My husband Rossano left for Honduras last week (don't ask me where that is) and I am not a happy camper. He's doing a TV show called L'Isola dei Famosi, which means "Island of the Famous." It's the Italian version of Survivor but with celebrities. I am freaking out! He's going into the jungle where you can get all kinds of diseases, and he went through a thousand pills and malaria shots. For some reason the show asked me to send his wedding tux to this hotel in Honduras. I said, "You think I'm going to send a $10,000 Dolce & Gabbana suit to Honduras? UPS takes like three weeks. It's never going to arrive because somebody will steal it." Countries like that are beautiful but they are very poor, OK? So I am passing on that. Rossano is just looking for adventure. But I am really slightly worried. In the jungle there are no mobile phones, no computers and no cigarettes, but there are plenty of tarantulas, cockroaches and snakes. I hate those slimy things. I can deal with the sharks on Wall Street and the barracudas on Madison Avenue, but this is really too much. And I honestly cannot see Rossano eating snakes unless it is smoked eel at Nobu.
It certainly wasn’t going to look right in one of those swaths of raw space near St. Marks Place or in any of the other 138 spaces, downtown and uptown, that the couple checked out in the course of a year in the mid-1990s.
The Sheraton-style table required just the right setting, as did the circa 1790 Hepplewhite serpentine-front sideboard. So, apparently, did Ms. Houlgrave, 46, a model who has worked for Glamour, Vogue and Self magazines, and who has a second career as a wedding and fashion photographer.
“I didn’t want to live in the stinky East Village,” she said with characteristic directness. “It was so unattractive. I am from Richmond, Virginia.”
Later, down in edgy Alphabet City, a rather different crowd raised the roof at the public unveiling of Varney's latest design project, a duplex cocktail lounge and piano bar called Ella.
At first glance, Varney, 69, hardly seems an obvious choice to decorate a bar on Avenue A. As chronicled in "Houses in My Heart," the designer built his considerable reputation working in far more upscale enclaves.
"These guys were spending more than $250 billion a year," Robert Frank said. "They bought mansions in Greenwich and Palm Beach. They bought art for $100 million a painting."
Frank, author of "Richistan," says the enormous amounts of money earned by Wall Street elite made them practically a nation unto themselves.
"They just looked at the guy with the bigger house, the nicer Ferrari, the better artwork," he said. "And it was all competitive spending."
