April 15

Shirt lifters:

Hirsute:

Marc Jacobs Nuptials

American fashion designer Marc Jacobs (b. 1963) married his boyfriend Charlie Defrancesco April 8*. “Char” Defrancesco, a former model who owns the candle company Lit (getlitbychar.com), resides with Jacobs in a lavish Greenwich Village townhouse. But a few days ago Jacobs closed on a water-front house on the northern tip of Manursing Island (Rye, NY), a stone’s throw from the Connecticut border. For $9.175 million the newlyweds gained 5,800 sq. ft. of historic architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, 6 bedrooms, 5 baths and a swimming pool with views of Long Island Sound.

*As Pope Francis would say, “Who am I to judge?”, but this entire affair is so classy that their engagement (April 5, 2018) took place at Chipotle, a fast-food restaurant. And “Char” might be able to charge $64 for a candle, but his company skipped out on hiring editors for his web site, which contains several grammatical errors in the advertising copy. Just sayin’.

Fine and dandy. But for your blogger, this news item fuels other interests – the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (he designed my college campus at Florida Southern) and classic cars. 

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) died just five years after designing this house for famed auto importer Maximilian E. Hoffman (1904-1981). Hoffman was an Austrian-born race car driver who had Jewish blood on his father’s side, so he wisely relocated to NYC in the late 1930s. He established the Hoffman Motor Company, a trailblazing importer of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche and Alfa Romeo luxury automobiles. 

In 1954 Hoffman hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design an automobile showroom at 56^th Street and Park Avenue (sadly demolished in 2013), and Wright was gifted with both a red and black Mercedes sedan and a gull-wing roadster (!) as part of the commission. 

The Max Hoffman house was authentically restored top to bottom in 1995 under the ownership of Tom Tisch, son of CBS president and CEO Laurence Tisch, although I must admit that Frank Lloyd Wright would roll over in his grave at the black metal fence that now surrounds the pool terrace (not pictured, but those damned insurance requirements!).