The Cultured Girl

This month’s issue of Vanity Fair is full of good reads, from Christopher Hitchens’s history of the blowjob to Robert Levine’s profile of legendary Ford Mustang designer Carroll Shelby. But by far the most morbidly fascinating is Nina Munk’s feature, “Greenwich’s Outrageous Fortunes,” which traces the excesses of the noveau riche in the fabulously wealthy bedroom community.

Since the 1920s, Greenwich has been home to massive estates owned by the likes of Zalmon Gilbert Simmons (how’s that for a name?) of Simmons mattress fame and various heirs to the Rockefeller and Morgan fortunes. But today, it’s being overrun by millionaire hedge fund managers who are building homes that put the 100-plus acre estates of yesteryear to shame. And of course, developers are demolishing the stately older homes to clear the way for mansions as large as 32,000 square feet, which, as the author points out, is pretty much the size of the Taj Majal. Writes Munk:

“Let’s think for a brief moment about style, scale, & taste. The average new home in America is 2,405 square feet. In Greenwich, as far as I can make out, the average new home of a hedge-fund manager is 15,000 square feet, about the size of a typical industrial warehouse. For example: the hedge-fund manager Edward Mulé, of Silver Point Capital, and his wife, Marian, are putting up a new 15,045-square-food residence on Dairy Road. Papers filed at Town Hall show plans for a separate 3,296-square foot pool house on the Mulé estate, plus an outdoor tennis court.”

And that’s just the beginning of the excesses detailed in the article. Honestly, it’s like a car wreck you just can’t turn away from.