a lot since my friend has an apartment near there. When her son goes to sleep, he goes to his window and the ‘pizza man’ waves good night to him.

In Tokyo, I go to Tokyo Department Store, Shibuya (right on top of the train station) for the best tuna sushi bar. They just do it so well, incredible tuna. It is very, very fresh straight from fish markets. We wholesale in Tokyo so we have a long association there. We are part of store there called Idaye for lots of years, and have been in Tokyo designers block for three years. We have a real love for Tokyo and often do JAL, nine hours to Tokyo, and then stop to see friends en-route to New York. We go for at least for a week a year. I really feel at home now. It is a very exciting exhilarating city. It is very hard to give addresses. They don’t have map system like we do. Trickier, so you do need a bit of a map or you can ask the policeman in each area


SHOPPING

Tokyo. It would have to be one of the best places in the world for gifts. It has such an incredible culture of gift giving to show gratitude towards each other. It is always important to take lots of gifts with you as well! I go to Cibone (Aoyama Bell Commons B1 2-14-6 Kitaaoyama Minato-Ku, Tokyo, 107-0061; (03) 3475 8017; www.cibone.com ) a beautiful homewares/design store. It has objects from all over the world, but with a beautiful Japanese sensibility. I have bought a lot of CDs from there. They have a really great selection of jazz, plus Brazilian, Cuban music in a collection of their own. They also do beautiful collection of own, beautiful colored towels, in incredible colors, wonderful cut out circles in them, really bright turquoise, bright coral red, deep luscious colors. At Tokyo Hands (Shibuya, 12-18 Udagawa-cho, (03) 5489 5111; www.tokyu-hands.co.jp/shibuya) a Japanese hardware store, where you can find everything you need to make anything, if you need wood, rope or string, light bulbs, kitchenware, cards, stamps, glue sticks, if you are looking for anything. Really handy things, a kitchen area, wonderful tea pots and great array of tea strainers, tea stirrers, I do like tea. Sushi roll section, buy bamboo mats to buy sushi, and other tools to make sushi and a wonderful array of knick knacks. There is an exercise section where you can buy exercise tights, back massagers and special foot socks that your toes can poke out of!



At Idee Store/ Cafe (Minami-Aoyama 6-1-16-3F, (03)-3409-6744) This design store has a lot of Italian pieces and Japanese. It is now owned by Muji, and has a little café attached. I love Sfera (D-0303 9-7-4 Akasaka Minato-ku, Tokyo; (03) 5413 3083; www.ricordi-sfera.com) beautiful hand-crafted Japanese objects that are purely Japanese design. The craftsmanship is wonderful, beautiful woven baskets that are finely, delicately done and beautiful hand blown glass pieces, wooden chopping boards.


ART

I always go to Lammfromm (Yamaguchi Bldg.1F 1-1-21 Uehara Shibuya-ku Tokyo 151-0064 ; (03) 5454-0450; www.lammfromm.jp) It is a beautiful contemporary art concept store with small works by Japanese artists. My daughter Camille really loves this store. The objects are very imaginative creations. Yayoi Kusama is just one of the artists we love. We always end up coming back with one of her dot sculptures or Daisy Face’s. There is an idea that the art world is not accessible, that it is hard to have a piece, but with this store, you can buy a beautiful, inexpensive piece and really treasure it. It is really wonderful art work by Japanese artists.




Louise on Shopping

Her other favourite stores:

New York, Moss (146 Green Street, www.mossonline.com) for design; for clothes, Butter (389 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn);

Tokyo, Comme des Garcon – one of my favuorite stores designed by Future Systems. There is a wonderful sense of translucent space moving in and outside itself. Being its flagship store, the collection seems to be the most extensive. They have one of a kind accessories ranges you don’t see in the other stores


Loveless – eclectic collection of fashion with a funny and playful twist with a very Japanese aesthetic. I also love Tsumori Chisato, the Japanese designer, who does the most wonderful prints, also has a very unique store in Aoyama.


Ends

Lifestyle: FT Manhattan Swap Shops

Weekend FT

By Julie Earle-Levine

December 6, 2008

As winter beckons, temperatures plunge and the sky turns inky black at 5pm, New Yorkers shuffle their closets to accommodate their bulky puffa jackets. But while the clear-out used to be space related, this year it has been driven by the economy too.

“Women, and we are talking wealthy women, who would normally buy what they want, are instead swapping their few-seasons-old Missoni and Prada for more recent pieces,” says Irene Albright, a former fashion stylist and owner of a new store, Mina’s on Cooper Square, that opened in November to sell secondhand designer clothing.

Indeed, more people than ever before are offloading items from their closets and opting to shop in luxury consignment stores, or secondhand designer clothes shops, to fill the gaps, according to several store owners. An ad-hoc survey of Manhattan’s vintage shops produced a chorus reporting an increase in “prized possessions” being handed over.

“I have a $10,000 dress that Jennifer Lopez wore once that will be for sale,” says Albright, who is enhancing the stock at Mina’s with overflow from another of her ventures, the Albright Fashion Library, where stylists, costume designers and celebrities hire clothing. Mina’s also plans to sell last season’s unsold designer clothing, as well as redesigned items. “I am taking designer pieces and reworking the design to make it fresher,” says Albright.

Lucyann Barry, whose namesake showroom on the Upper West Side has been stocking secondhand clothes, shoes, bags and jewellery from Chanel, Chloé, Gucci and Hermès at 50 to 90 per cent below retail since it opened in January, reports that one Texas man tried to sell his wife’s Louis Vuitton shoe collection. Barry says she has seen a 10 per cent increase in consignment clients in the past two months, among them a new demographic made up of wealthy women motivated by philanthropy.

“They can continue giving, without actually writing a cheque,” explains Barry. By selling “a Birkin”, they can turn their hardly used handbag into “a handsome donation for their favourite charity”.

Other women have been obliged to explore a new strain of retail: “People are telling me their husbands are freaking out because of big financial losses,” says Barry. Many of her clients are attracted by the quality of the items, although they are shopping carefully. “Even though they are getting great deals, they are more reserved.”

Kristjansen Villanueva, manager of Roundabout ReSale Couture, which opened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side four months ago and is targeted at buyers from the fashion industry, Wall Street and the local residents (Roundabout also has three stores in Connecticut), says one woman brought in an $8,000 bag last week that will sell for $2,900. “If she can make money by selling it, she can use money to buy another piece here,” says Villanueva, noting the barter-like dimension to the consignment trend.

One of his customers, a lawyer, was warned by her husband who lost his job at Lehman Bros: “No more Barneys. No more Bergdorf. You have to watch your wallet.”

“It was kind of sad,” says Villanueva. “But she sold her things and then ended up buying a never-worn Giorgio Armani suit, so she was happy. Instead of going to Saks or Barneys or a big retail store and paying $2,500, she got it for $499.”

Indeed, Villanueva says many clients are surprised by the choice and condition of most garments. Some are never worn and still have the tags on. “Most sellers don’t even think about the pieces they bought last season; they might even forget about them and don’t want to wear them now,” he says.

It is the more established fashion brands that are proving popular in the current climate. “We can’t stop selling Chanel and Hermès, because women feel good wearing it,” says Villaneuva.

Lucyann Barry, by contrast, says the vintage Chanel market seems to have slowed a little but those buying are diehard fans while new buyers will occasionally spend thousands on special pieces.

Meanwhile, Vintage Collections, an online store that sells high-end costume jewellery and accessories in Manhattan, is also seeing more sellers than usual. “It feels much busier,” says owner Vicki Haberman, whose items start at $1,000. “I’m getting a lot of enquiries. I definitely think more people are reaching in to the closet and selling their heirlooms.”

And not just women. Men, who traditionally hold on to their clothes a lot longer than seasonally driven women, are also trading them in. Gary Scheiner, owner of Gentlemen’s Resale, which has been in business on the Upper East Side for 14 years and sells men’s Burberry trenchcoats for less than $250, Tod’s loafers for $110 and Brioni suits for $495, also says business is brisk. “We are starting to see consignments of two or three items a week, instead of one,” he says.

“A lot of people are bringing in beautiful suits,” says Milo Bernstein, owner of Ina, another designer resale consignment store with five locations, the first of which opened in SoHo 16 years ago.

“One guy lost his job and had a lot of really good, not too conservative Thom Browne suits.” According to Bernstein, they were quickly snapped up by a savvy buyer who needed “new” suits for interviews.

Perhaps as a result, Bernstein says Ina’s five Manhattan stores are doing extremely well, in spite of the economy. More than half of Ina’s customers are from outside New York. “It just seems like a really good way to go,” he says. “You walk out the door with three things that would have cost $1,500 but you paid $400.” Of course, it may take a little work to find those items. “It’s not a store for people who do not like shopping.”

.......................

www.albrightnyc.com
www.inanyc.com
www.lucyannbarry.com
info@vintagecollectionsnyc.com
Gentlemen’s Resale, tel: +1: 212-734 2739
Roundabout Resale Couture, tel: +1 646-755 8009

Forbes: Bank of America's Chief Risk Officer

ForbesLife

Amy Woods Brinkley
Julie Earle-Levine
Forbes Magazine dated September 29, 2008

As chief risk officer at Bank of America, the largest retail bank in the U.S., Amy Woods Brinkley spearheaded its recent takeover of the stricken mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, just as the U.S. economy was heading downward. She will have a key role in defining the types of loans the new subsidiary will make and the growth model it will pursue as it is absorbed into the company.

Brinkley joined the bank 30 years ago in the commercial credit department after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina. She held a variety of positions in international banking, domestic corporate banking, and marketing, leading the consumer products group before assuming her current sector in December 2001. In 2005, she was awarded the top spot on US Banker magazine's list of "The 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking."

Why did you take on Countrywide?

Our company did very extensive due diligence. I've been involved in a lot of our acquisitions and I don't recall one that was more thorough. During that process I became increasingly comfortable; the problems at Countrywide were real, but they were also manageable. I always thought it would be a terrific strategic acquisition but the main question was whether we could handle the short-term challenges, and I think we can. I am excited about the longer-term opportunities.

And the impact on Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people )?

We understood there was significant reputation risk. That's why we promptly [made] certain changes that would mitigate that risk, such as the elimination of subprime mortgages and other nontraditional mortgages, pledging to work out loans wherever possible and working with community group partners. In the end, people need to judge us by what we do now and what we will do going forward.

But the estimates on write-downs for Countrywide's mortgages range from $8 billion to $30 billion. (Bank of America puts the figure at $12 to $13 billion.)

As we said a number of times, we did very extensive due diligence on the transaction, not only before signing but going back in before closing the transaction, and we believe the economics made sense and the market-share opportunity is worth the risk. We told investors in June that the purchase accounting adjustments will be in the neighborhood of $12 to $13 billion. Based on what we have contemplated, the acquisition would be accretive in the second half of this year. If we are wrong we will face some other losses in the future, but that would only delay the payback from the acquisition. Certainly I don't know that we bought at the bottom, but we clearly did not buy at the top of the market. So again, just before closing the transaction we revisited the economics and we are comfortable with what they tell us.

Where do you see the upside?

This transaction represents a rare opportunity to significantly gain market share, in this case in the mortgage business. We will have market share in the 20 percent range, in a business that is vital to consumers and to the economy.

Is it still hard convincing analysts about the deal?

I think some have understood [the purchase] better than others. Others will understand it more fully as time passes.

When will the mortgage crisis abate?

The single biggest question is when housing prices [will] stabilize, which is dependent on quite a few factors. I think we'll see some stabilization in 2009. I wouldn't try to call it into a quarter. We are battling a series of issues that stem from the impact of falling home prices, and that has created unprecedented illiquidity and extreme volatility in certain parts of the capital markets. Some areas are getting better: for example, liquidity in the leveraged loan market has improved. The bigger picture beyond housing and mortgages is the collective impact of higher energy and food costs [and whether that] results in a recession. We are not presently calling for that, but it is a close call.

As a chief risk officer, how do you calculate risk?

I certainly use many quantitative techniques based on probabilistic analysis. But it is also really important to use common sense and to not over-rely on models and historical evaluations of risk. I would describe it as balance of science and art. It's 70-30. I think there was a time when the quantitative approach worked better than it does today, and that is due in part to the increasing complexity of the global marketplace.

The industry is always good at lagging and coincidence indicators, but the best [people] are really good at reading the leading indicators and making informed judgments on that basis. Excesses in markets do come home to roost at some point, in some way, so learning from the past is also important.

And the pros and cons?

First of all, it's accepting that the most important decisions we make do involve tradeoffs--what appear on the surface to be equally imperfect, equally important choices, or partially right choices.

For instance, last year before the credit crisis hit, we didn't like where the leveraged finance market was going and we didn't like the deal terms being granted. Earlier than most, we became more selective. We faced losing potential revenue because the market was continuing to grow, but we had to weigh that against what we were beginning to see. We thought it was the right time to reevaluate our risk appetite, and it proved to be right.

When do you decide to decide?

One approach has helped me a lot through the years. I call it "trying each decision on and wearing it for a while." It might be just a few days, or longer. Usually I'll find that deciding one way leaves me feeling more comfortable than the other. When we exited the subprime mortgage business in 2001, it was a tough decision because it was giving up a not insignificant amount of revenue, and we are a growth-oriented company. We had to convince investors. On the other side, we had reputation risk (related to predatory lending) and concern where volatility could go over the longer term. It really was art and science and trying both decisions on.

What keeps you up at night?

Actually, I sleep okay. But what does concern me most is what we haven't thought of that we need to be thinking of. Are we pushing ourselves enough? What might be next? Worry in and of itself is unproductive. In today's world you have stuff coming at you every which way. Structuring time to just sit and think is important.

In speeches, you encourage trying on the unfamiliar to advance careerwise. When have you done so?

Early in my career, I was in the international group at Bank of America and worked in Asia. I spent brief periods in Hong Kong. At that time it was very unusual to have a single woman--a woman, period--in those markets.

Another time [in the 1980s], I was asked to start a risk-management function for the consumer businesses. All of my experience up to that point had been on the commercial and business side--I didn't know anything about the consumer business. I was getting in on the ground floor. I knew it was an opportunity to learn a whole new business, and to acquire a totally different skill set. That said, day one, I didn't know what I was doing. But I figured it out. You find good people that you trust.

Can you have a work/life balance?

All great leaders have balance. That's what allows you to keep perspective. It is your own formula. For me, reading, plus some nonprofit work, helps with balance. And exercise--walking and being outdoors.

Describe your day.

I get up very early in the morning, 4:30 or 5 a.m., and have that time for quiet thinking to plan my day. If I don't have an evening event, I leave work at 6:30 or 7 p.m. I can't recall a weekend when I haven't done some work. It might be a few hours, or the whole weekend. I try to work from home then. It stimulates my thinking, just to be in a different space.

What have been your tradeoffs?

[Giving up] more baseball games for my son than I'd like to, and annual cousin reunions that I cherish. It is a myth that you can have it all.

How do you see your strengths and weaknesses?

I think I'm very straightforward. Sometimes I might be too impatient--I tend to operate with a fair amount of urgency, and at times that might be overplayed.

Brinkley's Tips for Surviving and Thriving

1. Don't be preoccupied with proving yourself. I think a lot of energy gets lost in this. It did for me.

2. Make sure you know what you think you know.

3. Maintain balance. You will be better for it.

4. Don't wear your gender on your sleeve. This is not my line--another woman banker said it, but it's good.

5. Explore unconventional career paths. Take lateral moves and learn.

6. Always find great people who are better than you are and learn from them.

7. Trust your gut instinct. If it's speaking loudly, listen.

Travel: Departures 'Way Down Under'

Departures, September 2008

South Australia's Kangaroo Island - home to some of the continent's most intriguing wildlife - has long been popular with day-tripping and camping crowds. It never had any luxury accommodation until this spring, however, when James and Haylie Baillie, owners of the chic Capella Lodge on Oz's Lord Howe Island, opened their new property, Southern Ocean Lodge.

Set between two national parks on the island's isolated southwest coast and just a a 25-minute flight from Adelaide, the property is nestled in the bush and has expansive views of the turquoise sea below. Of the lodge's 21 minimalist rooms, the best is the Osprey pavilion, with its hand-sculpted, egg-shaped Japanese bathtub and private-terrace. From its alfresco daybeds and plnge spa, guests have a prime view of passing kangaroos and whales out at sea.

But those who come to K.I almost always want to get much closer to wildlife. And so the Baillies partnerned with local outfitter Exceptional Kangaroo Island to take visitors out into the area's singular landscape. The animal spotting is so good and so easy hear that it's really a shame the lodge doesn't allow children younger than six. Our stellar and slightly whacky guide, Anthony, aka Ants, who has lived on the island for 18 years, led our small group on a half-day journey, pointing out plump koalas perched on impossibly thin branches, kangaroo mothers hopping about with their in-pouch babes and even the elusive glossy black cockatoo - or at least evidence thereof, in the form of some nibbled seeds. On a separate hike, a trip to see Australian fur seals preceded a light lunch served rather glamorously under a white shade tent and accompanied by a local Chardonnay.

Later a stylish New Yorker who has just arrived at the lodge from Sydney was wondering aloud when she might see a kangaroo. She didn't have to wait long, though. During a twilight tour with lodge staff, glass of Champagne in hand, she was suddenly surrounded by dozens of curious 'roos and wallabies. "I didn't really expect to see wildlife like this," she said, laughing. But at Southern Ocean Lodge that's just the kind of Champagne wishes and kangaroo dreams experience guests are in for.

southernoceanlodge.com.au

Lifestyle: UK Vogue, GQ, Tatler - Ian Schrager

Studio 54 made him famous but Ian Schrager's latest project may be his crowning achievement

By Julie Earle-Levine
September, 2008

HE has been called the ‘King of Cool’, an arbiter of great vision and taste, ‘master of the ultra-hip hotel’ and a swashbuckling developer, but ask Ian Schrager, dapper in an Hermes pinstripe suit, where this style comes from and he shifts uncomfortably.

“I am not sure where this style comes from. I am not even certain I have good taste,” says Schrager, in a raspy Brooklyn accent.

Few would agree. Many would assert that Schrager not only has impeccable taste but that he creates it. Schrager, whose tanned skin and broad smile defy his 61-years, has spent nearly half his life creating spaces for the rich and famous to flock to, including boutique hotels in London, New York, Miami and LA. He has a colorful past. Of course Schrager was most famous for opening Studio 54 in Manhattan, once the world’s hippest nightclub where Bianca Jagger celebrated her birthday by riding half naked through the club on a white horse. He has also served 12 months in jail for tax fraud, where he and his friend Steve Rubell came up with the idea of a boutique hotel business. Four years later, Morgans, the world’s first boutique hotel opened in New York and the duo went on to open a string of hotels including the Royalton, Philippe Starck’s first-ever hotel project. Schrager’s new talent is combining hotels with high-end residential properties for the very, very wealthy.

When it comes to stunning buildings, New York has many, but Schrager’s second residential project, 40 Bond in downtown Noho, resonates with style. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects best known for Tate Modern, the 11-storey building is a modern take on the neighborhood’s cast-iron architecture. The exterior is cast entirely in greenish Coke bottle glass that glistens when the sun strikes it. Inside, there are wide-plank Austrian smoked oak wood floors, 11-foot high ceilings, fireplaces and envy-inducing outdoor terraces. Ricky Martin has bought here, as has Mario Testino. Schrager will live in the three-storey, 8,500-square-foot penthouse.

Schrager has been doing business in his mobile office – a black Mercedes - then walks in to greet me. He shakes my hand but is looking at the wall where he has spied a light fixture is not as it should be and demands to know why. I ask him if he is a perfectionist and he says. “Ha. Perfectionist is an understatement.” He might try 30 or 40 shades of white before he picks the right one. He can recognize if a bouquet, which he has decided must be a precise size and colour, is missing stems. “I don’t have to count them.” A potential buyer at the building recognizes Schrager and seizes the moment, asking, if the gleaming, wavy white walls in the foyer are plastic. Schrager’s face tightens, but the man who some say will simply walk away if he doesn’t like what he is hearing, just replies: “It is Corian marble.”

Schrager says he is actually very shy and does not like to be photographed. But once he warms up, he is charming, his conversation a steady stream of topics. Boutique hotels, Lifestyle apartments, concierges who will cater to how we live. His ideas stem from his roots in the nightclub business where he developed the production skills for acting on creative ideas. “Out of necessity I had to do these big productions and parties and the success or failure of what I did was really predicated on how exciting and magical you could make the space.” This thought process translates to hotels and to residences. “You get an idea, you try and realize it, you build it. It is exactly the same.” He is an avid reader of magazines and hunts the streets of New York for creative, individual ideas.

After leaving the Morgans Hotel Group in 2005, he developed his namesake, Ian Schrager company. His new focus is on “managing one’s life’ or rather, having someone else manage it for you. Schrager was at his weekend house in the Hamptons where estate managers do everything for you from writing party invitations to hiring a nanny. “I thought this should be applied to city living. City managers can really make your home somewhere you can enjoy.”

Schrager predicts there will be demand across the board for this kind of living, not just by the super wealthy and that it makes 40 Bond a standout. At the time of writing there were just three of the building’s 27 apartments still for sale. They cost $3 to $10 million. He insists the building’s appeal is not just the design, rather the services that come with it.

Schrager has plenty of other projects on his plate. Recently, he signed a deal with Marriott where he will develop 100 boutique hotels for a new brand that will be launched in major cities across the US, South America, Europe and Asia. He is working on a hotel in Miami, plus another high end hotel in that city as well as a sizeable project (a hotel and residences) on Manhattan’s 10^th avenue with developer and friend Aby Rosen He is also looking to close a transaction in Las Vegas and would like to do some more hotels in LA, New York and in London. “Over the next five to seven years I’d like to get to ten or twelve private label hotels and sell it or go public with it. That is the strategy.”

Clearly, Schrager shows no signs of slowing, but his approach is different these days. He works hard to strike a balance with work and family. And he’s spending time on his own immediate environment, 40 Bond. For now his new home is an empty shell, and he doesn’t want to share the specifics other than to say it will be very simple, with most materials from Europe, the woods, marbles and raw finishings. He’d like to keep the rest a secret. “Once something goes mainstream, for me it is over.”

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Gel Botox coming soon

Weekend FT

July 19, 2008

By Julie Earle-Levine

Ever since the 1990s, the anti-wrinkle drug Botox has reigned supreme in the fight against unwanted lines. Many have deemed it and one of its competitors, Myobloc (another drug that uses botulinum toxin to block nerve impulses and "freeze" lines), heaven-sent.

But now the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating the product and has warned of possible side effects and even deaths related to Botox use.

According to the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, there have been at least 16 deaths among 658 reported cases of people in the US "suffering adverse affects from Botox" between November 1997 and December 2006. The FDA is currently reviewing data from clinical studies by the drugs' manufacturers and expects to issue a report in several months.

Public Citizen's initial findings suggest that the use of Botox for cosmetic purposes does not lead to as great a risk of adverse effects as for other "off-label" uses, which would include using treating limb spasticity in a child with cerebral palsy. But the FDA has warned that people using Botox cosmetically should be aware of potential adverse effects, which include breathing problems.

The issue is enough to make consumer groups such as Public Citizen ask that doctors be required to give patients a written warning each time they receive a Botox injection. Last year, drug regulators in the UK and Germany required sterner warnings to be sent to doctors in those countries regarding its use. In France, the government requires doctors to have surgical qualifications to use Botox. Amidst all this, Allergan, the maker of Botox, has said that adverse reactions are rare. "In its entire history, there has never been a single reported death where a causal link to cosmetic Botox was established," said Dr Sef Kurstjens, Allergan's chief medical officer.

Talk of side effects does not appear to be deterring current clients, at least according to Dr David Goldberg, a Manhattan dermatologist and director of the Skin Laser clinic in New York. Goldberg has been offering Botox for more than 10 years and estimates that it makes up 20 per cent of his business. "About 75 per cent of people keep having Botox once they have tried it," says Goldberg of his mainly female client base.

But for those fighting shy of the needle or who would prefer to wait for the results of the FDA investigation, there are plenty of Botox-inspired products on the market - even if the results are not as long-lasting.

For instance, "Glamotox", which contains hyaluronic acid, promises to plump up the skin while you sleep. One recent convert already swears by it. "I'm addicted. It makes me look younger, without having to get Botox or laser," she enthuses.

"Freeze 24/7" is another highly popular moisturiser that professes to freeze wrinkles for up to eight hours, giving the effect of an eye lift - albeit briefly.

Meanwhile, the sale of topical Botox in a gel form - which can be applied to the skin rather than injected - is also a looming reality.

"The intention is to get rid of wrinkles but to preserve facial expression," says Dan Browne, chief executive of Revance, the US-based biopharmaceutical company behind the development. It is currently conducting clinical trials to see whether the gel will have fewer possible side effects than injected Botox.

According to Browne, Botox gel could become a huge chunk of the rapidly growing $14bn facial aesthetic markets. The cool gel will warm up on the skin and, as with Botox, result in visible changes after 24 to 72 hours, with "peak activity" after one week. But the gel would be prescribed and applied by a doctor, meaning you could not just apply it casually at home.

ends

Lifestyle: New York magazine - Polo's Nacho Figueras

Nacho Figueras Explains Polo to Us

Photo: Getty Images

July14, 2008

The Hamptons polo season starts this Saturday, and one of the world’s most famous players, occasional Ralph Lauren model Nacho Figueras, moves into his Sag Harbor summer rental to prepare. (Okay, let's face it, he's the only famous polo player. Why is he the only one anyone ever talks about? Because he's hot? Okay, that's fair.) He’ll be playing in Bridgehampton each Saturday through mid-August. The eternally adorable Argentine explained the appeal of the game to Julie Earle-Levine and answered our ultimate burning questions about polo: Isn't it really just about wearing pastel and drinking Champagne? (Answer: apparently not.)

Does anyone in the U.S. actually follow polo?
New Yorkers are obviously very into baseball and football, but I think that New Yorkers are very open-minded, so they are really into any sports.

But isn’t the polo thing really just about the Hamptons social scene?
No! Polo is a sport that is very underrated and has a lot more to offer. It is a great thing to do with family. I play polo with my son, who is 8 years old. He is learning the sport. It is a very special thing. The bond you have with horses is very, very special. They are wonderful creatures. You cannot be a polo player unless you have special relationship with horses.

And you think the Bridgehampton crowd appreciates that bond?
Of course some people are there to socialize. But after the matches, many people come up and tell me about the game, and I realize they have been following it. When I first got to America, in 1999, I couldn’t understand baseball. It is the same with polo. You need to learn the game and watch it. Then you can appreciate it.

Is it played in places more accessible to normal people than the Hamptons and Greenwich?
You need room, like fourteen acres. There is a polo club in Meadow Brook, Long Island, a club in Greenwich, and a club in Millbrook, upstate New York.

And the crowd seems to be all models, media barons, and hedge-fund guys.
I think polo is for everyone. Polo is for kids, family, and everyone. Polo is a sport that brings together people from all over the world. I mean, a guy like me, from middle-class family in Argentina, I met the Queen and played polo there, and then I spend a lot of time with the grooms in the barns.

ends

Travel: Departures - Explorers Issue

Departures, July/August 2008

By Julie Earle-Levine

Southern Ocean Lodge, Kangaroo Island – ‘Way Down Under’

SOUTH Australia’s Kangaroo Island – home to some of the continent’s most intriguing wildlife – has long been popular with the day-tripping and camping crowd. It never had any luxury accommodation until this spring, however, when James and Hayley Baillie, owners of the chic Capella Lodge on Oz’s Lord Howe Island, opened their new property, Southern Ocean Lodge.

Set between two national parks on the island’s isolated southwest coast and just a 25 minute flight from Adelaide, the property is nestled in the bush and has expansive views of the turquoise blue sea below. Of the lodge’s 25 minimalist rooms, the best is the Osprey Pavilion, with its hand-sculpted, egg-shaped Japanese bathtub and private terrace. From its alfresco daybeds and plunge spa, guests have a prime view of passing kangaroos and whales out at sea.

But those who come to K.I. almost always want to get closer to the wildlife. And so the Baillies partnered with local outfitter Exceptional Kangaroo Island to take visitors to the area’s singular landscape (the animal-spotting is so good here and so easy here that it’s really a shame the lodge doesn’t allow children younger than six). Our stellar and slightly wacky guide, Anthony, aka Ants, who has lived on the island for 18 years, led our small group on a half-day journey, pointing out plump koalas perched on impossibly thin branches, kangaroo mothers hopping about with their in-pouch babes, and even the elusive glossy black cockatoo – or at least evidence thereof, in the form of some nibbled seeds.

On a separate hike, a trip to see Australian fur seals preceded a light lunch served rather glamorously under a white shade tent and accompanied by a local Chardonnay.

Later, a stylish New Yorker who had just arrived at the lodge from Sydney was wondering aloud when she might see a kangaroo. She didn’t have to wait long though. During a twilight tour with lodge staff, glass of champagne in hand, she was suddenly surrounded by dozens of curious ‘rooms and wallabies. “I didn’t really expect to see wildlife like this,’ she said, laughing. But at Southern Ocean Lodge that’s just the kind of champagne wishes and kangaroo dreams experience that guests are in for.

Rates begin at A$900 per night (two night minimum) and include meals. Southernoceanlodge.com.au

Travel: Martha's Vineyard

The Five-Point Weekend Escape Plan
New York magazine

See Modern Martha’s Vineyard

With a spate of revamped hotels and upgraded kitchens, a robust local art scene, and those ever-gorgeous beaches, the summer perennial has rarely looked better.

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• By Julie Earle-Levine

1. Where to Stay

Lambert's Cove Inn & Restaurant (Photo: Courtesy of Inn Shots)

You won’t find four-poster beds, floral wallpaper, or a doily on the toilet at the just-made-over Harbor View Hotel & Resort (from $350) in Edgartown. Though still wrapped in a white picket fence, the largest hotel on the island has officially gone modern: Its 900-square-foot suites are dressed up with black walnut floors, red cedar outdoor showers, and private gardens. Book suite 61 in the Captain Rowley cottage—it has a spacious stone patio—and lie out with some trashy beach reading.

The family-packed Winnetu Oceanside Resort (from $230) near Edgartown is a 250-yard stroll from South Beach, one of the loveliest strips of sand on the island. The resort’s rooms are freshly renovated and unfussy and loaded with domestic accoutrements like toasters, coffee-makers, and microwaves.

Partners Scott Jones and Kell Hicklin bought Lambert’s Cove Inn & Restaurant (from $220) in West Tisbury in January 2005 and immediately did away with the mounted geese and powder-blue décor. Now there are pale gold walls, ivory damask bedding, and plush dressing gowns, along with a heated, saltwater swimming pool and complimentary chairs, umbrellas, and towels for private Lambert’s beach.

Where to Eat

The Outermost Inn (Photo: Courtesy of Outermost Inn)

Brasserie–style Détente , in Edgartown, serves locally raised organic chicken and island-grown veggies in a golden-hued dining room dotted with black-and-white photos of European wineries. If you can’t snag a reservation (this has been one of the island’s most popular restaurants since opening in 2005), go before 7:30 and grab a spot at the seven-seat bar.

Owned by James Taylor’s brother Hugh and his wife Jeanne, the Outermost Inn unsurprisingly attracts a celebrity crowd: Bill Clinton, Carly Simon, Dan Aykroyd, and of course, brother James. But despite the high-profile clientele, the vibe remains low-key and casual, thanks to the meadowy surroundings, the views of the sound, and cooking that makes use of locally grown squash blossoms and arugula, herbs from the Taylors’ own garden, and just-caught striped bass.

Book at least a month ahead in the summer to secure a table at the perennially packed Beach Plum in the fishing village of Menemsha. Though the décor's a bit Pottery Barn, the ocean views and lenient BYOB policy are hard to knock. Bring a bottle of Chenin Blanc and pair it with the pan-seared halibut, served in a shallow bowl with tomato confit and basmati rice.

Island newcomer Mark Goldberg, formerly of Boston’s Mistral restaurant, mans the kitchen at Lure, the Winnetu resort’s nautically themed restaurant, which dishes out sublime Katama Bay oysters and butter-poached local lobster. Parents should request space in the family dining room, where there’s a kid-height buffet, beanbag chairs, and movies in the corner.

What to Do

Aquinnah Beach (Photo: Courtesy of Peter Simon/www.petersimon.com)

Pastel sailing paintings and wicker baskets are still being hawked like crazy in the Vineyard, but there’s been a big push to modernize the art and shopping scenes in recent years, especially in Oak Bluffs, where plans are under way to restore a church to house new galleries and live-work artists’ lofts. In the so-called SoHa (for South of the Harbor) district, the new Red Mannequin boutique (93 Dukes County Ave.; 508-693-2858) is stocked with French designer duds for kids and bright bead necklaces. Next door at Pik-Nik (99 Dukes County Ave.; 508-693-1366), you can browse vintage jewelry and art, and just a few doors down, the Dragonfly Gallery features works by locals like Renee Balter, known for her striking monoprint illustrations of island landmarks. The Alison Shaw Gallery is a great spot to pick through coffee-table books and fine-art prints, while the new hastings in the alley displays Vineyard stalwarts like Ron Hall, who shoots hauntingly vibrant landscape photos, and Rick Hoffman, who creates thickly layered abstract paintings.

Of course, it’s never all about shopping, not when there are such stunning beaches around. Head to the public strand at Aquinnah, off Moshup Trail, before the afternoon crowds arrive. After a few hours playing in Aquinnah’s clean, calm surf, dust the sand off with a hike along the mile-long base of Gay Head Cliffs, the island’s much-photographed, brilliantly colored formations, which lead directly up to picturesque Aquinnah Lighthouse. Skip the daytime tour and return on weekend nights, when the lighthouse stays open late for viewings of seriously beautiful sunsets.

Insider's Tip

Lobster-roll Fridays at Grace Episcopal Church. (Photo: From left, courtesy of Susan Safford and Danielle Zerbonne/Martha's Vineyard Times)

Martha’s Vineyard is admittedly packed with tourists in the summer, but there are at least two places where you won’t see any of them. Che's Lounge (38 Main St.; 508-693-8555), hidden in an alley off Main Street in Vineyard Haven, is a locals-only spot, though that doesn’t mean visitors can’t stop in for nighttime poetry slams and salsa-dancing sessions. And on Friday evenings from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., Vineyarders gather at Grace Episcopal Church (Woodlawn Ave. at William St.; 508-693-0332) in Vineyard Haven, to chow down on delicious lobster rolls, listen to live bands, and swap fishing stories. A roll, chips, and drink, served in the church’s parish hall, will set you back $13.

5. An Oddball Day

Mansion House Inn & Spa (Photo: Courtesy of Julia Cumes)

The island has dozens of trails to explore, but the local favorite is Great Rock Bight, off North Road, where hikers scamper up into heavily wooded hills for stunning views of the Aquinnah Lighthouse and the Elizabeth Islands. Go in the late afternoon and pack a bottle of wine and snacks. There are few signs or markings, but it’s popular enough that you’re guaranteed to bump into an islander who can steer you toward the stairs that lead down to a remote, sandy cove. After your hike, slip into a lightweight cotton robe at the Mansion House Inn & Spa at Vineyard Haven. The Moshup Mud Wrap uses chunks of the Aquinnah cliffs mined through a “hunting-and-gathering” permit from the local Wampanoag Indian tribe. Wind down with some of the spa’s licorice root and peppermint tea, or indulge at the inn’s Zephrus restaurant with the “chocoholics platter” of chocolate strawberries and cake.

Related Links

The Martha’s Vineyard Times is filled with news about boating slips, fishing trips, and tales of overboard yachtsmen.

Martha’s Vineyard Online offers up good tips for visitors and virtual tours of places to stay.

Listen to the sounds of the island, as captured by MVYRadio.

Weekend FT: Dinosaur Designs

'Paintings can be like views'

Weekend FT:

By Julie Earle-Levine

May 31 2008

Louise Olsen is one of the designers behind jewellery and homeware collection Dinosaur Designs. She is inspired by artists such as sculptor Henry Moore and painter Jackson Pollock but also looks to her immediate surroundings for ideas and finds them often at her home in Bronte beach, a seaside suburb of Sydney. She is the daughter of John Olsen, the renowned Australian landscape artist. Her husband and business partner, Stephen Ormandy, is also an accomplished painter.

Do you have many childhood memories of places you lived?

Yes. I come from a family that travelled a lot, because of the nature of my parents' work. My father and mother are both painters. One of my first memories was living in Portugal in a beautiful stone house. My father was working as a chef in a restaurant to support the family while he painted. Then we lived at Watson's Bay in Sydney in a wonderful weatherboard house that used to rattle in the wind.

Was it near the beach?

Very near. My brother, Tim, who now has an art gallery in Woollahra, Sydney, and I would go down to the beach every morning at 6am to swim before school. My father liked to paint in the living room so whenever you walked into the house it was like one big studio. It smelt of turpentine and oil paint, which was wonderful. That was his space. It was quite a big house, with two storeys but that was my favourite room. We lived there until I was about 10.

Where else did you live?

We went to live in a big artists' colony - Dunmoochin, near Melbourne. Clifton Pugh [the Australian portraitist and landscape artist] had a big house there and we had a mud brick-house in the bush. There was no electricity and a pot-belly oven. It was great, like going back to grass roots. There were emus banging on our windows and kangaroos thumping around.

You also lived in another home in the country?

Yes, my parents wanted to live further in the bush and have large studios for work, so we moved to Dural, north-west of Sydney. My parents designed and built the house, with big sliding doors and verandahs out to the bush. It was a very beautiful place in a valley of angofa trees.

Tell me about your Bronte home.

My husband and I renovated this house for a year. This is a place where we enjoy creating, too. Stephen has a studio and I tend to work a lot at a large table with a view of the sea. Having the beach - seeing whales - is just like watching a moving theatre. It is incredible to see them, to feel their energy. It is never the same. It is so amazing. I love the smell of the sea and the salt.

How important to you is a sense of home?

It is good to have a home base but I always think that nothing is for ever. I will always feel a strong connection with where I live and with the nature of a place because that is something that developed as a child. It is important to me to be in a place where I feel I can work and create. With Dinosaur Designs it doesn't really feel like I am working because I love it so much. The business side is work but the creative side is pure joy.

Tell me about the renovations.

We lived here for eight years before we renovated. It was very different and very dark. We really wanted to work on the light aspect of the house. Being by the sea, we wanted the feeling of opening the house up to that and letting the sea in. There is a whole new storey and we have decks that open out on to the sea.

What is your favourite room in the house?

The open kitchen is lovely to work in. On one side you can look at the sea and on the other is the garden. We have lemon, orange and avocado trees. In six months the Australian native gardenia tree will really take off.

Do you collect art?

Yes, I love it. I have mum and dad's and their friends' work. We have art throughout the house. I think paintings can be like views. I like to collect Australian contemporary art.

What objects do you love at home?

We like to collect different things: one item is a sculpture from Milan, a special way of blowing glass where they pour salt in it, so it looks like bubbles. Another of our rooms has surfboards, aboriginal bark paintings and family photos. I'm fond of a picture of my father and me in the bush.

Your company is very conscious of the environment. Did you think about this when you were renovating your home?

Yes, we are a carbon neutral company. We offset our travel, if we travel, by planting more trees. At home, we have a solar expert guy across the road from us who has sun panels he is testing. If they measure up, we will put a set on our roof.

Any tips when renovating?

Get your house blessed. After the house was done, we had this lady come and she did a special ceremony with sage. She used drums and feathers - but, you know, there is something to it. It felt great afterwards.

Lifestyle: New York's Chinatown

Weekend FT: The allure of the authentic

Published: March 15 2008 00:43

Chinatown in New York is one of the last few authentic neighbourhoods in a city that is always searching for the next “it” place to live. Its core population is about 80,000, of which 55,000 are of Asian lineage. But residential developments and at least one five-star hotel are transforming an area that was first carved out by Chinese immigrants in the mid-18th century.

“The change is daily. It is obvious. It is irreversible,” said Stefan Gerard, who lives in a former factory on the eastern edge of Chinatown. Gerard, co-founder of Gen Art, a not-for-profit arts organisation, says: “There are no loft conversions on our street – yet. It is all still Chinese businesses but one block from us there is a new fashion boutique, Project No 8 (stocking international and local designers), a new restaurant, Bacaro, and the Swedish bar Good World. We all see the writing on the wall.”

Chinatown’s allure has been alive and well for decades, long before the gentrification of bordering SoHo, Nolita, the East Village, Tribeca and Wall Street. Its alleys are meant to be explored on foot. Its stores, selling everything from live crabs, to silk pyjamas, lampshades and rare teas, offer a different kind of shoppers’ paradise. As well as the many Chinese restaurants, there are street stalls piled high with persimmon fruits, ginger and lychees.

So what exactly is coming to Chinatown? Morgans Hotel Group is building a 270-room Mondrian hotel with a bar and restaurant at 150 Lafayette Street, which it expects to open in the second half of 2009.

W Hotels is reportedly eyeing a bank building for a new hotel. On a smaller scale, the Chinatown Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette is being converted into a boutique hotel.

On the residential front, a one-bedroom apartment in a new construction or recently opened building costs $1,150-$1,350 a sq ft, so a decent one-bedroom at 600 to 700 sq ft costs less than $1m. A two-bedroom flat can be bought for just under $1.2m. Ten years ago there were few apartments available to buy because there were not as many conversions or new apartments, only a handful of condominiums, according to Glenn E. Schiller, of the SoHo office of the Corcoran group. Schiller, who has been selling property on the edge of Chinatown for 18 years, said: “As early as three years ago, Chinatown would have been $800 to $900 a sq ft but there has been an appreciation across all of downtown.” In spite of the rapid rise in prices, Chinatown remains extremely good value, he says, and is continuing to develop.

A 30,000 sq ft building, a block north of Canal Street, Chinatown’s main artery, will soon be converted into 14 luxury lofts. The developer is gallerist Max Protetch, whose gallery is known for exhibiting architectural renderings and happens to be one of the first to show Chinese artists. He is betting on Chinatown being the next hip area.

Apartments in his development, which involves converting the old Machinery Exchange built in 1915, will cost from $1.6m for a one-bedroom to nearly $4.5m for a two-bedroom duplex penthouse. Protetch said he looked to Chinatown because he found nothing he liked elsewhere. He fell in love with the building’s arched windows and history. The buyers to date are rich Upper East Siders and foreigners, he says.

Directly opposite Protetch’s building is 123 Baxter, a full­service, 23-unit condominium that shot up three years ago and attracted attention for its “zen spa bathrooms with rainforest showers” and Brazilian cherry floors. A large one-bedroom has been listed for $1.2m.

The big question is whether Chinatown – which started on Mott Street, Park, Pell and Doyers streets, east of the Five Points District, a formerly dangerous slum area depicted in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York – will be able to retain its authenticity.

The conversions have really only been going on in the past two years. The pace of change is conditioned by the fact that many buildings are occupied by rent stabilised and rent controlled tenants who would all need to be moved out in order for them to be converted.

Gershon Adjaye, a broker and property investment adviser with the Gersh Group, doesn’t believe the area will become overrun with condos, as SoHo has. The core has zoning restrictions that prohibit high-rise buildings and he says his Chinese clients own in New York, New Jersey and offshore but never sell their Chinatown properties. “They prefer to keep it in the family. It is not even a case of money.”

He believes the far east end of Chinatown is not an area that developers would go to. “At that point you are so far east and south that you are too far from any major neighbourhood.” But he said if you go north, Chinatown is very attractive.

He predicts there will be more small developments. “Nothing huge scale because even if you get one guy, or one family to sell a building, you need a much bigger footprint, perhaps a whole block to do a very large development.”

Wellington Chen, executive director of Chinatown Partnership, a group that was formed after September 11 to rebuild Chinatown, also questions whether the area, which has been hit hard by fewer tourists and the demise of its garment industry, will become gentrified.

“Most of Chinatown is rent controlled, five-storey walk-ups owned by Chinese or Jewish landlords.” He said these tenement buildings were mostly more than 100 years old and often in poor condition, with bathrooms in the hallways. There is no doorman or parking and only rarely is there a laundry in the building. The buildings are financially supported by ground-floor retail and restaurants that are suffering because fewer tourists are visiting the area, preferring Little Italy or SoHo. “Development is not happening in the core of Chinatown. Speculators have been circling here for years and if there was a soft spot they would have had it by now”.

He predicts that Chinatown will “age out” over time, meaning that older Chinese residents in rent-controlled buildings are dying. Some are moving to more affordable satellite Chinatowns in Queens. The area does not cater for non-Asians, he says. “Try to get a town car to pick you up. Where can you buy organic food? You can’t.”

But Gerard has no plans to move any time soon. “So you can’t buy milk or butter very easily. But you can get 16 different kinds of shrimp paste. We like that.”

end

Travel: T&C Travel, The World's Most Elite Airport Lounges

Passengers Waiting in these Lounges Might Find Themselves Wishing for Delays

By Julie Earle-Levine

The Qantas lounge in Sydney, AustraliaThese days, flying first-class is all about what goes on before the plane takes off, or so it would seem at some of the world's most elite airport lounges.Qantas

Sydney

The look: Created by Australian designer Marc Newson, the 22,066-square-foot lounge resembles the wing of a plane. Curvilinear oak partitions break out ten zones with chocolate- and cream-colored furnishings.

Details: The dining room, with its open kitchen and tables designed by designed by Cappellini, feels like a cool Sydney café. (The menu is devised by chef Neil Perry of Sydney's famed Rockpool restaurant.)

Who: The business crowd, well-dressed families and young fashion designers en route to New York and London for shows.

Services: Hosts will meet you curbside and speed you through customs. They can also book hard-to-get restaurant reservations anywhere in the world.

Superlatives: A sublime day spa using Payot Paris products. The complimentary facials and massages are given in rooms with vertical gardens designed by botanist Patrick Blanc.

—Julie Earle-Levine

Travel: T&C Travel, The Maldives

The Maldives: Prepare for Paradise

These are four sumptuous spots in the Maldives that should not be missed

By Julie Earle-Levine

No matter how many paradises you've been to, nothing quite prepares you for the Maldives, a just-about flat archipelago of 1,190 islands that seem to float on the sapphire Indian Ocean 350 miles southwest of India. Since the tsunami in December 2004, construction has been in overdrive, with a handful of properties debuting and more on the way. Here's your guide to the best of what's new.

For the Scenester

When you see the giant white letter W on a jetty from the window of your seaplane, you know you've arrived at the W Retreat & Spa, on Fesdu Island, a seventy-eight- room resort geared to diving enthusiasts and the design-savvy set. Book one of the Ocean Oasis villas, which sit over the water and whose floors are partly glass. The water view also takes center stage at the Asian-inspired open-air restaurant, where you dine to the sound of the waves as manta rays and turtles swim by. At night, the mostly European crowd grooves to DJ-spun tunes at the underground bar. Villas from $895; 011-960-666-2222; whotels.com.

For the Sybarite

At the Four Seasons Resort at Landaa Giraavaru, the company's second resort in the Maldives, health-conscious guests can indulge in sessions with the resident yogi and in Ayurvedic treatments in one of the top-notch spa's ten pavilions. (Ayurvedic doctors have been brought in from Sri Lanka and Kerala, India.) There are 102 rooms, including thirty thatched-roof Beach Villas, each with a forty-foot lap pool and a sand-bottomed patio on which you can pass idle afternoons atop a daybed or in a traditional Maldivian swing. Al Barakat, an Arabian restaurant, serves Lebanese mezes; at the adjacent Shisha Bar, guests can be found puffing away on water pipes. Rooms from $800; 011-960-660-0888; fourseasons.com.

For the Yactsman

If staying on land and sea appeals to you, book the Rania Experience, on the private Water Garden Island, which will host up to fifteen people. You'll have your own eighty-six-foot yacht with three bedrooms and a Jacuzzi on deck. Visitors can sleep on board or on shore in the three-bedroom villa with open-air bathrooms shaded by palm trees and an entertainment room equipped with board games and DVDs. Your staff will include a chef, a butler and spa therapists. By day, you can play tennis and the ship's captain and diving instructor can take you sailing among the coral reefs, with stops for fishing and snorkeling. After dark, the stargazing is otherworldly. From $10,000 a couple a night, all inclusive; 732-773-8230; raniaexperience.com.

For the Romantic

Expect to see wealthy Europeans and a celebrity clientele when you stay at the One&Only at Reethi Rah, a castaway-style outpost of One&Only Resorts that opened just four months after the tsunami. Pampering begins on arrival, with lemongrass-scented towels and shots of custard-apple-and-lemongrass juice to revive you. The resort's 130 villas are scattered over 109 acres, enabling extreme privacy. Couples can soak in the large stone tubs designed for two or play in the tides at one of the twelve pristine beaches. There are three restaurants, but for a meal that will make you swoon, arrange a picnic at a secluded spot on the beach. Rooms from $1,050; 866-552-0001; oneandonlyresorts.com.

Travel: T&C Travel, Lord Howe Island, Australia

Capella Lodge, Lord Howe Island

Already a vacation paradise, Capella Lodge makes Australia's Lord Howe Island even more appealing.

By Julie Earle-Levine

A sleek new hideaway on Australia's Lord Howe Island, in the South Pacific, makes the UNESCO World Heritage-listed paradise even more appealing. The tiny island, just a two-hour flight from Sydney, is relatively undiscovered and blessed with abundant flora and fauna. Its Capella Lodge is the latest offering from James Baillie, the visionary behind some of Australia's best resorts, including Lizard Island and Bedarra Island.

The nine-suite beach house with a wraparound teak deck and floor-to-ceiling glass windows opened last year, after Baillie bought the existing property and rebuilt it from the ground up. The stylishly spare rooms have shutters that open to views of mountains and an isolated lagoon with golden sand and rolling surf.

By day, guests snorkel in the coral reef or bike on the nearly car-free island. Capella's spa features Aboriginal treatments and is the perfect place to relax after climbing Lord Howe's two volcanic peaks. Try Gower's Foot Therapy, named after one of the mountains: a foot soak and salt scrub followed by a mask of kelp and pepper berry. Take an early-morning yoga class on the beach, and in the evening enjoy the sunset while dining on fresh seafood at Capella's restaurant. From $306 a person daily. 011-61-2-9928-4355; lordhowe.com

Lifestyle: Weekend FT The perfect pair of Jeans

By Julie Earle-Levine

Published: January 12 2008

Weekend FT

It was only a matter of time. Now that denim is a market unto itself – no longer merely a “separate” or a piece of “casual wear” but a multi-million-dollar market full of competing players, global marketers and dedicated websites – comes the rise of the “denim specialist”.

James Leslie, for example, owner of Trilogy in London, a store that offers 15 brands of jeans along with a glass of champagne or wine in a boudoir-like setting, with designer high heels for customers to try with jeans. “The sheer nature of going to a department store is quite intimidating and in-your-face, with huge racks of 20, 30 different styles of jeans,” says Leslie, not to mention the fact that at some stores, sales staff use “jeans language; if you are an expert, fine, but not all customers know what a ‘high-rise skinny’ is, and we explain that”.

“There are so many jean-victims who bought poor denim or look bad,” says Mauro Farinelli, a Savile Row-trained tailor and former denim specialist at Saks Fifth Avenue. “People think, ‘how hard can it be?’. I can fix the gap with a belt, or if they have the biggest arse in the world, they don’t realise that itty-bitty pocket isn’t going to help.”

Now, however, at stores from New York to Los Angeles and London, experts who can match style to body type, and advise on details such as thread count, weave and selvage (the edge of the fabric that doesn’t fray) are proliferating at almost the same rate as new jeans companies.

“People who buy their jeans from department stores or boutiques specialising in mass-market jeans may have no need for a denim specialist,” says Mark Sterne, an image specialist and denim fan. “But I think the more particular the customer is about fit and exclusivity, the more useful a specialist might be.”

Consider the following story from Farinelli. He recalls one customer, a woman in her fifties who was determined to buy a very low-rise pair of jeans, “something her teenage daughter might wear”. He recommended a more sophisticated, flattering style of jean and she reluctantly tried on several. “She ended up looking better than her teenage daughter might. She still looked sexy in a brand other women admire, but not foolish.”

“We have an older clientele who really want to understand what they are buying,” says Kiya Babzani, co-owner of Self Edge, a denim specialist store in San Francisco that sells designer Japanese denim, including a $450 copy of a 1955 Levi’s jean with original Scovill brand zippers bought from dealers in vintage stock. “Most of our clients are deeply passionate about denim and care about what they are wearing.”

“I depend on specialists to research what is available in foreign markets and to tell me about expected shrinkage,” says Sterne.

Yuji Fukushima, co-owner of another specialist jeans store, Blue in Green in Soho, carries more than 10 Japanese denim brands, mainly for men, that he says are impossible to buy in any other one store. For him, specialists provide expertise for “serious” jeans buyers. “I think because we are a very small store, personal relationships are key,” says Fukushima. “If a customer comes into our store, they try to find one pair of jeans they really want. Sometimes we spend hours dealing with this, and help them try on many, many pairs of jeans to find the perfect one.”

“Men might go with something made with a shuttle loom, natural indigo – they’ll pay more for it – or they want to know where the zipper is from, what mill it is from,” agrees Farinelli.

This a reason American Rag, one of the first designer denim stores, trains staff to be knowledgeable about the finest details of every pair of jeans they sell. “A lot of customers want to know why these jeans cost so much,” says Mike Flynn, a spokesman for the store. “I think it is very helpful to have someone who understands denim explaining why certain types of cotton make a good denim, or just understanding that if it is loomed in Japan and made in the US, why that will cost more.”

“People hate shopping for jeans. They don’t really want to go in,” says Farinelli, who will open a new store, called Denim Bar in Manhattan, this year, where the ethos is nightclub, and buyers can have a glass of wine or a cocktail while shopping (he already has two in Washington DC). As he envisions the future, however: “The bartender will be explaining pocket placement, triple stitching, different cuts. A few drinks later, next thing you know, the customer is in Rock & Republic or metallics by 4 Stroke Jeans, a cool new line made in collaboration with Keith Richards’ daughter Theodora.”

And suddenly, he says, they realise: “Jeans shopping is not all that bad.”

......................

Pocketbook

www.blueingreensoho.com

www.denimbaronline.com

www.selfedge.com

www.trilogystores.co.uk

Lifestyle: Weekend FT New Yorkers Do It Better

New Yorkers do it better

Weekend FT
By Julie Earle-Levine

January 5 2008

A small mountain of shopping bags and a coat rack 20-garments deep filled the waiting area at Soho Nails in downtown Manhattan. It was not an unusual scene in this shopping Mecca where women drop in to the popular salon for a quick manicure, pedicure or bikini wax in between hitting the boutiques. But on a recent weekday, the lines were too long, the wait took several hours and the chattering ladies were largely speaking in foreign accents.

Blame the economy. British, European, Japanese and Canadian shoppers are swooping on New York to take advantage of the favourable exchange rate. But they aren't just going for clothes bargains – they are also booking in at hair salons and spas for "half price" treatments. And the spa business is booming as a result. One British woman at Soho Nails, for instance, exclaims her delight at the basic $7 manicure. "It's a steal," she says.

Alexandra Marshall, a Paris-based writer, has just spent Christmas in Los Angeles but had planned the Hollywood-style beauty regime she would undertake on holiday weeks before she arrived. "I was getting manicures and pedicures every other day," she says. "They're impossibly inconvenient and expensive in Paris" – a cry often heard in London too, where many beauty treatments are prohibitively pricey. Salons are not so prolific in the French capital, says Marshall, and there are no walk-ins – a more traditional appointment-only basis operates there. And the prices are more restrictive too with an average price of €35 for a basic manicure and then up to €8 extra to apply polish. "And they don't actually do a great job," says Marshall.

Emily Cohen, founder of Pout Cosmetics, which she has since sold, saves all her beauty treatments for when she is visiting New York for meetings on future projects. "I have my waxing done, my pedicures and manicure. I get it all done and save myself a fortune, plus the treatments are better in New York. Even the little places on the corner in New York offer really stonkingly great manicures. Fifteen bucks and you get quality."

Suki Duggan, owner of Donsuki's hair and beauty salon in Manhattan, says she has noticed many more international clients in the past eight weeks. "A lot of Americans are staying home because of the softer dollar, and their European friends are visiting. They bring in their friends and they are getting everything done here – colour, cut, styling – because it's so cheap here."

But, according to Duggan, a brisk business at her Upper East Side salon is not just as a result of visiting Europeans – it's also being driven by locals. "Many of my New York clients are not doing a weekend to Paris to shop. So they are getting more beauty treatments in New York because they still want to stay chic in a tough economy."

Other stylists and salon owners confirm business has never been better. Europeans don't blink at $600 massages because they feel as though they are only paying as little as half price, says Kim Matheson, a spa consultant. She says spas across the US have been seeing an influx of Europeans. "We are also seeing a lot of women from Asia, South and Central America getting treatments here."

Camille Meyer, of TriBeCa Medspa, agrees that travel-savvy New Yorkers are skipping weekend shopping jaunts in Europe. "No one is travelling right now, and everyone else is travelling here. We get a lot, especially from London." In recent weeks, those visits have been for Botox shots or one-off treatments such as dermal fillers. "Botox takes 14 days to really kick in, so they get it just once [in a trip]. We are also seeing a lot of Canadians and Japanese who might get skin resurfacing. They just walk around Manhattan with red skin for 24 hours but they don't care because they are on holidays."

Locals, of course, are still spending but some are doing it a little more cautiously. "They are buying laser facelifts. Usually they buy them in a package of three but in recent weeks they would rather pay each time," says Meyer. Even wealthy clients, who previously had no problem writing a $10,000 cheque, now just want to pay for single treatments. "They are saying, 'My husband will kill me if he sees a large amount [on the statement] all at once.'" Ellen Sackoff, founding partner of Cornelia Day Resort – famous for its customised facials – says her American clients are also travelling less but are spending more. One woman who once travelled to exotic locales with her husband is staying at home and making the spa her away time.

"Customers who would buy a $5,000 handbag still feel guilt associated with it," she says. So rather than opt for a new seasonal accessories fix, she says "now they are putting money into beauty and wellness. They realise it is good for them."

Regardless, for Sackoff, out-of-towners are still the main ones driving the business. While the average spent by her weekend clients is $350, those coming from Europe are parting with anything from $800 to $1,000 dollars a go. "They feel like they are getting a great deal. People don't care about prices. We raised them recently and no one blinked."

..............................

Reach for the spas

Soho Nails, 458 Broadway, 3rd floor; tel: +1 212-475 6368
Donsuki's Salon, www.donsukisalon.com
TriBeCa Medspa, www.tribecamedspa.com
Cornelia Day Resort, www.cornelia.com

Lifestyle: Portfolio A Wine for All Seasons

Portfolio

by Julie Earle Levine
Jan 7 2008

Wine director Richard Hales spends $2 million a year purchasing the bottles that make the list at New York's Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Photograph by: Robert Caplin

Job title: Wine director

On a recent Saturday morning in December, Richard Hales was at Christie's auction house in New York to bid on vintage madeiras—massive, full-bodied, and incredibly old wines with high alcohol content and prices to match. Madeiras have recently been attracting attention as investments and as stories (some are almost 200 years old), and Hales, the wine director for the Mandarin Oriental in New York, spent nearly $40,000 at the auction to buy about 15 bottles of the rare wine.

"These are wines that have been sitting in the cellars of wealthy families," Hales says. "They are very, very good, and everyone wants them."

As wine director, Hales' job is to study, find, and purchase wines for the hotel's restaurant, bar, and lounge; room service; and banquet facilities. He typically spends about $2 million a year at auction and through wine dealers to pick the wines that will be served at the hotel. (Read his top tips for building your own wine collection.)

Hales keeps about 1,000 wines on his various lists for the hotel and can recall each one according to style, flavor, alcohol content, and acidity so that he can suggest the perfect pairings, whether it be with foie gras or finger food. As a sommelier, his style is to be casual and conversational with the hotel's guests. "Not every table requires so much information, and as a good sommelier, you must read your guest," he says. Hales also always encourages his guests to give a price range for what they're looking to spend.

A typical day starts at 10 a.m. when he checks on deliveries and has meetings with staff, followed by lunch and dinner service and then an hour of updating his wine lists, studying new wines and regions. During slow periods at his restaurants, usually in April and midsummer, Hales travels to do research and tastings, typically splitting his time between the new and old wine regions.

Hales' passion for wine grew from an obsession with food and his original career path as a chef. After studying at New York's French Culinary Institute in 1997, he worked his way up the food chain at New York gastronomic centers La Grenouille and Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Vong, eventually rising to sous-chef at Vong several years later. From there, he moved on to Miami's Azul, an Asian-inflected Mediterranean restaurant located in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where he found himself in the role of wine connoisseur when the sommelier left abruptly in 2002. He became wine director for the Mandarin in New York in December 2006.

Hales compares his work as a wine director and sommelier to his previous job as a chef; both positions have required him to assemble the right ingredients to fashion something memorable.

"At this level, dining is about the experience as much as it is about eating," Hales says. "Wine is part of that experience, and it is more than just satisfying a thirst. It is a discovery."



Wine director Richard Hales shares his best advice for assembling a top-notch, highly personalized wine collection.

Companies that hire them: Luxury-hotel groups and restaurants. Typically, a wine director oversees multiple outlets in a hotel or restaurant group, with one or more sommeliers on staff.

How to find out about openings: Word of mouth, since it is a small world. There are also job listings on the Court of Master Sommeliers' website. This is the American chapter of an international group whose mission is to improve standards in the beverage industry.

How much you can earn: Between $60,000 and $250,000 a year, depending on the size of the company and the scope of the position. At the lower end, the job would most likely be at a single restaurant, while at the top, a national operation.

Useful skills: No specific background is necessary but communication and organizational skills, a fine-tuned palate, and a knowledge of wine history, vintages, and current wine trends is crucial. Wine directors must also travel and taste wine regularly.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: The Court of Master Sommeliers says it's likely that each five-star hotel and upscale restaurant in the U.S. has its own wine director, putting the number in the low thousands, but there are no official data.

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Weekend FT: How Hillary Wears The Trousers

How Hillary wears the trousers

Weekend FT

By Julie Earle-Levine

December 29 2007 02:00

Ah, the travails of being the leader of the pack. As Hillary Clinton heads into the Democratic presidential primary as the frontrunner, the mud is being slung fast and furious, and her clothes are getting a splattering. But is it because she is the biggest target around, or is it because - as she e-mailed in a note to supporters in response to some observations about a low-cut black jumpers she wore - she's female?

"Frankly, focusing on women's bodies instead of their ideas is insulting," she wrote, and not long after she could be found on ABC's The View commiserating with Barbara Walters about the fact that female candidates were unfairly analysed over their clothes. Truth is, however, she's going to have to get used to it. So says Edith Mayo, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History and designer of the current Smithsonian First Ladies exhibition, which aims to place these women in the context of their husbands' administrations. As Mayo can attest, American First Ladies' wardrobes have always been an obsession. One can only presume that's even more true for first female presidential candidates.

And so Clinton is being scrutinised for her fashion sense - or lack of it. She wears unflattering trouser suits, floral-print blazers and uninspiring heels, her critics say; she looks "boring" and "cold". "People have realised that fashion is not Hillary's main interest," says Valerie Steele, director and curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. "She just doesn't care."

Yet for world leaders, having an impact on fashion is inevitable. Is Clinton overreacting in dulling-down her appearance? Should she be harnessing the power of dress to project her political identity?

Mayo predicts that if elected, President Clinton will do more or less what Margaret Thatcher did: "wear some sort of power suit rather than strive for fashion elegance - except perhaps at state dinners or balls." Similarly, Michael Pick, author of Be Dazzled!: Norman Hartnell: Sixty Years of Glamour and Fashion, a new book on the British designer who helped to shape the image of various royals, believes that Clinton "could work with a few designers to transform her image, much in the way Thatcher did".

After all, as Mayo says, Americans want their First Ladies to look current, but not necessarily to be fashion leaders or take risks with their wardrobes. "I think they want them to be wearing clothes that are not dowdy and are currently fashionable," says Mayo, "but unless you are Jackie Kennedy, or a former movie star like Nancy Reagan, voters don't usually want women in high fashion."

"In Italy and France women leading the country need to be wearing fashionable - even sexy - clothes," agrees Steele, but in the US, "Women are not supposed to flaunt their sexuality."

There are, of course, tricks to getting noticed in a positive way. As Pick points out, in the 1950s Hartnell created a more youthful image for Queen Elizabeth II by using stronger colours and patterns, while for the Queen Mother the idea was to make her look larger and of greater stature, so a draped and waist-tied pastel dress might be offset by a feathered hat and triple row of pearls.

Clinton's trouser suits, although they have drawn considerable attention, may not actually be the modern-day answer. According to Steele, the idea of a woman wearing trousers has connotations of her stepping outside her appropriate, ordained place in the universe - even though women have been wearing them since the 1920s, and wearing them to work since the 1970s.

"Clinton's critics will say she is wearing the trousers - that she is too powerful," says Steele. "I've [even] heard women complain that she is too ambitious. [But] don't you think anyone running for president should be?"

New York Times Travel: Brisbane, Australia

Next Stop | Brisbane

Julie Earle-Levine
November 4, 2007

Once Just a Stopover, an Australian City Grows Up

ONCE just a stopover for tourists en route to either the Great Barrier Reef or the beaches on the Sunshine and Gold Coasts, the eastern Australian city of Brisbane has emerged as an alluring destination in its own right.

The New York Times

Returning recently to the city where I grew up and left 15 years ago for fast-paced Sydney, I found Brisbane to be almost unrecognizable. No longer a large country town, the capital of Queensland is now Australia's fastest growing city, and a plethora of new cafes, bars and shops, not to mention a beautiful new modern art gallery, add up to the kind of place that you could easily spend several days exploring.

Once known as BrisVegas (thanks to a casino and glitzy night life in the 1980s), the city is bisected by the Brisbane River, which winds its way to Moreton Bay, past former wool stores that have morphed into luxury apartments, and historic Queenslander houses built on stilts to catch the breeze. A former power plant sitting on the water's edge is now a performance center. Catamaran ferries ply the river, taking locals to work and to weekend farmer's markets.

The city's newest attractions are the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) and the just-renovated Queensland Art Gallery, which sit next to each other on the last bend of the river on Stanley Place in South Bank Parklands. GoMA is Australia's largest modern-art gallery, with works by Australian and international artists including the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor and the German artist Katharina Grosse. Enormous windows frame spectacular city views, and the gallery, which adjoins a brand-new State Library, has its own cinema complex and children's art center. The Queensland Gallery's new additions include a sweeping glass entry and the Historical Asian Gallery.

The museums (www.qag.qld.gov.au) can be reached by strolling down the River Walk, a floating walkway that links the New Farm area to the central business district and runs past South Bank Parklands, an expansive beach and swimming lagoon right on the river overlooking the city.

The museum scene in Brisbane doesn't ignore history. For perspective on Brisbane's role as Pacific headquarters for the allied forces in World War II, visit the MacArthur Museum Brisbane, at 201 Edward Street, dedicated to General Douglas MacArthur, who made Brisbane his base for two years. In those years, millions of Americans passed through the quiet Australian backwater that many thought would change after the war. Instead, central Brisbane almost closed down as a dwindling population moved to the suburbs.

Now, areas like Fortitude Valley, a formerly gritty area known as “sin city,” have transformed themselves. The Emporium Hotel just opened on the site of a former bus depot with its own upscale shops and restaurants. Guests can take a dip in the 50-foot saltwater rooftop pool with views of the city and Story Bridge, and recline on loungers, separated by billowing bronze-colored silk drapes. Don't be surprised to see brilliantly hued rainbow lorikeets in frangipani trees outside the hotel, or hear a kookaburra laughing its head off.

Just a few blocks away is trendy James Street, a former industrial zone, now home to designer stores like Sass & Bide, at 46 James Street, where you'll find jeans and pretty dresses by the internationally renowned designers Sarah-Jane Clarke and Heidi Middleton, who grew up in Brisbane. The nearby, T. C. Beirne building on the Brunswick Street Mall features Queensland designers including Gail Sorronda, whose monochromatic dresses are favored by Gwyneth Paltrow.

At Salvage, 12 Byres Street, Newstead (www.salvage.com.au), you can shop for everything from chandeliers to gorgeous French glass jewelry boxes and pearl necklaces.

Back at the Emporium complex, check out Depot, an open-air cafe that caters to a fashionable crowd. An extensive, mostly Australian wine list offers wine by the glass at the mosaic-tiled bar. At Cru Wine Bar & Cellar, guests sit near the street in a chic open-air restaurant. An antique crystal chandelier hangs over a solid onyx bar that serves up Pacific oysters.

The outdoors is also close at hand at Watt Modern Dining in the arts-theater complex known as the Brisbane Powerhouse, which once generated electricity for the city's now defunct tram system. Order the chili, salt and pepper squid or fresh whiting and big, fat chips (fries) and dine overlooking the river, its golden cliffs and mansions.

“It used to be unheard of in Brisbane for anything to be open past 10:30 p.m., but not anymore,” said Paolo Biscaro, an owner of Beccofino at 10 Vernon Terrace, in the Teneriffe district. “The city has grown up,” said Mr. Biscaro, who moved to the city from Melbourne three years ago. On a recent Friday night, his restaurant was packed with young couples, champagne glasses in hand, waiting to be seated. Diners sat on orange chairs and devoured thin crust pizzas with generous servings of thinly sliced prosciutto, mozzarella and oregano.

Another dining concept — communal dining — is making an appearance in Brisbane, at places like Cirque Cafe, which offers intriguing interpretations of ethnic fare, like Moroccan lamb burgers with mint yogurt or pearl barley salad with roasted pumpkin and feta, dill, spinach and pepitas. Communal dining wasn't immediately embraced by locals, according to Vaughan Kelly, co-owner of Cirque Cafe in New Farm, and another Melbournite who came north. “Some would see it and turn on their heels. Now there is a line to get in.”

At night, Fortitude Valley heats up. While bands in Sydney and Melbourne complain of fewer venues, Brisbane roars ahead. At Bowery Bar on Ann Street, for instance, staff in preppy white linen shirts and thin black ties serve cocktails to an over-25 crowd listening to live jazz.

Live bands also play at the Breakfast Creek Hotel, famous for its steaks. Years ago, this was where I shared farewell drinks with friends, before my departure to Sydney. It was seedier then, with the smell of stale beer wafting up from the floor. Now, after a $4 million makeover, a completely new bar called Substation No. 41 has opened, attracting a stylish crowd, the kind of new Brisbane denizens who look as if they are here to stay.

VISITOR INFORMATION

GETTING THERE

Flights from New York to Brisbane often require two stops. From Los Angeles, nonstop flights are available on Qantas Airlines (www.qantas.com) five days a week; daily service will begin on March 30, 2008. Round-trip fares for travel in November start at $1,325.

Public transport is excellent. CityCat ferries (www.brisbane.qld.gov.au) run from the University of Queensland in the southwest to Brett's Wharf in the northeast from 5:50 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Daily tickets, which cover unlimited ferries, trains and buses, start at 4.60 Australian dollars, or about $4 at 1.14 Australian dollars to the U.S. dollar.

WHERE TO STAY

The Emporium Hotel (61-73-253-6999; 1000 Ann Street, Fortitude Valley, www.emporiumhotel.com.au) has doubles from 295 Australian dollars.

The recently opened Saville South Bank hotel (61-73-305-2500, 161 Grey Street, South Bank; www.savillehotelgroup.com) is a short walk to the Queensland Performing Arts Complex, the State Art Gallery and museums. Studio apartments with kitchenettes from 398 Australian dollars.

WINING AND DINING

Open-air venues include Depot, (61-73-666-0188; 31/1000 Ann Street; www.thedepot.com.au), which offers a variety of Australian wines, from 7.50 Australian dollars a glass. At Cru Wine Bar & Cellar (61-73-252-2400, 22 James Street, Fortitude Valley; www.crubar.com), dinner for two is 80 dollars.

At Belle Epoque (61-73-852-1500; 1000 Ann Street, Fortitude Valley; www.labelleepoque.com.au) the atmosphere is eerily like New York's Balthazar — even down to the floor tiles, banquets and mirrors. Sample a delicious “flat white,” Australia's version of a latte, for 3 Australian dollars.

The Lark, a new cocktail bar in a colonial-style Queensland cottage in Paddington, has cocktails like the Songbird, a delicious mix of citron vodka, honey, grapes and prosecco for 12 dollars (61-73-369-1299, 1/267 Given Terrace, www.thelark.com.au).

At Cirque Cafe in New Farm (61-73-254-0479; 618 Brunswick Street), lunch for two is 40 Australian dollars. At Beccofino (61-73-666-0207, 10 Vernon Terrace, Teneriffe), dinner for two is 80 Australian dollars.

Lifestyle: UK Vogue: New York versus London

UK Vogue, GQ, Tatler, House & Garden Living, September 2007

Julie Earle Levine reports

Picture this. Five hundred of the wealthiest names in New York dancing en-masse in the lobby of a bank on Wall Street. Beyonce is singing on stage surrounded by lithe models, billionaires with bald spots reflecting whirling spotlights, mixed with A-list celebrities. Waiters dart through the crowd with magnums of Krug and Dom Perignon. The Cipriani Wall Street Concert series raises millions of dollars for charity. But there is more beneath the gilded surface of this soiree.

It is never formally announced, but underneath the din, the powerful engine of real estate is purring. Somewhere between the scampi alla thermidor and roasted double lamb chop, concert guests (which have included Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Lopez and Margherita Missoni, among others) may be offered a chance to see the $1-million-plus condos upstairs in this converted building, and hopefully, buy one. By the end of the evening, several Cipriani Club Residences at 55 Wall Street apartments have been scooped up.

The high-end-real-estate frenzy in New York is also being played out in London, albeit in a more reserved, less glamorous manner. When considering two of the most dynamic cities in the world, the luxury property market is bound to be a cocktail of money, glamour, power, and sex. New York’s social elite and previously discreet Brits have never been so consumed with property. At dinner parties in downtown SoHo lofts, Upper East Side mansions and Kensington apartments, the conversation is peppered with juicy details on bidding wars. Who is buying where and at what price – it went for how much?!

‘The Brits talk about little else at dinner parties other than house prices. It would never happen at a French dinner party, but it happens here now all the time’ says Rupert de Forges, partner at Knight Frank LLP, which has about 200-million pounds worth of apartments and 300 million pounds in houses listed in the Knightsbridge office alone.

So what changed? Both New York and London are awash in cash, from equity markets as well as wealthy foreign investors. Hedge-fund money has fuelled the very top of both cities’ property markets.

In New York, Prudential Douglas Elliman sold $11.7 billion of real estate last year, while the other top brokerage, Corcoran, currently has $8.4 billion in listings. And in prime central London, agents have 5.5 billion pounds of residential property listed (as of 18 May) according to the trade website www.lonres.com.

In Manhattan, deals are quietly closed at the Four Seasons Grill Room, or over an espresso at downtown Cipriani’s restaurant, where brokers such as Paolo Zampolli, who owns ID Model Management and now is also a realtor, dine with potential clients. On a recent weekday, Arkie Busson, the French financier and former partner of Elle Macpherson, sauntered across to say hello to Zampolli, who later speculated he was in town to buy a house. He suspected it was through Sotheby’s, not his agency. He was not happy.

Through their various brokers, the city’s power menagerie compete aggressively for properties. ‘If someone wants a certain penthouse, condo or townhouse they simply get it any way they can – and they pay’, said Raphael de Niro, who has his own group with Prudential Douglas Elliman and is the son of the actor, Robert. Many jump in early before construction starts. Prices for luxury condos in some buildings have jumped 20 per cent since they were sold off-plan.

Just how much have prices for a gorgeous townhouse shot up in Manhattan? Nanette Lepore, a fashion designer, bought her five-and-a-half storey, 20ft-wide-and-60ft-deep brownstone in the primeWest Village district for $6.5 million in 2004 and had it completely redecorated. Then the market shot up even higher. Her property is now valued at $12 million.

On average, New York is around $3,000 to $4,000 per square foot, while London is the most expensive property market in the world at $4,000 to 6,000 per square foot. Jonathan Hewlett, director of Savills London, says he has never been busier. ‘Everyone wants to be here. The security is good, trust in financial markets is good and there is a limited supply of prime stock.’ Prices in London’s prime time market have jumped 30 per cent in the last calander year, and more than tripled since 1997.

The top end for London is 10 million pounds. Who is lining up? De Forges says the Russians represent a good quarter of that market. At the 20-million-plus pounds mark tends to be those from the Middle East, Russian, or former Soveit states, Australia and the occasional Englishman. The best properties in Mayfair, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington/South Kensington and Notting Hill have seen a 40 to 50 per cent growth in the past year, he said. Wealthy locals are competing with and exotic international mix for the best properties- French, Brazilian, Spanish, Cubans and Americans. But the biggest buyers in the first half of this year? ‘They are from Kazakhstan and Iceland. It is extraordinary.’

Hewlett puts the former Soviet states at the top end of the market. ‘It is the same as in the 1980s, when lots of Hong Kong, Chinese and South-East Asian investors were buying properties in London, and for their families. When you come with 5-10-million pounds and you find nothing, well sometimes budgets can double.’ Savills sold 1.7-billion pounds worth of property last year alone.

Meanwhile, the spate of new buildings in New York (more so than in London where building is more restricted) is creating hot new areas and stealing the show from upmarket neighbourhoods such as the Upper East Side. ‘The financial district is where all the money is going’, says Michael Shvo, and founder of SHVO, a marketer of condo projects all around the USA, citing the Armani building and the new W Hotel residences. Gucci, Tiffany, Hermes are on their way. ‘Wall Street will be the next Madison Avenue, as will Manhattan’s Far West waterfront.

The property boom in both cities is all about ‘lifestyle’, especially in New York where skyscrapers come with big names- Donald Trump’s new SoHo building, Jade Jagger’s apartments in Chelsea (for YOO with Philippe Starck), hotelier Ian Schrager’s first-ever residential properties, Gramercy Park and 40 Bond Street.

Ivanka Trump, Donald’s daughter, is selling Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium, a new 45-storey hotel on Spring Street that will be four times as tall as anything else in SoHO. It will have an Olympic size swimming pool and world-class spa. ‘You can’t have a luxury building now without these amenities. What used to be okay in the 1980s, such as a 9ft ceiling height, is now 10ft ceiling height minimum plus the sort of amenities you would normally find in a hotel’ says Ivanka, a former model whose uniform of construction boots with Yves St Laurent suits sums up the newfound glamour of this business.

At the Cipriani dinner, one woman likened an apartment she had just seen upstairs to a beautiful jewel box. ‘It is perfect. Everything is completely built in. The refrigerators are completely hidden. There’s African wood. I’m in love with the sinks, they are so stylish.’ But anyone shopping for jewel boxes may be disappointed. The 100-unit building is nearly sold out.

ends

Travel: T+L Australia: Architecture in Chicago

WHERE’S WALTER?

CHICAGO

By Julie Earle-Levine

IT MAY BE A RAINY WEEKDAY IN OAK PARK, a serene, perfectly coiffed suburb almost 18 kilometres west of downtown Chicago, but visitors are undaunted by the steamy showers and grey skies. Toting umbrellas and wearing backpacks, their iPod audio tours are at the ready as they crisscross excitedly from one leafy residential street to the next, snapping photos and marking maps. They have been drawn here, from all over the world, by the houses designed by their hero, Frank Lloyd Wright, the self-described genius of American architecture.

Oak Park has had more than its share of pioneers. Ernest Hemingway was born and spent his early days here, and another writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, called Oak Park home. But it was Wright who left the most visible legacy – the 25 buildings he designed. More than 100,000 Frank Lloyd Wright architecture devotees flock annually to Oak Park to visit one of the most recognised collections of the late 19^th- and 20^th- century American residential architecture. The buildings include his home, studio and Robie House, in nearby Hyde Park, considered by the American Institute of Architects to be one of the 12 most significant buildings of the 20^th century.

But I had come to Oak Park with the intention of tracing the work of another architectural master-mind, a man whose American work has perhaps not received the recognition it deserves. Walter Burley Griffin, the architect and landscape designer best known for designing Australia’s capital, Canberra, grew up in Oak Park. Later, he would work for Frank Lloyd Wright at the Home and Studio, the centre of Wright’s creative hub.

As an Australian living in New York, I wondered what it would be like to explore Griffin’s work in Chicago, starting at Wright’s headquarters. I was intrigued to learn that it was suspected that some of the buildings in Oak Park credited to Wright were actually designed by Griffin.

Of course, no visitor to Chicago should miss the tour of Wright’s Home and Studio, but Griffin fans may be disappointed. Inside the studio, I asked my guide about Griffin. He shrugged his shoulders. “Griffin who?” “Walter Burley Griffin.” I replied. “He worked for Wright.” The guide looked at me blankly. I explained that Griffin designed Canberra, and has also been credited with developing the L-shaped floor plan, the carport and the first use of reinforced concrete. The guide nodded his head slowly, “Oh yes, a woman.” An architecture student from Belgrade interrupted and brought any Griffin-related conversation to an abrupt end. It was as if the other architects from the Prairie School, the late-19^th and early 20^th-century architectural style that Griffin and others engaged in, never existed.

Henry Kuehn, a Griffin enthusiast and volunteer with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, is not surprised. “For many Frank Lloyd Wright followers, there was no one else,” he says. “They are so enamoured with him, they talk as though he is still alive –as if they think he will walk through the door –while Griffin went unrecognized.”

What our guide does not tell our group was that the studio, a stunning room with a two-storey octagonal drafting room and natural light that pours from the roof skylight onto half a dozen desks, was the scene of bitter arguments between Wright and Griffin.

Decorated with Japanese prints and miniature casts of classical sculptures, the studio was an “informal, pleasant place to work” according to H. Allen Brooks, author of The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries. But according to others, tempers had simmered. Wright was a controlling, jealous boss. Griffin was serious about his work, but quiet and sweet-natured with a preference for floppy black bow ties.

I wonder how the disagreements had played out in this serene setting. There had reportedly been many, the most spectacular when Wright left Griffin in charge of the studio when he traveled to Japan. On his return, Wright accused Griffin of overstepping his responsibilities and inserting his own ideas and plans. Wright, who was notoriously careless with money, had borrowed money from Griffin for his trip. On his return, he tried to repay Griffin with Japanese prints. The man who would go on to design Canberra was outraged. He later discovered the prints had far less value than Wright had suggested. After Griffin left Wright’s studio to set up his own practice in 1906, the two men never spoke again.

Kuehn believes Griffin may have even overshadowed Wright’s success had he stayed in America instead of moving to Australia in 1914 after winning the competition to design the country’s capital. Wright was said to be furious to see his former employee featured on the front page of The New York Times for winning the Canberra competition.

Even though Canberra’s designer never built any houses in Oak Park - Wright had the market cornered – Kuehn, who has agreed to accompany me on my Walter Burley Griffin quest, believes Griffin’s trademarks can be found in Wright houses in Oak Park and other areas. He’s not alone in his opinion. Paul Kruty, president of the Walter Burley Griffin Society and Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois, supports that view. “There are specific houses that have Griffin’s trademarks, houses that Wright was credited with – but Wright would never admit that,” he says. “Wright often changed the dates on his drawings or just denied it.”

A short stroll from Wright’s Home and Studio on a self-guided walking tour is Wright’s Beachy House (238 Forest Avenue). Some people believe it has Griffin’s trademarks – big piers at the corner, blocks and a gable roof. “Beachy is known as the Wright house but if Griffin didn’t have a hand in it, it certainly has Griffin’s trademarks. I suspect Griffin was heavily involved,” says Kuehn. “Wright was a pretty big self-promoter. He would say he crafted fire and water if you listened.” Tim Loftus, an architectural historian and Griffin fan who has documented Griffin’s work on his website www.prairiestyles.com, agrees: “Beachy House has Griffin written all over it.”

Kruty also believes Wright was heavily influenced by Griffin. The Mrs Thomas H. Gale House in Oak Park (6 Elizabeth Court) is another famous Wright house which features horizontal planes that hover, and a flat roof.

Its abstract nature and geometrical shapes stand out in a street of Queen Anne-style houses and apparently, at the time, some of the neighbours hated it.

It is considered to be one of Wright’s most unusual styles here, although there is some debate about whether it was built in 1904 or 1909. “When everyone thought the Gale house was 1904, they would compare it to Griffin’s Mary Bovee house,” says Kruty. Plans for the Bovee house, in the suburb of Evanston, were completed by November 1907and it was constructed the following year. Wright fans will say Griffin’s house was clearly derived from Wright’s work, but it wasn’t, Kruty says. “I don’t actually have proof, of course, that Wright knew the building before he designed the Gale house, but it is very, very likely that he did, for a variety of reasons.”

Strolling in Oak Park, where Griffin grew up (he was born in the Chicago suburb of Maywood in 1876, the son of an insurance salesman), it is easy to imagine him being passionate about gardening and landscape design. The lawns are spectacular rolling green carpets, with perfectly pruned hedges and trees that seem to have been planted for each house. As a young man, Griffin was considering landscape design but decided to study architecture and in 1899 received a degree from the architecture program at the University of Illinois. He then worked as a draftsman for two years at Steinway Hall in Chicago, where a number of young architects shared office space. Among them were Wright and many others who would become important Prairie School designers. These architects, let by Wright, were heavily influenced by Louis Sullivan, an influential architect often referred to as “father of modernism”. Their style was marked by horizontal lines, flat roofs with broad, overhanging eaves, solid construction and craftsmanship.

Instead of opening his own practice, Griffin joined Wright’s studio- where the Prairie School style would flourish – as an associate from 1901 to 1906.

Kruty believes neither man knew what he was in for. “Griffin wanted to be a partner but Wright was not the kind of person who could ever have a partner. He had no respect for individual talents except to use them.” By 1914 Griffin had left Chicago for good, embarking on the ultimately controversial task of creating a national capital for Australia and later designing the Sydney harbourside suburb of Castlecrag.

To view one of Griffin’s first significant architectural commissions, we drive 20 minutes’ west of Oak Park to the William H. Emery House in Elmhurst. On the journey, Kuehn praises Griffin’s wife, Marion Mahony, who was the second woman to graduate in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (She also worked for Wright.) A highly regarded draftsman, illustrator and furnishings designer, she is believed by many to have been crucial to Griffin’s successful Canberra bid. The Griffins went on to design more than 350 building, landscape and urban design projects, as well as interiors and furniture.

Elmhurst streets are wide and the houses large, but none commands attention like the Emery House (281 South Arlington Avenue), with its vast landscaping. The visitor is greeted by what Kuehn says is “a pure Griffin house” in deep red brick that rests squarely on the ground, with roof lines that soar. And while there are no public tours, twice a year the house is opened to members of the Walter Burley Griffin Society courtesy of the home’s owner, Tom Zusag. He bought the house in 1998 and worked on it for two years before livingi n it with his family.

“This is the quintessential Walter Burley Griffin house. The biggest and the best he built,” says Kuehn, in awe, as if seeing it for the first time (he has seen it a handful of times, both inside and out). Griffin designed it when he was 25 years old. The wood-framed windows, four massive brick piers and gabled roof are distinctly Griffin. Zusag meets us outside, sweating slightly as if he has been cleaning, but once inside it becomes obvious that he may just have been climbing the many staircases in this enormous property.

Griffin received the commission for Emery House in 1901-02. At the time, Wright had been overseeing the nearby F.B. Henderson House, explains Zusag. Wright’s bid for Emery had been rejected because he was considered “too uncompromising” and the commission went to Griffin, whose parents’ house was nearby. Griffin would design the house as a wedding gift from William H. Emery’s father. He would also design, in 1909, the William B. Sloane House just down the road at 248 South Arlington Avenue. The size and scale of Emery House is impressive. “I think he was showing off,” says Kuehn. “This sticks up right out of the prairie and it would have been seen right across the farmland.” The plan was considered to be “ingenious.”

Our next stop is 296 North Elm Avenue in Elmhurst, but when we reach the address Kuehn screeches the car to a halt. “It’s gone!” A Griffin property that stood there months earlier had been demolished. “And look what is there. A monster!” he says, referring to a modern brick Sopranos-style home. He makes a note to find out what happened. The landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois is militant, but this one had apparently slipped through. “Don’t worry, we’ll see others.”

To see Griffin’s other houses, we travel to an area on the south side of Chicago that is home to a mix of blue-collar Irish, Italians and Poles. Here we find the largest concentration of small-scale Griffin houses in existence, as well as a street dedicated to him.

Most Prairie School houses are large structures with custom millwork, elaborate stained-glass windows and expansive floor plans, but his houses in south Chicago reduce the design elements of the Prairie School to their essentials.

The houses that line 104^th Place (renamed Griffin Place) are neatly marked with plaques and notes for each property, making it easy to wald from one to the next. These Griffin houses were designed as low-cost housing, with innovative L-shaped or open-plan living areas.

Pauline Saliga and her family of four have lived in a Griffin house (1741 Griffin Place) since 1990. “We thought it would be intriguing to live in an architect-designed house that was created specifically with affordability in mind.” Says Saliga, who is executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago. Historians have said that the Griffin houses on Griffin Place are modelled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fireproof House for $5000”, which, was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1907, and Saliga believes this may be true.

Mati Maldre, who lives in the Jenkinson House (1727 Griffin Place), has owned the house since 1980. “It’s great to own a small piece of America’s architectural heritage.” Maldre is also co-author and photographer for the book Walter Burley Griffin in America that became the inspiration for a television documentary on Griffin. She has photographed all of Griffin’s work in the US and Australia.

Griffin created more than 130 designs in his Chicago office for buildings, urban plans and landscapes. Half of these were built in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin but it was his Australian designs that brought him worldwide notoriety. Griffin’s letterhead came to carry the legend, “Architect and Landscape Architect – Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago.”

In 1935 Griffin moved to India, where he and Mahony operated a practice and received numerous commissions. He died there of peritonitis in 1937.

One wonders what he might have gone on to design had he lived as long as Wright, who died in 1959.

Seventy years on it is a thrill to find that on one street in a Chicago suburb, the work of Griffin - whose architecture and life is revered on the other side of the world – still quietly lives on.

ends

Travel: New York Post - Sayulita, Mexico

LET'S GET PACIFIC

THE REAL MEXICO AWAITS

By JULIE EARLE-LEVINE

September 25, 2007 -- JUST call me Tiger. Like the cat." My surf instructor, Guillermo "Tigre" Cadena, grins widely before turning to survey the rolling waves lapping against a stunning, golden beach.

"Look at that! It's so beautiful! Here we come!"

And there we go.

Tigre is a former international surfing champ, and he's helping me brush up on my skills, here in the easy-going village of Sayulita, Mexico. He will later prove invaluable as a source on where to find the best tacos.

There are many agreeable little coastal towns on Mexico's Pacific Coast. Few can say they are next door to a Four Seasons resort, or, for that matter, a villa where Beyoncé is staying.

Sayulita can. It is located just a few minutes' drive north of Punta Mita, the famous (and famously exclusive) luxury community near Puerto Vallarta that was designed to lure the high-end traveler to the region.

It seems to be working: At the Four Seasons, you can currently book a one-bedroom suite with a garden view for $1,025 a night. Over the holidays, you'll pay close to $2,000.

At the Villa Amor, located on the beach in Sayulita, an oceanfront one-bedroom currently starts at $88 per night, rising to a prohibitive $123 over Christmas.

Sure, your suite at the Four Seasons would feature a private plunge pool, but at Villa Amor, Sayulita Bay is yours to plunge into, anytime you like.

As you'd expect in a small town, the vibe here is relaxed. Dogs, cats and chickens roam free and everyone, even the locals, seem to be on holiday.

Experienced surfers and novices alike flock here to soak up the local culture.

Greg Shove, founder and CEO of luxury vacation real estate guide the Helium Report, found his way to Sayulita four years ago. He generally considers himself a luxury traveler. But at least once a year, he makes time to go to Sayulita with family and friends.

"We love the atmosphere, the warm water, great surfing and fresh food," said Shove, whose family learned to surf there. Sayulita is renowned for surfing, but there is enough in town to keep you happy beyond catching waves.

Quick, so you can walk again, go to Nicole Brandt, a Texan transplant, who does deep-tissue massages in a private palapa studio on the beach for $50 to $75/hour.

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Vikram Chatwal

HOUSE AND HOME: 'The vibe is sophisticated but relaxed'

By Julie Earle-Levine
Jul 28, 2007

Vikram Chatwal is an Indian hotelier, actor and socialite who lives on the island of Manhattan in New York City and has a holiday home on Long Island. He is president of the boutique division of Hampshire Hotels and Resorts. He and his wife, the model Priya Sachdev, have a baby daughter.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Addis Ababa [Ethiopia] but I moved to Manhattan when I was three and have lived here ever since. I love New York because it is so accessible. It has something for everyone because it is constantly changing. I also spent much time travelling to India, visiting family, and throughout Europe as well.

What was your childhood home like?

Growing up, we resided at 30 Lincoln Square Plaza on Central Park West. There was an interesting juxtaposition between the modern design of the building and the traditional Indian furnishings in my family's three-bedroom apartment. Our home was filled with warm colours and antiques we collected during our travels everywhere from London to Bangkok to Japan. All of the artwork and antiques I grew up with are still in our family homes. I loved the New York apartment, especially its location. My brother Vivek and I spent all of our time in Central Park playing basketball and swimming.

Tell me about your apartment.

It's very white and bright with sweeping views of Central Park. The sun pours in through floor-to-ceiling windows. I like to see the park's green tree-tops. It's very relaxing.

What is your favourite room?

The main living area. I have a bar crafted from stainless steel and with white fur. There are photos of friends including Naomi [Campbell]. I have a white, custom-designed, L-shaped, leather lounger, with black and white pillows, and a white, calfskin rug. All of this is reflected in a floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall. The black-and-white composition in general is attractive because it is very polarising. It can make a room feel both elegant and warm, yet also staunch. The lack of colour leaves open the imagination to focus more on the room and furniture.

The black-and-white theme seems to be echoed at one of your boutique hotels, in Manhattan, called Night.

Yes, all my hotels have a story, a connection to the heartbeat, culture and pure energy of the city they're in. Night is my homage to the drama, power, vitality and innate sensuality of New York. The space was designed to elicit the feeling of the city after dark. There are wrought-iron gates, black curtains on the outside of the building and black-and-white tiled carpet throughout. Also, black-and -white photographs, shot for the hotel, are on the walls in our public spaces.

What kind of mood have you created in your own home?

The vibe is sophisticated but relaxed. With Priya it became more intimate and personal. She bought me a 17th-century gable from a Buddhist temple in Thailand and we have this hanging on a mirrored wall, opposite a Picasso linocut entitled "Spanish Woman". When we are not travelling Priya and I like to cook at home: good Indian food. We dine under an antique silver candelabra. The apartment is now a mix of both of our styles.

You have an impressive art collection.

I love art and became an avid collector during my tenure as an analyst at Morgan Stanley in New York. Art is very important to my being. In the foyer we have an oil painting of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesh; a Francesco Clemente oil on canvas; a Peter Beard diary/collage called "Hot Rod"; and a linear Brice Marden. A "decision tree" drawing by artist Beth Campbell is by the dining table. I love her work. To me, it is the various probabilities that we contemplate, sometimes unconsciously, before making decisions and evaluating their outcomes. In the den I have a Sante D'Orazio photograph of Pamela Anderson [topless] next to our formal portraits. I love the fact that it is very Pam Anderson, daring and fun yet still a really natural photograph. My favourite portrait here though is of the Maharaja Dalip Singh, a poet. There are beautiful swords in this portrait and I have them in a sword collection.

You say the apartment now reflects your travels. What items?

A lot of what I have is relevant to a time and a place that I want to remember, such as artifacts from Thailand, one of my favourite places. I also like to collect art that reminds me of moments in time: "The Dream" from Dalí, one of Thierry Despont's masks and Picasso's "Spanish Woman", just to name a few.

Tell me about your 'den' and how that helps your creativity.

It's about comfort. I have two brown leather recliners, next to a bed with Indian throws and a soft, peach headboard. The drapes are pale gold silk. There is also a flat-screen television with a Sony PlayStation and an Xbox for when I want to really relax. I like to collect thoughts and ideas for my next hotel or film in this room. I'm mostly thinking about my hotels but sometimes I just like to look at the beautiful greenery and its various shades. It's so refreshing.

Your bedroom?

It's a quiet room with a four-poster bed and Indian silks and beads. The colour scheme is sombre tones and rich woods. There are two portraits of Sikh prophets hanging above the bed. I really like Indian silks and throws with tassels. They are part of my environment here and in India.

How many homes do you own?

Two - one home in Long Island and the Manhattan apartment. My weekend home is a Charles Gwathmey-designed farmhouse. It's on the north shore of Long Island in Nassau County, close to the water. It is decidedly more traditional inside than my home in Manhattan. It is a wonderful place to escape to. It is so relaxing and very convenient, being close to the city. I enjoy the architecture of the house just as much as the calm interiors. I also have a collection [of art] here and one of my favourite additions is a Ross Bleckner painting of flowers. I like these pieces because they stimulate emotion and provoke thought. I also know my [art] investment is safe and will grow in value.

Do you also invest in real estate?

I invest in real estate as it relates to hotels but not straight real estate investments per se.

You live in a Trump building in Manhattan. Is it glitzy - all gold and chandeliers?

I live in 1 Central Park West, probably the most reserved of the Trump buildings in that regard. The location works well for me and I can see my hotels from there along with the rest of the city I love.

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Betsey Johnson

HOUSE AND HOME: 'I've always had a huge amount of junk'

By Julie Earle-Levine, Financial Times
Jul 14, 2007

Betsey Johnson has always made her own rules since she started as a fashion designer in the 1960s. Andy Warhol was a close friend and Edie Sedgwick her house model. At 64, she still wears fluorescent baby-doll dresses and tutus. Johnson is passionate about her living quarters and recently launched her first home collection, designed for women who like her funky, eye-popping clothes.

You lived at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1960s. Tell me about that.

I moved in with a toothbrush for one night, after a break-up with a boyfriend, but I ended up living there for two years in a big loft. This is where I met John Cale [co-founder of the Velvet Underground, for whom she designed velvet suits and whom she married]. The place was very artsy, incredibly visual, with some of Andy Warhol's 1960's pop art thrown in. I made most of the costumes for Warhol's [film] Ciao Manhattan there and would sit in the lobby and try them out to see if anyone blinked - but no one ever did. I'd spend evenings at Max's Kansas City and then work all day. It was the second home where you hung out with "your kind". It was either Max's or Chelsea, a home for very "special" people.

How many homes do you own?

I have a Greenwich Village penthouse, a Hamptons home and two houses in Mexico, one of which I've turned into a villa. Each home has a completely different decor. Manhattan is Hollywood modernist glamour - Marilyn Monroe, pink walls with lace and zebra-print draperies, velvet sofas and gold tassel chairs, very 1950s style; East Hampton is "tea party floral"; and in Mexico, Betsyville, "a bright floral siesta house" and Villa Betsy, "Italian villa-esque".

What are your design influences?

I've always collected antiques and vintage furniture and decorated my homes with chandeliers, great country-kitchen cupboards, English wallpapers - a big mix. I love antiques, yard sales and everything crosses every time zone of history, in terms of furniture, clothing and shoes. I've always had a huge amount of junk around but it is collectable junk.

How did you choose the homes?

They were out of necessity. My favourite is the Fifth Avenue and 12th Street penthouse apartment, a big open space, 2,500 sq ft on the 17th floor. I have gorgeous views of the old spires of the church across the street and private roofs. I bought this 15 years ago but I was terrified then of buying, of any investment. I was in the stock market once and I hit the jackpot - that is how I was able to start my business - but I have never understood the mortgage concept. I generally take money and spend it.

You were married to John Cale?

Yes, we had a house in Jamaica but after we separated I realised I needed a place to house all my stuff. We had a funky farmhouse that was in upstate New York, so I met a lot of antique dealers. I always needed chandeliers. I can get five chandeliers for the price of one and early country cupboards, things I've had for years. I've never gone to Crate and Barrel, I love what I have. After the divorce, I found a cottage in East Hampton, in the woods. Here I have chandeliers, knick-knacks, old cupboards wallpapered with English tea party florals, cabbage roses. It is very cosy. Now it is our cosy grandchild hang-out. My daughter Lulu has my first and only grandchild, Layla, and we love going there.

Why did you buy in Mexico?

I didn't have a year-round, blue-sky, no-clouds, warm-weather private Idaho escape. Five years ago when I was celebrating being breast-cancer free, I thought, "This is the year to get an island home." Over the years of working, I'd been to Hong Kong, India, Morocco but I wanted just a place for sun and surf, warm water and hot sand. I love it down there, even in the rainy season. It's so tropical and lush and green. The spirit of the people is warm and friendly, innocent and culturally rich. When I was younger, hitchhiking and poor, bussing it around, I loved Mexico.

The area you bought in Mexico is very fashionable now.

Yes. Just like I predicted in the 1960s that SoHo in downtown Manhattan would explode, my paradise has taken off but it's still lovely. I was very lucky to find it. A friend told me to visit there and to go have lunch on this little beach where the fishermen come in with their catch. I found a tiny hotel and stayed in it. On the second day at breakfast, I asked them if they wanted to sell. It is walled in, a classical Mexican home, with three hand-built palapas [palm-thatched huts]. I started dreaming of buying the little strip of land next door. I took me two years to find the owners and a lot of beer drinking but finally they gave in. The interior decor was the most fun thing to do. I've always found decorating houses was just the perfect balance to difficult or frustrating creative work.

Is your first home collection like your fashion?

Well, where you start is bed and bath - that's everything that goes in and under the bed. And then it goes into the bathroom, sheets and towels. Home is wonderful for a clothing business. If a girl likes your clothes, she might like your kind of environment. Even if I could cook, which I can't, she'd probably enjoy my meal. Interior decorating is close to clothing design, with patterns and colours but I wouldn't turn that into a business.

What did you do with Betseyville?

Betseyville was too adorable and just too big for me. I would sleep in the pink room. Then another room for fun. It is four separate palapa houses, pools, two lounge hang-outs. It was too cute not to be shared. Meanwhile, down the road, 40 minutes south, I have this other property. The views are all blue sky and water. The house is like an Italian villa, grey cement with archways. I wanted to build a glamorous monastery. All the rooms have chandeliers and their own body lotion and bath gel. I don't rent it for more than 10 weeks maximum a year and that is just fine. I've never approached it as a business. Besides, I love to take jaunts and go myself every few months. I like to do San Miguel as a side trip. It is always an exciting new experience. I don't believe in having houses unless you live in them and keep them alive so I try to go every few months. I still hate flying but I'll fly to have three days on the beach.

Are you still shopping for homes?

Mexico's coastline still has some very nice deals, but no. I'm now realising - no more homes. The ones I have are pretty much filled because I am so addicted to antiquing. When I set up in Mexico, I had two 24ft moving trunks. Now, I need to restrict myself to collecting small objects like embroidered table napkins and silver spoons.

Travel: New York Post - Sayulita, Mexico

LIFESTYLE: The New York Times Style Magazine: March 2007

The Remix

Now Ticking - Big Ben for Men

By JULIE EARLE-LEVINE
March 11, 2007

Time for a new watch? Dent — the British clockmaker famous for creating the Big Ben tower in London as well as timepieces for luminaries like King Edward VI and Charles Darwin — has a new line of watches for the common man. Frank Spurrell, the founder of Watch Magazine, and Twysden Moore, a London nightclub entrepreneur and watch fetishist, acquired the label after assuring the original owner that they were not going to make tacky plastic alarm clocks. Expect instead a classic square-face ticker inspired by Big Ben and a round homage to an 1848 ship chronometer used by the Royal Navy in the world wars. Go to http://www.dentwatches.com/.

Weekend FT: Lifestyle, Jorge Perez on design

December 9, 2006

'I have always had a love of design'
By Julie Earle-Levine

Jorge Perez, 61, is a Miami-based property developer, architecture enthusiast and art collector. He is chairman of The Related Group, a $13bn company that is the largest multi-family builder in the US. It has already built 55,000 units in Miami and has plans to build another 15,000 in markets including south Florida and Atlanta.

As someone who was born in Argentina to Cuban-exiled parents and who relocated to Colombia following Castro's rise to power in Cuba (in 1959), what are your earliest memories of a family home?
Because of Castro we moved a lot, so the first house I can remember was in Argentina when I was eight or nine years old. It was an older, two-storey, English-type, brick house on a lot of land in a very pretty neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. There was a library, a very tall room filled completely with books. My mother had a very good book collection. When we were in Cuba, I would go to my grandparents' house in Guantánamo Bay (not the American side, the Cuban side). It was an old Spanish house. You couldn't tell anything from the front and then on the inside it had a fountain in the middle and all the rooms going around. In exile in Colombia we lived in a beautiful apartment in Bogotá. Furniture for my parents was always secondary to the books, great limited edition collections. There were always books, even when they lost everything.

How many homes do you own?
Three: our home, Villa Cristina, a Venetian-style three-storey home in Coconut Grove, Miami, on a waterfront parcel that once belonged to aviation tycoon Howard Hughes; a condo designed by Philippe Stark in Palm Beach; and a home in Utah.

Villa Cristina looks like an art gallery. How important is art to your home aesthetic?
I could not live in a house that did not have art. When I look at it every day it is a wonderful feeling. In Miami, it is all Latin American art inside and out. I have a sculpture garden I walk in every day. In Palm Beach every wall is filled with art. I have Chuck Close; he is like a chess master who knows the 700th move. Even if I have no wall space, I am always buying. I have hundreds of pieces in storage and then I also put art in my buildings and in my office.

Who are your favourite artists and why?
I have a wonderful collection of works by Wifredo Lam, one of the great Cuban painters. I particularly like his early period but also have pieces throughout his Afro-Cuban period. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero is one of the greatest artists ever. I have many of his early paintings and several bronze sculptures. The Mexican artist Diego Rivera is incredible. I love his work. Jose Bedia, the Cuban artist who uses African tribalism in his art, is amazing and a good friend. Right now I am concentrating on young artists. I love Art Basel because it electrifies Miami. It gives me the chance to meet collectors from all over the world and to reconnect with my non-Miami friends in the art world. All our galleries and museums put their best foot forward.

How involved were you in the design aspect of Villa Cristina?
I was single at the time and put a lot of energy into it. To get the stone we needed I bought a quarry. I used French and English designers but I have always had a love of design and know the things I want in my life. I was in a classical mood, my "Ralph Lauren" mood. I went to Paris to buy antiques, to London for silver and Persian rugs, to California for Rachel Ashwell's super-comfortable couches. I have many antiques, from Mexico and India, and very good oriental rugs.

What is your favourite room at Villa Cristina?
My library. I love this room: the deep leather seats, the quiet and art books. It is conducive to work.

You just spent some time repairing your home after hurricane Katrina. Was there much damage?
Yes. We lived at the Ritz Carlton Coconut Grove for months. The water had broken through all the villa's windows and destroyed carpets. We all worked through the night moving art to safety.

Do you spend much time at the Palm Beach apartment?
In winter we go every weekend. It is a completely different mood to Villa Cristina. It is all Philippe Starck, very funky, very American, all black and white. He says it is the only private residence he has designed other than his own and the president of France's.

Which designers and architects do you favour?
I think I have great ability to capture well done design. I'm not a designer, neither am I an architect, but I get very, very involved in the physical designs of buildings. I hired Philippe Starck to work on my Icon project at South Beach. He is brilliant. I said: "You have to design my Palm Beach apartment, too, and he did. More than anything, I want Santiago Calatrava to do a building for me - he is an artist more than anything - or to get Frank Gehry to do a building.

You have a master's degree in urban planning and started out working on affordable housing projects in Florida before graduating to building luxury condominiums in the 1990s. Were these first buildings
good design?

I refurbished homes for low-income seniors in Miami's Little Havana and Homstead neighbourhoods, then started developing two-storey apartments and suburban homes. I thought each of them was the Taj Mahal. I look today and think: "Oh my God, did I do that?" I can't compare to what I'm doing now, I've grown up in my design
standard and have larger budgets. Those buildings might not be
the best architecturally but they acted like catalysts to change in
the city. The City Place project is not the best design but it
changed the city of West Palm Beach into an urban city and increased values. One Miami is definitely not the best project but it is a good project for the young and provided a catalyst for downtown Miami's revival.

In Florida, some people call you "the king of condos?" How do you feel about that title?
I have always loved cities. I feel great looking at buildings in Paris, New York, in Barcelona, the Maldives, Miami, wherever. It doesn't have to be high-rise architecture; it just needs to be well done. Architecture is just art in buildings.

Weekend FT: Lifestyle Models sell real estate in New York

Beauty is in the eye of the freeholder

By Julie Earle-Levine

Published:November 20 2006

At first glance, Paolo Zampolli's premises in downtown Manhattan looks like those of any other luxury real estate broker. Listings for multi-million-dollar condominiums are displayed on Paramount Realty's floor-to-ceiling windows. The usual glossy magazines, comfortable leather sofas and Italian espresso maker are all present.

What is striking is that the real estate brokers in Mr Zampolli's Greene Street office are as eye-catching as the sleek apartments they are selling. These agents are mostly fashion models, many of whom have swapped the catwalk for what they hope will be another lucrative career.

Zampolli's strategy of training models as real estate brokers is an intriguing response to an increasingly competitive real estate market. "It is all aboutluxury and attractiveness," he says. "If you are going to buy an apartment, why not with a beautiful, smart woman?" Mr Zampolli, the owner and president of a modelling agency, ID Model Management, decided two years ago to branch out into real estate at the suggestion of his friend Donald Trump, the property developer.

He recently formed a partnership with Prudential Douglas Elliman, New York, the state's largest real estate services company. ID Model Management, which is in the same building as ID, has a stream of models on their way to fashion shoots. The models leaving Paramount are on their way to show off apartments in much the same way as they might launch a designer's fashion collection.

"For me, the focus is now more on square footage than on fashion magazines," says Mr Zampolli. He says 12 models will be working for by early next year. Six already have broker's licences while the others are still studying for their real estate exams.

Good looks are not the only factor. After years spent attending glitzy parties, many models have acquired a valuable network of wealthy contacts. Angie Everhart, a 37-year-old actor and supermodel, has become one of Mr Zampolli's agents after a 20-year modelling career. "Fashion is the centre of a lot of worlds and lifestyles. You get to meet rock stars, presidents, sports stars and your regular Joes on the street," she says after sweeping into Mr Zampolli's office in knee-high boots, silk blouse and dark designer jeans. All such contacts are possible buyers. "I know a lot of wealthy people round the world, so it made sense for me to get paid to tell them about apartments," she says. With other projects on the go, she intends to sell real estate part-time. "I am only going to sell ultra-luxury properties. No sixth-floor walk-ups. I'm sorry if it sounds snobby but it's just not my style," she says.

Maria Markova, a 21-year-old Russian model with a real estate broker's licence, works part-time for Mr Zampolli while studying philosophy and literature at Colombia University. "I started modelling at 17 and got bored. Now I'm selling real estate to make extra money," she says. Ms Markova has sold two multi-million-dollar apartments at a development on Wall Street.

Aleksandra Slowinska, a Polish-German model in her 20s, worked for ID be-fore studying architecture and interior design in New York and real estate at another firm before joining Paramount Realty. "Real estate is a wonderful transition for a model. You meet all the people when you are modelling and your contact sheet is important. It is almost the same in real estate," she says. Ms Slowinska has not sold any properties yet because, she says, she has focused on her full-time job at Costas Kondylis & Partners, a New York architectural firm that specialises in residential high-rise buildings, but she is confident she will. "One of my goals in real estate is to sell whole buildings," says the blonde, 6ft model.

Mr Zampolli has plans for developments in New York, Brazil and Milan, and believes prime real estate is "easy to sell, whatever the city". He says models can compete with more seasoned brokers. "Some models are not only extremely beautiful, but they are also exceptionally driven." For models, whose careers start at 15 and often end at 24, real estate is a new way to make money.

Weekend FT: Antigua

Balancing newcomers and natives

By Julie Earle-Levine

Published: November 18 2006

The view from the aircraft as it lands in Antigua is mostly green and lush. On the ground, alongside a dirt road, there are mango trees dripping with fruit and hand-painted signs advertising pigs and ducks for sale. Locals sit out in front of small shacks selling roast birds and Wadadli, the island beer, or beside stalls laden with "black" pineapples, coconuts and bags of sugar cane, a reminder of what used to be the island's main economic driver.

Now, of course, like other Caribbean destinations, Antigua depends on tourism and real estate development. And the pace at which new luxury hotels and houses are being built around its 365 beaches ("one for every day of the year") as well as rapidly rising property prices stand in stark contrast to the traditional laid-back nature of the island. The building boom begs the question: will Antigua, just 14 miles long and with a population of 70,000, lose its charm?

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"Antigua is probably a little hot now with quite a lot of development going on," says Gordon Campbell Gray, who opened Carlisle Bay, a five-star hotel on the island's south coast, three years ago and is now planning "a civilised, small amount of villas in a quite Antiguan style" nearby. "Even the land next to us, which we very stupidly didn't buy back [in 2003], has gone up in price considerably."

Local estate agents say that beach-front land has jumped from $6 per sq ft four years ago to $20 per sq ft, or $215 per sq metre, today. Land with distant views of the water that cost $1.25 per sq ft has more than quadrupled in price. "For some buyers, money is not an option, [and] some locals are seeing this as their golden opportunity and selling," says Dominique D'Aloia, owner of Paradise Properties Connection, who has lived on the island for 25 years. "Now, everyone wants to live here or at least have a home here." Rock musician Eric Clapton, Virgin tycoon Richard Branson and actor Timothy Dalton are owners on the island and fashion designer Giorgio Armani bought two villas with ocean views on the north-west coast last year.

Antigua's first "golden era" was in the 1980s when British entrepreneur and yachtsman Peter de Savary injected millions to develop the St James's Club, on a 100-acre private peninsula. But after five or six years of activity the island's property market settled down. Two decades later there are new major players, including Amsterdam-based luxury home builder La Perla International Living and Sandals Resorts. Both are significantly expanding their operations in Antigua, while smaller hoteliers, such as Campbell Gray and Cocos and Cocobay founder Andrew Michelin, are opening new properties, some of which include one or a handful of condos and villas. Right next to Armani's stunning cliff-side retreat at Shell Beach is the Galley Bay Club, a new development of 40 luxury, two-bedroom apartments with natural coral stone floors and ocean views priced from $795,000.

"Previously, [development] was only hotel-based but there were very few villa or residential communities being built," says Ian Fraser, managing director of Fraser & Associates, a commercial property and hotel management company in Antigua. Partly thanks to the exposure offered by the West Indies hosting the 2007 Cricket World Cup, "we now expect to see quite a lot of these."

La Perla started developing its first resort in a cove on the Atlantic-facing coast, a gated community called NonSuch Bay, in 2004, says Hans Verver, the company's sales director in Antigua. Most of the 70 condominiums in phase one have been sold to British buyers at prices from $485,000 for a one-bedroom to nearly $1m for a three-bedroom, three-bathroom property with a private terrace. The development, which includes a beach club, private gardens and pools, and a small private marina on nearly 40 acres, is due to be completed in 2007.

La Perla has also bought several other properties, including a large tropical peninsula with views to Montserrat and Nevis that it hopes to develop with a US partner, and Jolly Harbour, a large marina, golf, hotel and residential complex on the west coast that it is updating and expanding. "There are 600 properties here but it is not overbuilt because it is spread out," Verver says. "We are also selling plots for construction of individual villas."

Fraser, whose company will provide local management to NonSuch Bay, grew up in Antigua and says the island has changed enormously. "There is talk of a large 300- or 400-acre development on the cards and it may have some social element where there is a requirement to build low income housing as part of it," he says.

Mark Cochrane, a developer whose parents were born and raised in Antigua, is already balancing his desire to benefit from the wave of American and British buyers looking for luxury homes with an obligation to give back to the community. His company, NUVN Development, one of the largest high-end homebuilders on the island, will next year launch a residential development for locals with 60 houses priced at about $100,000. "Many local houses are wooden, built a long time ago, and some, still standing from hurricanes, need repair. We are bringing new styles and designs for a reasonable price."

For now, developments in Antigua remain scattered and isolated and most islanders think the government has done a good job of preserving open spaces. Alex Michelin, whose London-based company Finchatton is involved with his father Andrew's new Hermitage Bay hotel project, notes that only about half of the beaches are accessible by road and only 20 have resorts on them. "It's now seen as 'the' chic unpoilt place to be in the Caribbean as Barbados becomes overdeveloped; property prices have soared; and it even has its own private jet terminal for the super-rich. But the speed of development looks to stay steady," he says. "If developing was easier on the island, more [resorts] would have [already] been built."

Officials are now working on a master plan to guide new construction over the next decade and working to forge links between wealthy newcomers and less wealthy locals. "We are being very careful about the way we progress," says Lorraine Headley, the island's director general of tourism, who is based in the capital and cruise-ship port, St John's. "There is always a delicate balance on an island where there is limited land, but residents recognise the benefits of investment, tourism and jobs. Many Antiguans are landowners anyway."

She notes that hundreds of islanders plan to open their homes to visitors during the cricket. But not everyone is embracing the building explosion. "More buildings mean more people living here, which will make the island more crowded," says one small business owner. He worries that the "genuine, down-to-earth Antigua" could disappear.

Others hope the developments might improve the island's infrastructure. Antigua has only one main road, which it is upgrading for the World Cup, but many are just bumpy dirt tracks with few road signs.

Rob Sherman, a 30-year resident of Antigua who lives on a 400-year-old sugar estate surrounded by royal palms, banana and mango trees, is encouraged by the upscale nature of the island's new developments. "It's [still] a beautiful place to live," he says.

His wife, Bernadette, a local businesswoman and board member of the Island Academy International school, agrees. Both natives and newcomers appreciate Antigua for what it is now - safe, relaxed, spiritual and fun - and "hopefully they can keep all this going as the island changes", she says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

Business: Weekend FT - Dolly Lenz

HOUSE AND HOME: 'I'd condo all of Central Park if I could'

Jul 29, 2006

Dolly Lenz is typing furiously on one of her three Blackberries, with one phone pressed to her ear and another ringing beside her. She dives for her Chanel bag but misses the call. "Hello, hello, hello?" Then both phones are ringing and do not stop.

Lenz, who is vice-chairman at Prudential Douglas Elliman in Manhattan, has been the top-selling real estate broker (as measured by dollar value of sales) in the US for the past three years. In the 12 months to May, she racked up $500m in deals, for which she should earn at least $8m in commissions. Late night meetings at Nobu or Cipriani downtown (she's been known to attend three business dinners in an evening) and at least two lunches at Michaels or the Four Seasons are the norm seven days a week. She even admits to keeping a Blackberry at her bedside so she can respond to e-mails in the middle of the night.

I spend an afternoon with her at Cipriani Club Residences, a luxury condominium development, where Bruce Willis, Harvey Weinstein and Naomi Campbell, among others, have bought units. She's overseeing sales and marketing for the development, in addition to handling other prime properties around the city. But, when I ask her about stress, she laughs. "Do I throw the phone at people? No," she said referring to Campbell's reported tantrums. "I eat lots and lots of chocolate. Like three candy bars a day. Cheap chocolate, and Bellinis." (Prospective buyers at Cipriani are offered the restaurant's signature cocktail, and Lenz sometimes joins in.)

In spite of her schedule and diet, the 48-year-old Lenz is petite, with girlish, long blonde hair. She wears four-inch patent leather heels and a snug-fitting black Armani suit, one of the 30 black suits she owns. This is her uniform every day except Sunday, when she still works but might put on jeans. She says she rarely sees her husband and two teenage children for dinner. "My husband likes it that way," she jokes. "That is why we've been married happily for more than 25 years."

A native New Yorker and a former accountant, she seems like a born saleswoman: blunt, fast-talking, occasionally coarse, but still charming. "This is like a million six, with all the services," she says of one condo. "This is classic. Everyone wants it." Later, she declares a studio apartment with a fold-out sofa bed and a $890,000 price tag a deal. "Cipriani is a 106 unit building, other units downtown are 600 apartments. It's a classy building, the average age is 27 to 45. I'd love to be 27." Click, click, click. Her heels tap away on the polished wood floor. "Look at these refrigerators, completely hidden. This is what people are going to be killing for in Manhattan. It's the perfect pied-à-terre. It's like a jewel box." The week we meet, Lenz has sold three Cipriani penthouses to two Wall Streeters in their 30s for a total of $7.5m; a $200m building lot to an Italian developer; and 14 apartments at a mid-town development, the Veneto. "I've got $1bn worth of listings on my website, that's a third of Prudential Douglas's business in New York," she says.

The value of the property she's sold over her 20-year-plus career is more than $5bn, including deals for whole buildings, estates in the Hamptons and homes in London and Barbados.

Still, she says, it has been a long climb in a cut-throat world. "Oh my God. When I started, no one would show an apartment with me," she says. "They'd say 'Who are you? Which rock did you crawl out from under?'" But Lenz was lucky to have top-notch clients early on. These included singer Barbra Streisand, whom she helped to sell several apartments and eventually to purchase one. "We looked for almost 19 years," she says. "I learned the whole market as a result, and she introduced me to a lot of people."

Now she works with numerous celebrities. She says Revlon boss Ronald Perelman is her most interesting; but others can be difficult. "I sold P. Diddy an apartment, [and] his people wouldn't sign," she says. But "I said 'If you want the apartment, you need to put down $400,000, like now'. As a woman, I have to be very tough."

Lenz, who has moved 38 times in Manhattan and currently lives at the Park Imperial atop the Random House building at 56th and Broadway, prides herself on knowing when a buyer is ready to seal a deal. She says it takes her about 12 minutes. "You can just tell. You can tell when a man is going to buy. They start to perspire. You can see it in their face. It's like when men see boobs. It's that same look."

She says she conspires with many women to encourage their husbands to buy and enjoys that part of the business. "I love hearing about people's lives. I have 307 marriages to my credit. I love matching people to people. Are you married?"

As for a widely reported real estate bubble, Lenz is unsurprisingly bullish, especially about the top end of the market. "I think there is a good balance of supply and demand, but if there was a huge oversupply, well that would affect only the cookie cutter [condos], like in the last bubble in 1990, when there were 10,000 new apartments," she says.

That said, she's always hoping for more new developments in Manhattan. Although she starts each day at 6am with a 12-mile run through Central Park (still carrying those phones and Blackberries), she thinks the 843-acre oasis could be put to much better use. "You know, I'd condo all of Central Park if I could," she says. It's clear, once again, that selling property will always be her top priority.

Prudential Douglas Elliman, tel: +1 212 891 7113, www.elliman.com

Travel: New York Magazine - Sydney

Sydney
By Julie Earle-Levine

After years of swaggering self-promotion, the dream is finally coming true: Sydney really is on the verge of joining the ranks of the world’s great cities. Sydneysiders are starting to rise to the top of the fashion, art, architecture, and food worlds. (Not to mention the city’s Hollywood connection: Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, and Nicole Kidman call the city home.) With success comes prosperity—apartment prices have doubled in the past five years and the stock market just broke the magical 5,000 mark—and there is no end in sight. The country is primed to become America’s gateway to China: This year, the Opera House introduced guided tours in Mandarin, Qantas started flying direct from Sydney to Beijing, and Prime Minister John Howard started negotiating a free-trade agreement with the Chinese premier. Of course, big successes also bring problems—big-city problems. The riots that exploded in the southern suburb of Cronulla in December divided the town along ugly ethnic lines. Sydneysiders were forced to take a long, hard look at themselves. Then Howard announced, “I do not believe Australians are racist.” That nasty business over, they’ve gone back to wining, dining, beaching, and generally enjoying a quality of life—hyperbole alert—unmatched in the world. - J.E.

Hotel Finder:
If you like the City Club’s oversize glass showers, you’ll love the soaking tubs at Establishment.
If you like the historic feel of The Library, you’ll love the Chelsea Guest House.
If you like the harbor views from the Ritz Carlton Battery Park, you’ll love looking out over the Opera House at Park Hyatt Sydney.

Glossary: Sydneysider Slang
Bottle-O: Liquor store, where you load up on a “slab of amber fluid” (a case of beer).
Budgie smugglers: Speedos, also called “dick pointers.”
Crack a coldie: Open a beer, quite possibly over a barbie.
Dinkum: Real, genuine.
Dog’s eye: A flaky meat pie.
Fancy a cheeky shampoo?: Want to get a drink?
Good on ya, mate: Thanks a lot.
Pacific peso: A$1; i.e., 70 cents.
Pom: A Brit (“bloody Poms”).
Root rat: Sex addict.
Shark biscuit: Surfing novice, a kook.
Spunk: A hottie, especially a male (“what a hunk of spunk”).
Westies: From the Western suburbs; i.e., the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Sydney
BEACHES
Step Into Liquid
The city has 40 beaches to choose from, and each has its own style, from its most famous, Bondi, to Palm Beach, Sydney’s version of the Hamptons. Surf lessons are a cliché, but one you should indulge in wholeheartedly. And if you’re gonna learn to shred, it ought to be with Tony Morley, one of a team of mostly blond-haired, tan pros at Lets Go Surfing, a school at North Bondi known for its small classes and highly trained instructors. Morley, 26, has been surfing since he was 10 and specializes in teaching beginners to stand up on Bondi waves, which look tame but can have gnarly rips (A$69 for two-hour group classes; 61-2-9365-1800).

BONDI - Yes, it can be a tourist trap—expect busloads of Japanese visitors and swarming British backpackers—but without the crowds, it can be truly gorgeous. To experience the quiet, beautiful Bondi, go at 6 a.m. for laps with the locals along Campbell Parade; after, have an espresso at the Bondi Tratt (61-2-9365-4303), serving “brekkie” from 7 a.m.

TAMARAMA - Barely-there bikinis rule at Tamarama, a tiny beach around the cliff from Bondi that’s big on attitude and style. Prime flaunting hours are weekends, from noon to 4 p.m. Stop by the Beach Café (61-2-9130-2419) for a fresh mango smoothie. Don’t miss the regular surf lifesavers’ drill, when good-looking, athletic bodies scramble into the surf and power through the waves. If you feel like you might need to be rescued, this is the place to do it.

MANLY - Families go to Manly Beach, on Sydney’s northern shores, for laid-back surf breaks. Leave the city from Circular Quay; it’s a quick trip by ferry. If you miss the boat back, wait for the next one at the Manly Wharf Hotel (61-2-9977-1266), a good spot for a Carlton Cold and a bird’s-eye view of the dock.

PALM - An hour’s drive from the city, Palm Beach is a glamorous day trip, especially in a ragtop—or even better, by private seaplane (Sydney Harbor Seaplanes, 61-2-9388-1978). Aussie film types, financiers, and other movers and shakers own mansions at “Palmie” and lunch at the Beach Road Restaurant (61-2-9974-1159). Try the roasted blue-eyed cod.

BALMORAL - Balmoral Beach is like its own small island, with lovely swimming beaches: no surf and no rips to worry about. Don’t drive here—parking is impossible—just catch the ferry or bus from Circular Quay. Every weekend in summer, there is free Shakespeare in the Rotunda. Go to the Bathers’ Pavilion (61-2-9969-5050), a changing shed from the twenties that’s now a chic light-filled café and restaurant: the perfect spot for sundowners right on the beach. -J.E.

PLACE TO BUY FISH YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF -
Christie’s SeafoodsSydney Fish Market (61-2-9552-3333) Go at ten on a weekday to avoid the early-morning rush. Christie’s, the first shop on the left-hand side as you walk into the New Arcade, sells the sea: from sweet, pink king prawns to black-lip abalone. Select your fish, and have it cut for sashimi or cooked to order at the grill counter. Christie’s has tables, but sitting by the docks with screeching seagulls is more fun.

WAY TO GET PIPES LIKE RUSSELL CROWE’S - Kayak Touring, The Spit Bridge, Mosman (61-2-9960-4389) On a half-day guided kayak tour of Sydney’s Middle Harbor, you’ll work your way past waterfront mansions with megayachts and the serene Garigal National Park with its bush vistas and stunning sandstone formations. Expect to see bandicoot below and white-bellied sea eagles soaring overhead. (A$99 for three and a half hours).

SHITKICKERS YOU CAN’T GET AT HOME - R.M. Williams389 George St. (61-2-9262-2228) Now that the whole Ugg debacle is more or less behind us, go for what Australia does best: leather boots (cowboy and others). Guys should buy the Comfort Craftsman in chestnut, black, or the new must-have tone, whiskey. Sheilas (that’s Aussie for fair-dinkum women) should snare the black suede Aberfeldy boot with white stitching. Neither is available yet at R.M.’s Manhattan store.

PLAN FOR NOT GETTING RIPPED OFF - Hogarth Galleries7 Walker Lane, Paddington (61-2- 9360-6839) Dodging the tourist traps of Sydney’s Aboriginal art scene is a bit like unguided shopping for diamonds on 47th Street. Stick to Hogarth, the oldest commercial dealer in Australia with the hottest painter around: Rosella Namok, a 26-year-old abstract artist who paints with her fingers. -J.E.

Sydney
THE TOP FIVE Seafood Restaurant

1. If you can’t score a beach-view table at Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, hit nearby Swell for plump Sydney rock oysters and crispy skinned salmon (61-2-9386-5001).

2. For four-star fare to rival Eric Ripert’s, there’s only one option: Tetsuya’s. A confit of trout served with daikon and fennel is chef Tetsuya Wakuda’s signature dish (61-2-9267-2900).

3. At Glass Brasserie, demand a table close to the open kitchen to watch (if you’re lucky) chef Luke Mangan prepare your line-caught barramundi, served whole (61-2-9265-6068).

4. Foodies hang out at Flying Fish, in inner-city Pyrmont. Ask for a table on the outside deck and try chef Peter Kuruvita’s spicy Sri Lankan snapper curry with basmati rice (61-2-9518-6677).

5. Golden Century is as crowded, noisy—and delicious—as Joe’s Shanghai. Fish and crabs are brought wriggling to your table before being dispatched to the kitchen (61-2-9212-3901). -J.E.

TREND -D.O.M. Pubs“Dirty old man pubs” are making a comeback—especially those that haven’t been renovated and therefore still have charming features like spittoons underneath the bar. Try the Darlo in Darlinghurst, the historic Cooper’s Arms in Newtown, the Nelson in Bondi Junction, the Shakespeare (a.k.a. “the Shakey”) in Surry Hills, or the Beauchamp, which just reopened in Paddington. -J.E.


Sydney, Woollahra
Antiques Road Map - The new neighborhood for old things.
Sydney is the oldest city in Australia, settled in 1788, so the antiquing is fabulous. Not only are there treasures still to be found, but the favorable exchange rate makes shopping here a much better deal than in, say, London. Start at Anne Schofield Antiques, known for its stunning South Sea pearl earrings, then make your way along Queen Street; stop for lunch at Bistro Moncur before venturing toward nearby Oxford Street for the grand finale: the Woollahra Antique Centre, with 50 shops. Avoid Sundays, when many stores are closed.

1. Anne Schofield Antiques36 Queen St. Jewelry—Georgian neoclassical cameos, French Deco baubles—from the eighteenth century to the fiffties.
Simon Johnson

2. Simon Johnson55 Queen St. Not antiques but a gourmet store worth a stop: Buy the preserved lemons and satay paste to bring home; salt caramels for the walk.

3. The Art of Wine & Food80 Queen St. Everything from absinthe glasses to hippopotamus-tooth corkscrews.

4. Howell & Howell84 Queen St. Antique mirrors, lamps, and stools from France, Italy, and Spain.

5. Tim McCormick’s 92 Queen St. Rare books, prints, and maps; ask to see the Colonial manuscripts.

6. Three Antiques stores in a row 104-108 Queen St. Tortoiseshell brushes and vintage pens at Michael A. Greene, early-Victorian dining tables and chairs at Gaslight, and unusual pieces like a Charles X cherrywood birdcage at Martyn Cook’s.

7. Bistro Moncur116 Queen St. Break for a bistro lunch: Order the grilled sea scallops or the popular pure pork sausages with potato mash.

8. Woollahra Antique Centre160 Oxford St. The three best specialty shops: Cast, Tin and Other Toys; Art Nouveau; English and Continental Glass. -J.E.

BAR CRAWL
WHERE TO DRINK NOW - Kings Cross
Acclimate at the Crest Hotel’s Goldfish Bowl bar, right above Kings Cross station, where all the Westies arrive by train. Watch the world outside through greasy windows, with a chilled, A$3 schmiddy in hand.

Dine across the street at Bayswater Brasserie. It’s a bit like Balthazar and caters to a young, savvy fashion-and-art crowd. Bartender Naren Young serves stiff drinks: Try his Shanghai Charlie.

Move on to LadyLux, just off Darlinghurst Road. The best nights, Fridays and Saturdays, tend to be packed with a model-gorgeous crowd. Secure a spot on the guest list by e-mailing mailto:Rochelle@ladylux.com.au.

End the night at the Bourbon, formerly the Bourbon and Beefsteak. The place has great history: Originally it catered to GIs on R&R leave from Vietnam.

DOWN UNDER FASHION DECODER
There’s a parallel universe Down Under: The fashion looks familiar, but the names (and the prices) are not. Right now the Sydney boutiques are putting deep discounts on their remaining summer stock. To take advantage of the seasonal flop, start at the Centennial Park end of Oxford Street, and shop your way north.-J.E.

From left to right:Jayson Brunsdon = a young Yves Saint Laurent
Lisa Ho = Vera Wang
Josh Goot = Helmut Lang
Lover = Marc Jacobs
Kirrily Johnston = Proenza Schouler + Jil Sander
The hookers are out in full force after 2 a.m. (Prostitution is legal here.) Time to call it a night. -J.E.

Travel: Christian Bedat/Town&Country Travel

The Wonder Boy of Watches - Swiss watch magnate Christian Bedat likes to heli-ski in Canada, relax in the Maldives and vacation with his family in Forte dei Marmi. We caught up with him between trips.

Spring 2006

IN the 400-year-old Swiss watch business, where legacy is practically a prerequisite, Christian Bedat has achieved enormous success in a remarkably short eight years. He launched Bedat & Co in 1996, and almost immediately it was heralded for its luxury designs (think handstitched hot pink alligator straps). Watchmaking is in Bedat's blood: His mother Simone, was a founding partner in the Geneva-based Ramond Weil.

A former Swiss army officer, Christian spent most of the 1980s in Hong Kong, manufacturing watches for United Colors of Benetton by Bulova. He returned to Switzerland to collaborate with his mother, first at Raymond Weil, where he led the design team, then in the launch of Bedat & Co. The company was purchased in 2001 by the Gucci Group. Today, the forty-one-year old is the vice president and creative director of Gucci Group Watches, as well as the CEO of Bedat & Co, whose signature, square faced watches are sold in the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, Hong Kong and Brazil.

Overseeing the prosperous company, Bedat spends his days traversing time zones, traveling frequently from his home in Geneva to New York, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo. He likes a bit of adventure - he's an avid scuba diver - as well as downtime with his wife, Diane and their five children. He's obsessed with design, whether of luggage or of an airplane's interior, and is always searching for unusual ideas.

What impact do trips have on your work?
The more you travel, the more you experience. I like to think about new designs when I am fully relaxed - in a quiet, remote location, away from my day-to-day life. Certain colors and shapes can be inspiring. Recently, my wife and I went to the Amanpulo resort, on a private island in the Philippines. It has just 40 casitas and is surrounded by very clear, blue water and there is a coral reef for diving. I started considering sporty designs and ended up sketching the No. 7 women's watch on a napkin. The turquoise water inspired a turqouise grosgrain silk strap.

Describe some particularly adventurous trips from recent years.
Diving in French Polynesia, in the Fakarava atoll on the south pass was amazing. During one dive, I could not believe how many sharks I saw. First there were five or six, then fifteen and finally, maybe three hundred. It was one of my most memorable dives, but was it daring? Not really. Have you heard of many divers eaten by sharks? The majority of them aren't very dangerous. I have also gone helicopter skiing in British Columbia: white powder, wild skiing and high speeds. I found it quite exciting. We explored the Monashee and Cariboo mountain ranges, skiing almost nonstop every day. I am planning a return visit this year.

Where have you always wanted to go?
The North and South Poles. I would love to see the icebergs. I'd like to visit the Galapagos Islands too. I have heard that the fauna there is incredible.

How do you find good local restaurants when you are traveling?
I always go with friends who will look after me. Hong Kong is one of the best places in the world for food. I eat mainly Chinese, in restaurants on hidden streets where there are no other foreigners. I go to Lucy's in the Stanley neighborhood, a small place that prepares Shanghainese dishes. In Geneva, I like the Auberge Communal d'Onex for excellent Italian food. In winter, it serves whhite truffles. For tasty chicken and fries, there's Carnivor du Centre, in the centre of the city. In Las Vegas, I'm fond of the Red 8 Asian bistro, at Wynn Las Vegas. The shark-fin dumplings were amazing and the dim sum reminded me of Hong Kong. The restaurant Noodles, at Bellagio, also has dim sum on weekends.

Have you had any especially memorable meals?
A most interesting experience was chicken sashimi in Kagoshima, Japan. I put a lot of sauce on it. And once when I was in Tokyo, I had beef tongue - cooked and raw.

What are some of your favorite hotels?
The Gora Kadan, outside Tokyo in Hakone National Park, at the foot of Mount Fuji, is serene and beautiful. It's the former summer residence of the Kan-In-No-Miya imperial family, and it has cypress baths. In France, I love the views, from the hills in Les Baux de Provence. Ousta de Baumaniere there is romantic and has good food. In Italy, Sardinia is appealing: The Hotel Cala di Volpe has excellent service and food, especially the lunch buffet.

What do you look for when booking a hotel?
I always request the least expensive room at the Four Seasons (or any other hotel for that matter) . It's worth asking, and I'm often rewarded. I think a fair price is $350 to $700 a night.

Where do go to undwind and be pampered?
When I'm on vacation, I like getting a facial, a massage, everything but nail polish. The resort town of La Baule, on France's Atlantic coast, is an ideal place for a reviving week of treatments. My wife and I like to stay at the Royal-Thalasso Barriere. At the Four Seasons at Kuda Huraa, in the Maldives, you can get a massage while looking at the ocean.

When you travel with your family, what do you like to do?
During the winter, we spend every wekeend in our chalet in Villars. We all love to ski. I like to cook (especially Indian curries) so we eat mainly at home, except for the occasional outing to enjoy traditional Swiss fondue or raclette. During the summer we go to Forte dei Marmi for a week. It's like the Hamptons for the Italians, who come from Florence or Milan. You can lead a simple life or that of a jet-setter. We stay at a family style hotel. Lunch is taken by the pool (at the Bagno Piero) and consists of traditional dishes, like penne pesto and Milanese. There are plenty of shops, but we prefer just to relax.

Any advice for traveling with children?
You need patience, organisation and big cars. We went on a tour of Switzerland in a minivan last year, visiting the Transport Museum in Lucerne. We stopped for a cheese fondue in Gruyere and walked by the lake in Lugano. The children loved it. Traveling really opens their eyes and creates memories for them.

Which airlines do you prefer?
In terms of first class, Japan Airlines is the best. British Airways, Air France and JAL have beds that are completely flat now and they supply nice pajamas. I am also in love with Cathay Pacific's first class lounge in Hong Kong. The bathrooms are clad in black marble, and the showers are out of this world. You can order from a real menu, and there is even Haagen-Dazs ice-cream.

Dou you have any packing tips?
Plan ahead and pack light. I never check my luggage, usually a small Bottegga Veneta or Hermes bag. I carry my laptop, two phones, my passport, my Ipod, my headphones and an Hermes accordian picture frame with photos of the kids. I pack the same amount for one night as I do for a week. I'll take three shirts and a jacket, and then use the hotel for laundry. I wear suits made by Frank Namani and Gucci shirts. Shoes have to be casual. I like Prada, Tod's, Gucci and John Lobb. And I'm never without my Bedat & Co watch.

What are your favorite travel gadgets?
I use Skype to speak over the internet with my family and friends. My newest device is the Archos AV 700, a mobile digital video recorder. It records television programs and movies, and you can watch them on the go. It stores 400 hours or 250 movies.

What have you recently bought back from a trip?
I jsut bought five robes (by Robeworks) from the Four Seasons and had them shipped home. The inside is made of terry cloth and the outside is brushed cotton. I make a purchase if I happen to see something and am tempted. Five years ago, Diane and I were staying on a Turkish junk with friends for a week. One of them bought leather necklaces with black stone pendants for everyone. Years later, I saw one made of jade with gold and diamonds. I got a plainer version. Now I always wear it, except when I do karate.

Business: Miami Condo King out to Trump Donald

Las Vegas's latest colossus will be a slice of Barcelona: that's the vision of a larger-than-life developer with movie star mates.
Julie Earle-Levine reports
February 18, 2006


JORGE Perez's excitement is palpable when he is talking about his Las Vegas project Las Ramblas. It's a colossal Barcelona-inspired $4 billion hotel condo and casino complex he is building with the actor George Clooney.Unlike Clooney, Perez -- who speaks animatedly, hands outstretched to show just how big this project is -- is not a household name in America. Yet.

Perez is the largest residential condominium developer in the country, a Miami version of New York real estate developer Donald Trump without the bad hair and aggressive self-promotional skills.

In Miami, Perez has already built 55,000 units and his $13 billion Related Group has plans to build another 15,000 units in South Florida and Las Vegas in the next four years. Atlanta is another target.

It is a lofty ambition to build a "first" anything in Vegas, a city that is thought to have seen it all and where a new hotel or condo tower seems to be built every other day (even Donald's ex-wife Ivana Trump is building her own 82-storey luxury residential building called Ivana Las Vegas). But Perez believes his Las Ramblas project really will be unique.

In an interview in his headquarters in Miami, Perez, 56, who was born in Argentina to Cuban parents, outlined his vision for Las Ramblas, and shared his passion for building and fast cars.
Las Ramblas, just off The Strip, will spread across 11 hectares and feature 11 towers, including a five-star hotel, condos and bungalows -- that's more than 4000 units in total -- a spa and health club, nightlife, dining, shopping and, of course, a casino.

It will also have an open-air pedestrian promenade modeled after Las Ramblas in Barcelona, even though this is glitzy Vegas and residents may well be dodging drunk tourists armed with super-size, brightly coloured cocktails in plastic cups.

The project is due to be completed early 2008.

Perez has based the project on his favourite city, Barcelona.

"Sitting in a cafe having tapas, seeing the trees, flower shops and bookstores in Barcelona is a wonderful experience we are going to recreate," he says.

To do this, he's bringing together his dream list of architects, designers and entertainers including ubiquitous designer Philippe Starck on the interiors, and architect Keith Hobbs of United Designers Europe.

George Clooney and Rande Gerber (the nightclub owner better known as Cindy Crawford's husband) are involved.

Clooney is also talking to his friend Brad Pitt about "designing" for the project.

Both superstars famously love Vegas, and then of course there was the movie, Ocean's Eleven, where Clooney and Pitt, aka Dapper Danny Ocean and Pitt as a card ace, staged an elaborate heist at Las Vegas's Bellagio casino.

Perez says Clooney and Gerber will be "extensively involved in multiple aspects" of Las Ramblas, which is due to start construction in mid-2006.

More specifically, as investors and residence owners, they will contribute to the design and direction of the project, including the hotel, restaurants and entertainment and "the look and feel of the casino".

Clooney has said the project will be a "first class experience, with a five star hotel, the coolest bars and clubs and an exceptional spa", reflecting his personal taste and interests. "We're clearly putting more than just our names to this project."

Perez says he is negotiating with an up-market brand for the hotel, and is pushing forward with reservations.
Perez is hoping the project will create the kind of frenzy he is used to seeing in Miami.
While the market has recently cooled in that city, Perez recalls buyers were scrambling to buy and "flip" (resell) properties.

Some of Related's 1000 unit condos in Miami sold out within 36 hours of being announced.
On talk of the real estate bubble in Miami, Perez says he is certain there will be a short-term correction, and that development is peaking.
"It is red hot. There is a crane on every corner."

But he is confident strong local and international demand will create another boom. "I think Latin Americans continue to see Miami as their capital, and I can't think of another city in America that is better poised for growth."

He has seen strong interest in Apogee, his latest high-end project with 66 of 67 units sold, mostly to domestic buyers. Their average price is $5.3 million.

Miami's potential is greater than Las Vegas, New York and Atlanta, some of the other favourite cities for developers to be in, he says.
In New York, Related developed the Time Warner Centre, and also developed and owns the W Union Square and the Mandarin Oriental.
Atlanta is another growth spot where Related is looking to make its mark. "We have a piece of land and are trying to zone it into a great urban city, building around 4000 apartments and bringing in great restaurants, architecture and design."

But it's not all about buildings for Perez, who started out as building affordable housing in Florida. He set up Related with New York developer Steve Ross in 1979, and last year, Related had $4.3 billion in revenue.

"What really makes me tick is not just building a building, but changing a city," he says. Can he really change Vegas? "Las Ramblas is all about getting away from the glitz, The Strip and the casinos, and creating a more elegant environment."
He sees visitors strolling a tree-lined promenade, ice cream cone in hand, dropping into Gucci and other luxury retail shops and dining at up-market restaurants and cafes.

Perez does love the high life and owns a 2002 Ferrari 360 Modena Spider and a 2002 Mercedes S500 AMG, but his favorite car is much like him -- a low-key, fast-moving and nimble yellow Mini Cooper convertible.

Perez is swiftly and aggressively changing America's skyline, city by city.

Business: Walking the Plank in the Big Apple

The Weekend Australian
Julie Earle-Levine reports
February 18, 2006

SCOTT Andrews was paying $US2600 ($3450) a month to live in the top floor of a Greenwich Village building when he got notice that rent for his 74sqm apartment would jump to $US3000 a month.He was interested in buying, but escalating prices meant he would need at least $US1 million to secure what he had been renting, and moving into a smaller space was unappealing. He moved out, and on to the Hudson River.

Andrews, 30, who is a commercial property developer, bought a three-bedroom motor yacht, with a living room large enough to fit his two lounges, and now lives at a marina with postcard views of Manhattan. Several of his friends are now doing the same.

His new home is moored at Liberty Landing Marina in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Andrews figures he has great waterfront views and pays a third of the cost of rent, after slip fees and maintenance.

"I thought, I can buy a tiny, second-floor walk-up in Manhattan with no light, and no views for half a million bucks, or spend half of that on a boat ($US250,000) and get a view of Manhattan." His neighbours include teachers, doctors, office workers and finance types.

'Liberty Landing, is the second-largest marina on the east coast of the US with 600 slips, and is part of Liberty State Park. The park is a bonus, a 8km bike path along the water, past Ellis Island and more green than you might see in the city walking for 10 blocks.

It is also favoured by liveaboards, because it is well protected from the sometimes choppy Hudson. Andrews' marina has showers, a laundry, and its own "pub", a dockside bar and grill.
He catches a $US5 water taxi to his offices at the World Financial Centre, splitting his time staying on the boat and at his girlfriend's house in the East Village.

The only downer so far is that the ferry stops running at 8.45pm, so he has to catch a train, which runs all hours, and a taxi to reach his boat. Still, he wakes up on board a light-filled, gently bobbing boat with views to die for. "I wish I'd done it sooner."

It sure sounds attractive, but there are catches.

Leasing a slip, as well as "liveaboard" fees for marina utilities can cost about $US15,000 a year, including expenses to haul the boat out of the water to paint, and for repairs. Then there is a lack of space on smaller boats, and the winter months can be brutal.

At the West 79th Street Boat Basin in Manhattan, about 50 people live on boats with names like "Freedom" and "Orca". Some have two bedrooms, and two decks, and simply hop on and off the island for work and play, buying groceries from nearby Broadway, or by having the food delivered to the boat.

The marina is a mish-mash of luxury boats, houseboats and yachts, many with children's toys, bicycles and everyday house stuff on the decks. When this reporter visited, the owners looked happy, mostly because the weather that day was perfect. "Usually in January, in any one of the past 25 years, it is seven degrees outside. Once it was below 20 degrees for a week," says one man. Owners heat their floating homes with a diesel furnace or electric heater.

But as soon as the snow melts, the marina is inundated with hundreds of phone calls from people who want to live there. They just want to know how to do it. A resident who has lived there for many years recalls that in the 1970s, it was "like the wild, wild west". "It was kind of a hippie community, people who wanted to live in an alternative way in the city. It was very crowded, with too many boats. Even now it is a different kind of person who lives here, someone who has a free spirit."

Freedom has its price. "Unless you live in the most dilapidated apartment building in Manhattan, you wouldn't be concerned about your living space," another liveaboard says. "But if you come home to a boat and it is taking water, well you might have a three-hour project ahead of you."

Liveaboards at 79th Street maintain their year-round status because they staked claims prior to 1997, when the city curtailed year-round dockage from April through October. Anyone new trying to live there permanently will find a four-year waiting list, unlike Liberty Landing, where there is no wait.

Linda Ridihalgh editor of LiveAboard magazine estimates there are 30,000 liveaboards in North America.
"It's a lifestyle that has wide appeal," she says. She grew up near the Mississippi River, and has spent her life on boats. Most people do it for lifestyle, she says, not to save money.

New houseboats cost anywhere from $US50,000 to above $US1 million.
Others buy smaller sailboats and are "transients" -- those who live on boats with V-shaped hulls that are more mobile than houseboats.

Many people buy a stunning, luxury houseboat and fit it out with designer everything. But they only last a week. Some people never get over motion sickness or they realise, it's not easy.

Weekend FT: Traveling light

Layering is the travel trick
February 18 2006

February in New York. Grey skies, snow and wind so fierce it snaps your umbrella like kindling. Last week I saw a squirrel blown out of a tree by a freezing gust. No wonder, when a friend's invitation to a wedding in Sydney arrived in October, I pulled out my suitcase without thinking twice. Never mind the 24-hour flight, warmth was all that mattered. It took a while for the other flip-flop to drop.

Everyone in New York or London wants to go somewhere sunny in February, but what you don't want to deal with is the issue of what to wear. Sure, packing for a resort is a breeze - you just don a bikini and a sarong. But if you are travelling to a country with opposite seasons and have an itinerary that includes a wedding, work and visiting family and friends, what to pack? Especially if the destination, like Sydney, is having such a heatwave that even residents won't venture to the beach?

Although I flee the Manhattan winter each year for Australia, packing the right wardrobe never gets easier. It seems simple but is not. Beyond the idea of light clothing, I am at a loss. Would my silk chiffon pale grey dress work for the wedding? Would it look less "goddess" and more gritty in Sydney than in New York? I was unsure so I weighed up an eye-catching, floral Pucci dress. Then, I recalled a friend who went to a wedding in London wearing a turquoise halter, gold taffeta skirt, turquoise, gold shawl and strappy, gold Jimmy Choos.

"My New York autumn get-up, which would have been perfect at the Pierre, was not in sync with very simple suits and plain hats at awedding at a Regent's Park church," she said. Nor did she fare well walking on cobbled, wet and rainy streets in stiletto heels. Still, some hemisphere-traveller, somewhere, must know what they are doing.

Someone, for example, such as Gail Elliott, the New York-based British designer and former model who splits her time between New York and Sydney, not to mention Costa Rica, Hawaii and Malibu.

"I pack lightly and travel with the staples," Elliott says. "Jeans, boots and then layer." She favours tailored clothes, such as a smart jacket for meetings or events such as New York and London fashion week, and easy silk separates. Her 2006 spring collection will featurea pure silk "gypsy peasant dress" designed with travel in mind: rollit up, pack and, on arrival, steam when showering to freshen up the silk.

Layering is also a pet trick of Vera Wang, the designer best known for bridal wear. "You can create multiple looks depending on your mood and the weather," she says. Wang says leggings can do triple duty: on the plane, sightseeing and under a coat at night. And "a black shift dress or a fabulous skirt can transform any look from day to evening. Pack tissue-thin layers of cashmere and silk separates and accessorise with a gold bracelet."

When travelling to the European fashion shows, Kate Lanphear, a stylist in New York, wears silk-look thermals under pretty dresses. "Accessories weigh you down so I pack only the best of the best - an amazing pair of boots that can look gorgeous with skirts, dresses and jeans," she says. She also likes to buy clothes overseas to take home to New York. In Sydney, she buys select Australian designers including Scanlan & Theodore, Marnie Skillings and Josh Goot.

"If you can't get it into a nice Goyard bag overhead, then forget it," says Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York. He says that even if it is snowing when he departs New York, he will leave his coat at home and wear just a woolly hat and scarf to the airport.

But wouldn't this overhead-only rule be a problem for those, for instance, attending a wedding overseas? "Wear the wedding outfit on the plane and take an extra pair of undies," says Doonan. "It's nice to see people glamorously attired on planes. Jeans topped with a glamorous Zandra Rhodes chiffon top or a Balenciaga jacket could work." It certainly could get you an upgrade. And isn't arriving in high style half the battle?

Lifestyle: Weekend FT: Make that Two Ferraris

By Julie Earle-Levine
Dec 24, 2005

New Bentley Continental GT - tick. Foie gras dinner for 50 - tick. New penthouse apartment - tick. A fresh-cut Christmas tree from Michigan, delivered and decorated - tick. Three levels of Christmas decorations at Tribeca apartment - tick. Week in a private, oceanfront villa on Brazil's Cacoa coast - tick.

Wall Streeters are giving themselves a lavish spread this holiday season. Thanks to bullish earnings at investment banks, the highest bonuses in years - from several hundred thousand dollars up to a reported $20m - are rumoured to be in the financial pipeline, and though most bankers, traders and hedge funds don't get the cash until early 2006, many have been pre-spending what is estimated to be a total of $17bn.

What are they buying? We asked the experts (names have been deleted for obvious reasons).Start with travel. According to Nathaniel Waring, president of Cox & Kings USA, the high-endprivate travel company, one equity manager with his own firm indulged in a $100,000 one-week trip to Brazil for Christmas and new year, staying in penthouse suites in Copacabana, then travelling by private jet to the Txai Resort in Bahai and holidaying in a three-bedroom villa on the beach.

Another New York banker spent $70,000 on a 10-day package at the Ritz Carlton, Grand Cayman, including a four-hour private snorkelling tour, a seven-course dinner cruise for two, and ringside seats for an opening gala with Tony Bennett.A lower-level younger man had booked a $600-a-night room at La Samanna, a luxury resort in St Martin, French West Indies, and then heard about his big bonus and re-booked, taking the $2,700-a-night room.

Then there are the facelifts. Neil Sadick, a dermatologist and cosmetic surgeon with a Park Avenue practice in Manhattan, says: "We are seeing a lot of men getting bonuses and getting major stuff done - liposuction and fillers. They are spending $500 to $10,000 per procedure.Many are repeat customers and are agedfrom their early 30s to their 60s." "There are bankers, traders, executives who want to look younger in high-powered jobs and they come to us. Some of it is for their second wives," says Sadick, who is also president of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery Foundation.

Another popular luxury is food. At Petrossian, the Tiffany of caviar purveyors, executives are buying beluga caviar for themselves and as gifts - which may not sound so over-the-top until you realise the US recently extended its ban on beluga. "One man bought a kilo of beluga, and 50g of Imperial Special Reserve Persicus caviar for $11,400. The beluga was $7,600," a store spokeswoman says.They are also snapping up Oestra caviar at $3,500 a kilo. "We have many New York customers who are buying one to three kilos of Oestra for parties," said Frank Schaefer, chief executive of Caviar Creator, a Miami-based company.

Cars come in for some action too. Maurizio Parlato, president and chief executive of Ferrari North America, says, "We saw a big increase in traffic this month and because our cars are pre-ordered with aone- to two-year waitinglist, this makes a significant impact."The car of the moment is the F430 coupé (starting price $170,045) and the recently launched Ferrari Superamerica, a two-seat convertible, is also selling well. "Some clients are paying cash."

There is strong interest in a new Porsche Cayman due to be released in January and a new Bentley Continental GT ($175,000), according to Brian Miller, general manager of Manhattan Motorcars. "Everyone wants this one. The entertainment types, bankers and hedge fund guys. This year we've sold 200 of them and expect to sell 30 in December. There has also been a lot of activity with Lamborghini ($170,000 to $200,00) and we are seeing the $300,000 version sold out for 60 days. We need more!"

But perhaps more than any other gift, Wall Streeters are buying real estate. Keith Copley, of Sotheby's International Realty, has seen bidding wars in recent weeks, mostly among young hedge fund players. Three are competing for a $6m "celebrity style loft" called the Glass Farmhouse with views of the Hudson River. "All these guys are in their 30s," he says.

Meanwhile, Dolly Lenz, vice-chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, is seeing the trend trickle down to those with "smaller bonuses" of $3m or so. Last week she sold 20 units in one building, 55 Wall Street, a full-service Cipriani Club Residence. "These guys won't get paid until February but they are using all their bonus money to buy and rent out apartments," she says. "It's the usual suspects - Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, the hedge fund guys." Another client, aged 33, got a $20m bonus and bought in Southampton on the ocean for $28m.

And what about the traditional stuff?One Manhattan member of Quintessentially, the global concierge service, is planning to give his girlfriend a Christmas stocking with Crème de la Mer cream, underwear by La Perla, and a platinum, diamond and ruby studded necklace from Cartier's Orchid collection. It makes the rest of what the company has been asked to source - a new Jaguar, Birkin bags (skipping the waiting list of course), vintage wine and jewels - look almost pedestrian by comparison.

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Left High and Dry Cleaned

By Julie Earle-Levine
Feb, 2005

So there you are, ogling all the fantastic gowns on the runway during fashion week, planning what you'll buy for this season, and modelling your spring frocks just in case – when, shock! horror! you see the a large, dark stain that could be steak au poivre, or perhaps red wine, across the front of your dress.

Observing your resolution to Deal With It Now, you immediately send said garment off to the best dry cleaner you know, which successfully removes the stain, but also sends your dress back with a large tear, right across the front. Ruined.

Your dry cleaner insists it must have come in like that, but you know it didn't. Who is to blame? What recourse do you have?

Consumers often hold dry cleaners responsible for stains, shrinkage, melted buttons and tears, and missing clothes. The number of complaints against dry cleaners in the US alone jumped to 5,584 in 2003 from 4,380, the previous year, according to the Better Business Bureau, an independent group run by the US Chamber of Commerce.

But talk to the cleaners themselves, and you (not surprisingly, but maybe begrudgingly) hear a different story.

John Mahdessian, president of Madame Paulette, a New York dry cleaner who looks after classical gowns for Sotheby's and the Metropolitan Opera, says customers who try to remove a stain can cause irreparable damage. "Red wine is a big culprit, but it is not a problem for dry cleaners," he says. On the other hand, "If you use water, or an at-home stain remover, or rub instead of blot, you might get the stain out but the fabric can't be restored."

Indeed, that old stand-by, club soda, turns out not to be such a great idea at all.

"Club soda can be great – God love it – but it is nothing more than water. It is one of the things your grandmother told you and unfortunately is not great advice," says Nora Nealis, executive director of the National Cleaners Association, an industry group.

Water on silk can also create problems. Mahdessian recalls a water leak that damaged 14 Valentino gowns - or $150,000 worth of silk and sequins. Luckily, the water rings were able to managed to be removed, the beads re-stitched and the dresses restored.

According to Mahdessian, dresses can also be defective, or manufacturers fail to provide the right care instructions; indeed, many one-off designer pieces do not have care labels inside at all, leaving it to the cleaner and garment owner to guess how to clean.

Deborah Kravet, the owner of Fashion Award Cleaners on Manhattan's Upper East Side, says there are also "invisible" stains. Clients are often surprised to see new stains, caused when dry cleaning solution interacts with perspiration or other substances. "People put their clothes away dirty. This happens a lot with men's tuxedo shirts."

If Madame Paulette can't fix a garment using conventional cleaning, the client is informed.
"We tell them, you can't wear this the way it is, but we could try something else," said Mahdessian. If a garment is damaged, the store "always steps up and takes responsibility".
Kravet says she also works on clothing up to a "safe" point. If there is concern the fabric could be damaged, then she will ask for a customer's permission to go further. The customer makes the decision and is responsible if the cleaning doesn't work out.

In Paris, Pouyanne-Teinturier, a dry cleaner since 1903, talks to customers about what each garment will require. If a garment is damaged under 'normal' circumstances, or goes missing, the cleaner takes full responsibility, said according to the manager Caterina Gurez, manager.
Meanwhile, in London, Paula Silver, a manager for Jeeves of Belgravia, which has 12 branches throughout the city, says, "We do a disclaimer on receipts. We will try to clean it but there is no guarantee. We also can't guarantee loss of trims and beads."

Nealis says the best way to determine who is at fault when a garment is damaged is to send it to a garment analysis laboratory and ask for a determination.

This may reveal if there is weakness in the fabric or dye (which would be the manufacturer's fault), or if the consumer has tried to fix it, using seltzer or bleach, or had hair spray, medication or even perspiration on the fabric. The last resort can be taking legal action.

In London, the Textile Services Association, an industry group for dry cleaners, also helps offers consumers and will investigate complaints. And then there's always the all-black alternative.

WAYS TO AVOID DRESS DISASTERS
Questions to ask your dry cleaner:
*What percentage of the time do you ruin a garment and what will you do for me if that should happen?
*Can you give me some references?
*Can you give me a satisfaction guarantee?
*Do you guarantee, in writing, all of your work?
Tips for parties
*Apply hair products (hairspray, mousse, gel etc) before getting dressed and allow time to dry before donning The Dress.
*Do the same with perfume.
*Don't iron out closet wrinkles; a hot iron on fine fabrics can dull, pucker and damage the fibres or colours. Expose to light steam by hanging the garment in the bathroom (away from a wall) and running hot water in the shower to allow the wrinkles to disappear naturally. However, do not leave the garment in the bathroom for more than a few minutes: excess moisture can affect fibres, finish and threads.
*Don't wear jewellery that is likely to snag a fine fabric.
*If possible wear dress shields to protect the garment from perspiration and body oils that could disturb sizings and dyes, and cause permanent damage.
*When spots and stains happen, blot don't rub

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Jacques Grange

A Frenchman in New York
By Julie Earle-Levine
Financial Times; Feb 2005

Moments after I am introduced to interior designer Jacques Grange, we are striding past security into the lobby of a gleaming new residential building on New York's Upper East Side. My interview with him aside, he is on a mission: to inspect furniture.

"I check everything. Every detail," he tells me. "I love to control all I do. Each project I make, I control. I do not delegate. This is why I do not do so many projects, because if you grow too much then you disappear."

So far, Grange has mainly decorated individual homes for wealthy patrons including Princess Caroline of Monaco and billionaire cosmetics heir Ron Lauder, causing him to be dubbed the "reigning designer of the international set" and the "ultimate conjuror of magnificence". But we are here today because the perfectionist has finally allowed himself to take on an entire residential building, One Beacon Court, in which we are now standing.

Grange pulls up suddenly in the lobby and waves his hand towards a miserable grey vase being filled with flowers. "I don't want that," he says. "I hate that. It's ugly." He next stops two men carrying a bespoke rug, takes it from them and places it on the floor, just so. He rearranges some furniture, paces back and forth, looks at the sofa, plumps the cushions.

In just a few hours, the Municipal Art Society gala will be held in this space and it has to be perfect.

So, why did Grange take on this vast project, designing kitchens, bathrooms and public spaces for future residents he doesn't know, in collaboration with architect Cesar Pelli? All his other work - combining 18th and 19th century furniture with designs from the 1930s and 1940s - has been for acquaintances or friends with whom he first felt a connection.

It is easy to understand," he says. "I have come from Paris. I am French. It is like a dream to design something on the tower. I love coming to New York and have many friends here. I was friends with Andy Warhol in the 70s. This building is like a realisation of a dream.
"I think there are only three real cities in the world," he adds. "In our world, they are Paris, London and New York. Asia, I do not understand. I have to travel there, and China is the new world, no? But Paris, London, and New York are all the same people. It is a nice world isn't it?"

While he's in town, Grange is also working on a "huge flat" in Manhattan, though he can't say for whom, and puzzling out the US political situation. Failed presidential candidate John Kerry was a childhood friend thanks to mutual family holidays in Saint-Briac, Brittany, France, and Grange can't quite understand why George W. Bush is so popular. "Kerry is not arrogant like Bush," he tells me. "Bush is too much. But people do not realise. It is a shame, no?"

But back to decorating. Grange enjoys visiting India and says there is a "touch" of that aesthetic in One Beacon Court ("the marble in the foyer, the scalloped ceilings"). The lobby walls feature panels of hand oiled parchment, a luxe treatment not seen since the 1930s and a carpet with a pattern also from the 1930s. "The carpet is so beautiful. It is mixed together to give the floor huge personality."

Moving up to the condominiums, which range in price from $3.1m to $26m, Grange has created kitchens featuring polished Brazilian granite floors, Italian stone counter-tops, stainless steel Kohler sinks, Miele dishwashers, and refrigerators and under-the-counter wine coolers from Sub-Zero. Washer/dryers are also there, but concealed.

In the master bathrooms, Grange again chose Kohler for sinks, tubs and bidets, as well as polished marble counter-tops and tiles. The bedrooms and living rooms are delivered empty, though Grange has spoken to some buyers about finishing the interior design job.

Vornado Realty Trust, which owns and manages One Beacon Court, declines to tell me how many units have been sold but some high-profile names, including pop star Beyoncé Knowles and motor racing tycoon Flavio Briatore, have been linked to the building.

One of the things Grange says he likes most about the condos is not their interior but their bird's-eye views of Central Park. He adds that New Yorkers have completely disproved the theory that they would shy away from tall buildings following September 11. But, of course, not all tall buildings are created equal: "That [Donald] Trump builds tall buildings," Grange tells me "but Trump is blah."

Although One Beacon Court is Grange's biggest project to date, it is not his favourite. After a moment of deliberation, he cites Yves Saint Laurent's home in Marrakesh, Morocco.
"It's incredible," he explains. "We worked for five years. The garden is incredible. The house is incredible. We did leathers. It was all very influenced by Matisse." Oh, and that's not to mention the fact that he incorporated Warhol portraits of Saint Laurent's dogs on the walls.

Naturally, Grange also decorates his own homes. They include an old barn in France's Loire Valley, which he converted into a weekend retreat housing leather armchairs of his design, colourful paper kites, rustic-looking wood and rush chairs, and a blue mohair velvet sofa ("I'm very passionate about modern, and timeless attitude"). He also has a cabin in Portugal, which Grange calls "a cheap and totally wild country, like the Hamptons was 100 years ago".

But when I meet him the designer's full attention is devoted to one big building in Manhattan.
Surveying the finished lobby, surrounded by staff vacuuming and polishing the bronze elevator doors, he smiles.

"It is elegant no?," he says, "It is character."

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Flat times for Straight Hair

By Julie Earle-Levine
Financial Times; Apr 2005

Gwyneth Paltrow once famously announced that straightening her hair made her more confident, claiming: "If I have straight hair, I feel like half my outfit battle is over."

But that was before marriage and baby, and to see her now is to see a vision of beatific, almost hippie, Raphael waviness. Indeed, dead straight hair, or as some stylists put it "flat, anorexic hair", has not been seen on the runways or fashion magazines for some time. But is it really time to declare it over? Are our locks loosening up along with our looks?

In New York women are asking for anything but pin-straight hair, according to Spresa Bojkovic, who owns the Damian West salon in Greenwich Village. "They want va-voom, lots of shine and rich-looking waves."

Kelly Reynolds, a New York recruiter for an international real estate company, however, is not one of those women. Reynolds is in her mid-20s and has straightened her hair "forever".
"I have curly hair," she says. "Straight just looks more professional."

Linda Vogel, vice-president and general counsel for Aerosoles, the shoe company, is also staying straight. "The biggest reason for me to go straight is that it is a time saver," she says, noting she prefers to use a Japanese straightening treatment in which the hair stays straight for several months. "I don't have to worry if it is humid about leaving one way and arriving at a meeting with it looking totally different."

Hiro Haraguchi, a New York hair stylist to designer Vera Wang, acknowledges some business women are still asking for pin-straight hair but says it suits very few of them. "For someone with a small, long face or small head, straight hair is a Don't, and I will tell them that." Instead, Haraguchi suggests women get layers around the face and a style that can be easily maintained.
"We are not encouraging straight hair at all," agrees Ian Florey, a senior stylist at Charles Worthington's Mayfair salon in the Dorchester Hotel. He suggests blow drying hair straight then using tongs to achieve "a Sienna Miller" look. (Miller gets her hair done at their Percy Street salon). "We don't want frizz or old fashioned. Soft curl can still look edgy."

Michael Gordon, the British hairdresser and founder and owner of Bumble and Bumble, the New York based hair product company and salon, believes ironed-out straight hair became a "suburban thing" that people had to have. "Let's just say it is very unnatural to have hair so straight it is like curtains," he notes.

Gordon prefers waves and chignons to create "a combination of elegance and texture", and is predicting a return to 1920s style bobs. "Like anything, hair goes through cycles and I think it will soon be about hair with volume and hair that moves."

David John, a stylist at Fred Segal Beauty in Santa Monica, also says that while some women were still asking for straight, blown-out hair, many had embraced curlier, more glamorous hair. "At the Golden Globes everyone was wearing full, soft and natural hair." And, like Gordon, John also believes bobs are the next new thing, along with cleaner, geometric cuts.

In this they are supported by Paul Windle from the Windle Salon in London's Covent Garden, who says straight hair, or "old footballers' wives' hair" is over, and Louise Brooks-style bobs are in.

Curls are also back in style, but messier. "Don't ruin the texture of curly hair by trying to straighten it," says Windle. "Just let it dry naturally while running your fingers through it."
"Stylistically, big hair is officially dead," says Gordon. "Please write an epilogue."

But perhaps a woman should have the last word. According to one Wall Street lawyer she would never go to a client meeting with her hair naturally wavy. "Straight hair, regrettably, will always look sharp, clean and polished and there is nothing we can do to change that."
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, A Compulsion to Consume

By Julie Earle-Levine
Jun 04, 2005

The promise of spring and crisp, new clothes after a miserable winter is reason enough to shop. There is that must-have pouffy skirt to purchase, silky camisoles to snap up and a new swimsuitfor the beach. Most people would agree, retail therapy feels good. Butwhat happens when you cannot stop shopping?

Close to 8 per cent of the US population are considered "hard core" compulsive buyers, according to the psychologists who treat them. For some, this is expressed as dropping $2,000 on Jimmy Choo shoes and not being able to pay the rent; for others it is having the latest DVDs, cameras, computer and sports equipment.

Then there are those who go to see April Benson, a Manhattan psychologist who specialises in the treatment of compulsive buying disorders, because a well-known celebrity has worn a designer item on television.

"I used to get a lot of women coming in after Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) on Sex and the City would wear something on TV," says Benson, author of I Shop. Therefore I am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self. "Jimmy Choos are a big problem for lots of women. They think they can never get enough of what they don't really need."

"Most shopaholics are trying to counteract feelings of low self-esteem through the emotional lift and momentary euphoria that compulsive buying provides," Benson says, and adds that she believes the problem is growing.

Donald Black, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, who has studied compulsive shopping for 12 years, agrees. "There are reports from England, Germany, France, Brazil and Australia to suggest people are consumed with shopping in a way that impairs their emotional, social and financial lives."

He says the few countries that did not have the problem were generally third world countries. "If you think of Africa, or poor parts of Asia, the same conditions don't exist. People spend their time gathering food not at the mall."

But compulsive shoppers don't need to live near a mall to be seduced by retail. "If an individual has an impulse in this direction, then they can get anything they want via the internet, the phone, catalogues and have it delivered express," says Black.

Most of Benson's clients are women and though men have the same lack of control, society refers to them as "collectors" and fewer seek help, she says. Certainly, more is known about compulsive female shoppers, from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Imelda Marcos, whose passion for shoes was well documented. Michele Duvalier, the wife of the former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, bought designer clothes, jewellery, furs and works of art in the middle of that country's economic crisis. Black gives further examples: "Princess Diana was widely reported to be a compulsive shopper, among othedisorders. Even Randolph Hearst almost bankrupted himself in the 1930s because he was a so-called collector."

But what determines if shopping has gone beyond a routine activity? If you shop excessively year round, or every day, or buy multiples of the same product and hide what you buy, then you may have a real problem. It is not about overindulging at Christmas or for birthdays, Black says.

"Women can hide it for a while. Most spouses aren't curious about attics but many get divorces when they learn they can't get a mortgage because of their partner's problem."
Olivia Mellan, a Washington-based psychotherapist who is credited with creating the field of money psychology, sees many couples and says usually one is the spender.

"Often the man will ask his partner to get help and I have addicts who buy Kate Spade handbags, Hermès scarves and then guys who love Rolex watches."

As Carrie said on Sex and the City: "If I spent $40,000 on shoes and I have no place to live, I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes."

IRENE ALBRIGHT HAS 4,000 PAIRS OF MANOLO BLAHNIK SHOES

"I definitely have a problem." But the racks of Manolos take up a relatively small amount of space in her 7,000sq ft loft in Manhattan. It is the rows of Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton shoes, and aisles of clothes by Gucci, Prada, Chloé and Marc Jacobs that are the biggest space hogs.

Albright, an American-born Iraqi, is a self-described fashion whore. "I always say it is better than being a drug addict," she says, admitting to spending thousands of dollars a week on her "closet", which has expanded to become a rental showroom, stocked with designer handbags, suits, shoes and even bikinis.

However, unlike other addicts, Albright has turned her compulsion into a business, and her showroom boasts one of the most comprehensive fashion inventories in New York, which she rents out to various stylists and editors.

Albright buys the current season's must-haves at sample sales and often stores invite her to visit early in the season. She never shops with friends. "I always have a huge pile," she says. "Dolce & Gabbana let me come in early because I buy a lot and I don't want to be bothered when I am shopping. I have to be completely focused."

Albright officially started her collection in the 1990s, when she was working as a stylist.
She had studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and designed opera sets at Juilliard School but ended up working with fashion photographer Bruce Weber, as well as the late Vogue editor Kezia Keeble.

Of her collection, her favourite pieces include the Tom Ford-designed Yves Saint Laurent gold sequined backless dress that Nicole Kidman wore to the Golden Globes last year; a new Gucci purple sequined gown; and a pink Christian Dior gown with ruffles that Renée Zellweger has worn.

"Where have all the Chloes gone!?" she asks no one in particular. One of her four in-house editors, who help to style photo shoots for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, rushes over to tell her the Chloes are all out, as is a pink Alberta Ferretti dress she can't find.

"Oh no! I can't think about anything else but that dress. I should have bought more," said Albright. "Maybe I will."

Albright throws open dozens of cupboards to reveal racks of designer handbags, hats and even jewellery. "Isn't this sick?"

She is wearing a simple, black Michael Kors dress with bare legs, and slip-on shoes.
"When I bought this loft I thought I could just walk next door into my showroom and wear something fabulous, but I don't really. I don't think about getting dressed up when I am in working mode."

Albright rarely gives up anything and finds her annual South Hampton yard sale a trial.
Up to 5,000 shoes can be displayed on the lawn, with prices starting at $40, though they are new and originally cost $400 and up.

"I hand-pick everything and I am very passionate about it," she says. "My staff will edit (and remove items so they are for sale and out of the showroom) and then in the middle of the night I will go back and put it back on the rack."

Albright also admits to concealing how much she really buys. "I am like a wife who doesn't want her husband to know they shop. I hide it. Sometimes I just put it on the rack and one of my editors will ask, have you been shopping again?"

Irene Albright, stylist, 62 Cooper Square, 2nd floor, New York +1 212-977 7350




© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd

Lifestyle: Weekend FT, Jade Jagger at home in Ibiza

By Julie Earle-Levine
Jun 11, 2005

Jade Jagger, daughter of Mick and Bianca, is at home in Ibiza, Spain, slicing chicken for a teriyaki stir fry from the local market for lunch. The view from the kitchen of her 500-year-old Spanish farmhouse is stunning - mountains and greenery as far as the sapphire-blue sea. Jagger stops for a moment to enjoy it, knife poised over white Corian counters. "Yeah, the design of my house just puts you right in it. This is my kind of sanctuary."

Jagger has invited me to the house, which she designed with architect and business partner Tom Bartlett, because she sees it as a showcase of her artistic sensibility. She is perhaps best known as the hard-partying daughter of a Rolling Stone. But now, aged 33, with two children, she is trying to establish a career in design, creating jewellery for Garrard and, more recently, signing on as an interiors consultant to UK-based property developer Yoo, which has about 500 apartments worldwide and 4,000 under construction.

Starting our tour after lunch, Jagger describes her home as "a mix of traditional Jagger bohemian style with a clean, modern feel". "The kitchen is made for a big family that loves to cook, so we have a big Aga stove (best for slow-cooking roasted meats and vegetables) to keep everyone toasty in the colder months," she says. An orange aluminium table by MDF Italia matches custom-sprayed Gio Ponti chairs. The floor throughout the house is industrial rubber that Jagger says adds a spring to her step. "It never creaks, and bounces glasses and youngsters with ease."

Next is her bedroom, or boudoir as she prefers to call it, a former hayloft with floor-to-ceiling windows framing the mountains and an enormous, freestanding, Japanese teak bathtub by William Garvey. "It is as big as the kitchen and used a lot where we as a family can all get clean and beautiful as we relax and talk." Her four-poster bed is also teak. There is a fireplace and a bespoke round futon for "after-bath" relaxation, or if her daughters, Assisi, 12, and Amba, 9, want to be close by. Portraits of her six dogs adorn the walls. A walk-in closet spills with designer clothes and racks of shoes for an event every night, whichever city she may be in. Jagger splits her time between Ibiza and London and is often in New York.

Downstairs, hip hop music thumps. "This is the 'teenager's' room, where they don't study," Jagger says, sweeping past the not-quite teenage girls, who are just back from school.

Outside, there is a seating area with Indian silk throw cushions and statues of the Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesh - all part of the "bohemian" aesthetic. Ganeshes and fabrics she has bought back from India over the years help to "keep my eyes alive", she says. Walking from the main house, we pass one of the house's two pools (with an enormous mirrored disco ball above it) and what look like naked tepees, just upright poles and no covers. "In the winter we take the skins down, but in summer, guests stay there. Kate (Moss) prefers to stay inside the house." The teepees have fur blanket beds where guests can recline on plush cushions and oriental carpets.

The pool, with rendered pink concrete on the inside, turns the water a delicious green. The landscaping around it was difficult, Jagger tells me. "We wanted to do it without changing the feeling that it was a farmhouse with a lot of land. It seems like sabotage sometimes when you put all the concrete down."

A dirt path cuts through green land that is scorched in summer. This leads to a spacious studio where Jagger draws and paints each day. Doors open on to a terrace and an infinity pool. Cactuses in terracotta are eye-catching against white walls. There is also a studio for her boyfriend, musician Dan Williams, and a guest room, where everything is vermilion, like sindoor, the deep, rich blood-red powder used in Hindu rituals and by women to show they are married.
The walls are lined with books, mostly the novels, design, art and inspirational books Jagger says she likes to read. "I think that, sadly, the beauty of a well-read book shelf is sorely underestimated, both as a feature and as a part of daily life." She puts wood in the fireplace and settles into a chair covered with an ornate Indian wedding shawl.

I mention a photo seen in a London tabloid that day - of a paparazzo leering at Jagger in a skimpy orange dress, and she bristles. "Public perception of me can be totally annoying. Sometimes I want to pull my hair out."

Although she sees herself as a serious, self-taught artist who has been creative her entire life, critics are not yet convinced. When her paintings sell for thousands of pounds, they suggest that it is because of the family name rather than talent. Many fashion editors seem to have ignored, or panned, her jewellery; and her Yoo appointment was greeted with some surprise.

"I spend every breathing day thinking about art, and yet somehow, people see me in a different way," Jagger laments. She says she officially embraced art and design as a career when she left modelling to live amid Renaissance works in Florence. Other influences include friends of her mother, such as artists Ross Bleckner and Francesco Clemente. "From my early childhood I thought that Andy Warhol with his whole factory concept was genius," she adds.

At Yoo, she will work closely with designer Philippe Starck, a company co-founder, and with Bartlett. The aim, says the other co-founder, John Hitchcox, was to bring a feminine side to Yoo's apartments; it currently has five, 40-storey buildings under development.

Jagger will help design four concepts, expressing different lifestyles: Boho, Aristo, Disco and Techno. "There has to be different applications in each place, but I think there should be a recognisable philosophy," she says. "Boho is kind of luxurious, with ethnic finishes. Aristo is leather, traditional colours and that kind of English, quintessential racing green. Disco relates back to what I remember of the Studio 54 generation: Halston, carpeted stairs and plush recessed seating." (Her mother was, of course, a fixture at the New York nightclub along with Warhol, whose paintings Jagger has in the Ibiza house.)

"I really love the idea of spreading out art and creativity into products and things that are affordable and attainable," Jagger says.

There is also the draw of trying to turn the sensibility she's showing me today into a fully fledged interior design business with Yoo.
As for the idea of branding herself, she makes no apologies: "I think we have become a society that enjoys lifestyle identity."
Contact Yoo: www.yooarehere.com;tel: +44 (0)20 7009-0100

Lifestyle: Homes, Weekend FT, Donald Trump Jnr

HOUSE & HOME: A chip off the old building block
By Julie Earle-Levine
Oct 22, 2005

It is hard to miss Trump Place when driving up Manhattan's West Side Highway, along the Hudson River. The group of buildings looms over the road and the adjacent Hudson River, like its own city, emblazoned with the Trump name in thick, gold block letters. Get closer and you'll find a stream of limousines waiting to pick up wealthy residents; inside the main tower (one of 16 that will eventually be built), there is a dramatic, domed foyer of Italian marble with custom woodwork.

These are exactly the sort of glitzy, gargantuan developments for which Trump is famous.

But I'm at Trump Place today to visit a decidedly low-key apartment - the one owned and occupied by the son, Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Jr is to all intents and purposes his father's real apprentice. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, he joined the Trump Organization four years ago.

Now, at age 27, he is vice-president of development and acquisitions, responsible for four major US projects and helping to find opportunities in Moscow, Shanghai, Macau and Mexico.
He claims to work 12-hour days, six days a week, so asks me to meet him at home before he heads to the office - located on a floor he shares with his father at the 58-storey Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

When I step off the lift, Trump Jr is waiting outside his open door in a beautifully tailored pinstripe suit - and socks. (He has a shoes-off policy at home because "New York can be, well, dirty.")

The apartment is a well-laid out two-bedroom that he shares with his fiancée, the model and actress Vanessa Haydon, and her dog, Faluffa, a fluffy, white Havanese who bounces around before eventually plopping down on a dog bed filled with toys in the kitchen.

Trump leads me into the living room and settles into a chocolate leather lounge. Trump Place is more than a home for him, he explains. It was also his first construction project, and a tough challenge. Sales started just before the September 11 terrorist attacks, then, as almost everywhere else in Manhattan, suddenly stopped.

"I mean, [the buiding] is 49 storeys tall and right on the water, and it was a sceptical market," Trump says. "But in January, we sold 45 apartments." Eleven months later, the building was sold out.

He has lived here for 18 months and particularly likes being close to the highway, which offers an easy escape route to the country. Where Donald Sr thrives on parties and pageants, his son is happiest hiking and fishing. There's a photo of him with an enormous steelhead trout on display in the apartment to prove it.

The living-room coffee table is stacked with business books and magazines, surrounded by more framed pictures - of his father; his mother, Trump's first wife, Ivana; and Haydon. The décor is somewhat sophisticated, but also a mix of styles. In the lounge, for example, Trump has installed a tree-stump coffee table with a glass top because "it brings nature inside". Haydon is not a fan. "That is definitely going to the country house," she says.

So, given that Trump's name is on the building, why isn't he in one of the penthouse apartments? "It was not an option," he laughs. "I had to buy this apartment. My parents were good at spoiling me with travel and a good education but I had to buy my own place." The purchase price was $900,000, he says, "but I got in before the craze", he refuses to speculate about what it is worth now.

I ask what he thinks about recent claims that Manhattan real estate is overvalued and set for a fall. "As far as a bubble, I don't see anything exploding; I don't see doom and gloom," he says. "After the Enrons, the Dennis Kozlowskis and the advent of the hedge fund business, people now realise real estate is solid."

The week after our September interview he was set to close the sale of a $19m apartment. He'd sold another for $23m earlier in the summer. And "these things happened in August and July and June, which are typically the slowest months of the year," he says.

These values will hold, and rise, he argues, because the baby boomer generation has realised the value of owning a second home and their purchases of condos at the beach and pieds à terre in the city will support the overall market. His advice for twentysomethings such as himself - not surprisingly - is to invest in property as soon as possible.

He and Haydon are talking about that weekend house in the country (where that tree-stump table will go) as well as children and a second dog. They're due to wed next month and are watching their waistlines when I visit. But both tell me they love to cook and, judging by the equipment in their kitchen, which is positioned in the main living room, and their dining table set topped with candelabras, I believe them.

As Trump gets ready to be photographed for this piece, he asks how his hair looks. For the record, it's nothing like his father's much-ridiculed combed-over coif: it's dark brown, long for an executive, and smoothed back from a boyish but determined face.

It must be hard to be the son of someone so famous and infamous, successful and self-promotional - to suffer through the constant comparisons and the, often unflattering, assumptions. But, says Trump, "I have dealt with scepticism about me, and I think people are surprised by my experience."

Having visited construction sites since he was able to walk, Trump followed in his father's footsteps by enrolling at Wharton. But instead of starting work immediately after graduation, he took a year off to party in Aspen. "It was fun," he says. "But then I realised I loved real estate." And he felt ready to join the family business. "I know who my father is," he says, "and I know he doesn't accept failure."

Aside from Trump Place, Trump has overseen the transformation of the art deco Delmonico Hotel, at 59th Street and Park Avenue, into 35 storeys of luxury condominiums, now called Trump Park Avenue. He is also helping to look after the 90-storey Trump hotel and condominium development in Chicago, Trump International Hotel and Tower Fort Lauderdale and Trump Las Vegas.

Those who work with father and son say they handle problems differently. Donald Sr can be "explosive", and is known as a brash, fierce negotiator. (He recently sued his business partners for selling a parcel of land and three Trump Place buildings to developers for $1.76bn, a huge price but one which he claims was 40 per cent below another offer.) Donald Jr prefers a softer touch.

His diplomacy is on display during another tour, of a $31.5m duplex penthouse at Trump Park Avenue. When I comment on the chandeliers in the elevators, the gold doorknobs everywhere, and the frescoes covering the entire ceiling (modelled after the ones at Donald Sr's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach), he responds easily. "He thought they would be a nice touch.," Trump says. "When people buy into a Trump building, buyers expect a slice of Trump."

The son may not share his father's taste, but he can still sell it.