Posted by Leonard Steinberg on December 16th, 2013

12 East 69th Street was just listed for $ 114 million……oops, and $ 77,000.00….who came up with that price? Did they forget a faucet in their calculations and just tag it on at the end? The $ 100m+ New York real estate listing has become quite fashionable, and it seems most of the properties listed at this stratospheric level (although still well below mega-London pricing) are finished out to appeal to a Mega-millions lottery winner: do really, really rich people truly have such gaudy, dreadful taste? The timing for listing is perfect as a Mega Millions lottery drawing for an estimated  $550 million nears.

I receive so many mailers and magazines weekly showcasing super-high-end properties in Manhattan, the rest of the USA and from around the world, and I would say YES, the bulk of the super-high-priced properties I see are mostly finished out in the most hideous, layered, tacky way, its actually quite hilarious. Versailles is an on-going theme: gilded details that remind you Marie Antoinette was just like you, massive stairways from which to descend when the Feds come to get you, jack-hammer-ready wildly patterned onyx and marbles, enough home-tech to launch a Chinese space shuttle, grotesquely carved exotic woods banished from far off places for being too weird even the jungle animals are praying for their extinction….and the list goes on. Those New Jersey housewives would LOVE it all, if only they won the Lottery drawing this week to pay for it.

Now that New York real estate has to continue to ‘raise the bar’ I am seeing some excesses in finishes that are just bad: Surely that Candy & Candy-style gilded-oligarch-chic is not the next big trend?

To those less fortunate, the other 99,999999999999999%: don’t fret. These catastrophic lapses of human judgement are really good for the economy. It takes many long hard hours of incredibly well paid,  highly skilled labor to create these dreadful messes….and as much effort and cost to gut them and replace them with something equally vile……all the while producing tons of income dollars, tax dollars ($3m in transfer and mansion taxes alone)and economic activity which benefits all. More importantly these monuments to vulgar wealth provide us all with a moment of humor and cheer, perfectly timed of course: if this is what you have to buy with your lottery winnings, think again.