For two years, co-op shareholders at the Pierre, including Tory Burch and Art Garfunkel, have been fighting over the fate of the storied hotel and co-op, where a $2 billion offer from the Khashoggi family is on the table. curbed.com/article/pierre-ho…

The supermodel Linda Evangelista bought her 4,000-square-foot penthouse condo in the Spears Building in 2001. curbed.com/article/linda-eva…

The Oheka Castle, on Long Island, has 127 rooms, a 72-foot-long ballroom, 110,000 square feet of interiors, and nine reflecting pools. It played Xanadu in ‘Citizen Kane,’ hosted Taylor Swift in jodhpurs for her “Blank Space” video, and was the backdrop for countless weddings, including the one between Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The 23 acres of gardens were laid out by the Olmsted brothers. A restoration job that started in 1984 cost $40 million, possibly the most expensive in U.S. history for a private building. That restoration then turned it into a luxury hotel, a job carried out by developer Gary Melius, who is now being forced to sell after declaring bankruptcy. It’ll be auctioned on October 27 with no minimum bid. It was built on the eve of the Jazz Age for a German-born banker, Otto Kahn, who reportedly served as the inspiration for Parker Brothers’ Monopoly Man. He had been blocked from joining country clubs because he was Jewish and instead built his own equivalent — competing with the Vanderbilts to make the country’s largest private home. It barely escaped despoilment when Robert Moses tried to build the Northern State Parkway through the estate’s grounds, saved only when Kahn more or less paid him off to remap the road; a sharp curve in the highway was, until Robert Caro came along and revealed the lurid tale, the only visible evidence. Read more: curbed.visitlink.me/QAHu6f

Taylor Swift rode horses here. Logan Roy played ‘boar on the floor.’ And the exterior played Xanadu. Long Island’s 1919 Oheka Mansion is up for sale. curbed.com/article/oheka-cas…

Jemima Kirke is synonymous with Brooklyn. A large part of that stems from her role as Jessa on ‘Girls,’ but it’s also her real-estate choices: She has bounced around the borough for well over a decade, picking up and selling a townhouse in Carroll Gardens, followed by her pink-heavy fun house in Red Hook, which she sold for $2.5 million in 2024. So it was a little surprising to see that Kirke and her mother, Lorraine, had purchased a Chelsea co-op apartment for $2.35 million this month, according to recent property records. The Kirkes’ 1,750-square-foot apartment is on the 11th floor of London Terrace Towers, a prewar complex of four corner buildings with a nearly block-long interior courtyard. While the 700-unit development is close to the High Line and the neighborhood’s blue-chip galleries — a likely boon for Kirke, who has long seen herself as more of a portrait painter than an actress — London Terrace itself is also a bit of a puzzling leap after townhouse living. Read more: curbed.visitlink.me/hGmk1m

On a scale from Saks Fifth Avenue to a subway sax player, where does ‘Verity’ and ‘Devil Wears Prada 2’ star Anne Hathaway fit? curbed.com/article/anne-hath…

The best NYC apartment listings available for rent this week in neighborhoods including Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Crown Heights, Weeksville, Kensington, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. curbed.com/article/best-nyc-…

The former ‘Girls’ star and repeat Brooklyn townhouse buyer purchased a three-bedroom in Chelsea’s London Terrace Towers with her mother, Lorraine Kirke. curbed.com/article/jemima-ki…

The downtown decorative-arts studio Sunfish, run by newlywed couple Kevin Hollidge and Julia Eshaghpour, is not known for one specific look or approach. Instead, over the past few years, Sunfish has established itself as the go-to for furniture pieces with a fine-art pedigree, creating custom work such as a mahogany headboard painted with birds-of-paradise or a ceiling mural for the musician Lizzy McAlpine. The seven furniture collections Sunfish has released since its founding early in the pandemic have not only showcased the couple’s increasingly giddy aesthetic, but also their desire to speed, unimpeded, through design’s rich catalogue of materials and methods. They were introduced to a new one — straw marquetry — when a friend lent them a book on Art Deco legend Jean Dunand. Straw marquetry uses flattened, often dyed stalks of rye or wheat to create images (much like wood marquetry), and Sunfish’s first encounter with it was an example of the highest order, embedded in one of the great interiors of the 20th century: the 1920s San Francisco penthouse of American industrialist Templeton Crocker. “We use a lot of imagery and hand-painted elements in our furniture, and with straw marquetry, we saw an opportunity to take that and merge it with the actual materiality of the pieces,” Eshaghpour told Jill Singer earlier this month. Singer speaks with the couple about their latest collection, which debuts in October at Assembly Line Annex: curbed.visitlink.me/FvtSZ0

Despite its shaky financing, the city’s universal-2K program launched September 10, as an inaugural class of 2-year-olds joined its 3K and pre-K elder classmen at Brownsville’s Friends of Crown Heights Educational Center. curbed.com/article/first-day…

The pair, who have been friends since high school, co-purchased the 1888 neo-Grec brownstone in Harlem for $2.9 million in 2023. curbed.com/article/julia-fox…

A visit with the downtown design studio Sunfish reveals a new technique they’ve been working with, straw marquetry. The designers have created an entire collection of furniture and decor covered in straw to debut in October at Assembly Line Annex. curbed.com/article/inside-st…

It’s midnight on a steamy August day and Christopher Payne is standing in the middle of a Brooklyn-bound lane of the Battery Tunnel, a mischievous smile on his face. Forty years ago, as a college student at Columbia, Payne says, he would occasionally appropriate a subway-station sign. “Now, here I am,” he says, “getting paid by the MTA to go places I shouldn’t.” The tube is closed to cars so that its 400,000 wall tiles can be cleaned — and so that Payne, who for the past 20 years has built a vast catalogue of industrial photography, can shoot an aspect of the city’s transit system the public never actually sees. Shooting the off-limits MTA-related sites sent Payne, over the course of five months, from crawling through a bus factory in Sacramento to wrangling subway-car builders in Lincoln, Nebraska. One recent day, it had the trim 57-year-old dangling from a catwalk atop the Marine Parkway Bridge. “This is great!” Payne shouted as we surveyed the panoramic view from 200 feet above the Rockaway Inlet. “But it’s too pretty!” Opening and closing the bridge’s giant iron deck didn’t inspire Payne, either. Instead, he wanted to photograph looking out from inside the bridge’s tiny control room, which is suspended above the four lanes of traffic, but a grimy window wouldn’t open far enough to angle Payne’s camera properly. He asked — politely but insistently — for the window to be removed. Once the ancient screws were stripped, and that plan foiled, Payne and his assistant rigged up a support arm so he could extend his lens three feet out the window, toward a battleship-gray beam that anchors the 89-year-old span. Payne outlines the significance of these photographs — which are now featured in a new exhibition installed in 45 light boxes across four subway stations — and how they came together: curbed.visitlink.me/WBE2UN

The photographer’s new exhibition will be installed in 45 light boxes in four subway stations, including Grand Central and Atlantic Avenue. “I’m not interested in just documenting things,” he says. “I’m interested in the wow factor.” curbed.com/article/christoph…

The recent arrivals of Los Angeles’s two enormous floating amoebas — the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed by Peter Zumthor, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects — remind us of a familiar specter from the not-so-distant past, writes Sam Lubell. “The blob, that hated symbol of globalist excess, might be back.” But wait a minute — didn’t the novelty of using powerful modeling software to make crazy new forms fade away years ago? Hadn’t a building type that initially looked like liberation from the limits of analog architecture hardened into a predictable placeless formula? And haven’t we been burned enough by the institution-crushing costs and maintenance headaches required to keep an idiosyncratic museum running, not to mention the (mostly false) promise that just a single good one could revive a city? Apparently not. We never stopped loving a good alien landing. The blob continues to satisfy our attraction to organic shapes and spectacle and looks incredible on our Instagram feeds. The difference now, or at least the hope, is that it can graduate from its position as a shallow status symbol and earn its keep. If the blobs of the ’90s and early 2000s were exclamation points, these blobs offer prepositions: over, across, between. They have, in theory, shifted from billboard to terrain: less “look at me,” more “hang out with me.” Lubell explores the promise of these new amorphous arrivals: curbed.visitlink.me/Hkz2To

The audience at the New York City Ballet is younger than ever before. Here, NYCB diehards share their favorite seats, the shows on their must-see lists, and where to eat and drink before and after the final curtain. curbed.com/article/how-to-sp…

The new Lucas Museum and LACMA galleries seem to signal that the blob is back. But instead of representing global excess, they seem to promise an era of participation; more public landscape than objects in a landscape. curbed.com/article/lucas-mus…

Here are some apartments to buy in New York City for under $1 million, including options in Lenox Hill, Sunset Park, Prospect Park South, and the Upper West Side. curbed.com/article/nyc-apart…

For nearly 50 years, a couple have cultivated a wild private garden in their loft in the middle of the Garment District. curbed.com/article/cactus-ap…

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