Table of contents for Oct-15 in Robb Report

TO PRODUCE Orchid for the grand stairwell of a client’s Connecticut home, Sharon Marston (sharon marston.com) and a team of glassblowers painted each of the 10-foot-long light sculpture’s handblown, amber-toned blossoms with 24-karat gold leaf. “I’ve been working with glass for quite a few years and really wanted to apply a different finish,” says Marston, whose eponymous studio is in London. “[This glass] is such a wonderful color, and embellishing it with the gold leaf only enhances it. It also catches the light really beautifully.” With more than 650 blooms and stems that seem to spill weightlessly toward a tapered point, the commission is an elaborate combination of creativity and craft that started quite simply. “I really liked the idea of having tumbling, cascading petals,” says the onetime jewelry designer,…

“I GOT TO KNOW who Ferdinand Berthoud was through my grandfather’s pocket-watch collection,” recalls Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, a copresident of Chopard. “The more I read about him, the more I admired what he did.” In honor of the 18th-century horologist, Scheufele—who has built up his own small collection of Berthoud timepieces over the years—is launching a limited production of contemporary watches under Ferdinand Berthoud’s moniker. Although Berthoud figures as a brand within the Chopard group, these watches are assembled at a separate company facility in Fleurier, Switzerland, with its own staff, mechanical technology, and design codes. Like many students of watchmaking history, Scheufele came to recognize Berthoud’s contributions to the craft by poring through his extensive writings and analyzing the refinements the watchmaker made to marine chronometers—the most exacting form of…

THE DIAMONDS in Valérie Messika’s imaginative jewelry designs appear to float, with no obvious metal settings to detract from their pure sparkle. “Diamonds are already a creation; I’m only here to put [them] on the skin of a woman,” says Messika. The 39-year-old Parisian jeweler herself dons layers of diamond bracelets, rings, and necklaces comfortably, with a casual elegance, and it makes sense that she would wear them with ease: She was a child when she acquired her adoration for such stones from her father, the long-established diamond dealer André Messika. Today, her signature light and airy creations, including the Maya cuff and Swan ring (shown), are well known in the world of high jewelry. In contrast to those minimalist works, Messika has fashioned a series of 37 more-lavish diamond…

ART Rather than secreting her vast collection away, Walton established a 200,000-square-foot museum. Alice Walton—an heiress to the boundless fortune reaped by the retail behemoth Walmart—made her first art acquisition as a preteen, when she purchased a $2 reproduction of Picasso’s Blue Nude. Since then, the scion has taken a patriotic turn with her acquisitions, amassing a comprehensive collection of U.S. art that ranges from Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits (purchased in 2005 for a reported $35 million) to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of Dolly Parton. Rather than secreting her vast collection away, Walton established Crystal Bridges, a 200,000-square-foot museum that is said to have cost $1.2 billion to create. Located in Bentonville (the Walton clan’s Arkansas hometown), the institution houses a $500 million collection featuring Warhols, Rothkos, and Pollocks, as…

JEWELRY In 2012, Sotheby’s auctioned 63 lots of Magnificent Jewels from the Collection of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, featuring a diamond bow brooch formerly owned by Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. The princess inherited it from her mother, Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who was believed to have received it as a wedding gift from her cousin, Tsar Nicholas II. The storied brooch—which was spirited safely out of Russia during the revolution and worn by the princess to the coronations of King George VI in 1937 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1953—sold for $842,500, tripling Sotheby’s expectations. Gavel to gavel, the entire collection drew an astounding $15.5 million (surpassing a high estimate of $9 million) as bidders around the world clamored for jewels once worn by American royalty: Jayne Wrightsman.…

Art WHEN THE FONDATION Louis Vuitton opened in Paris last October, the $143 million museum triggered a whirlwind of excitement for its bold Frank Gehry design and its stash of major artworks ranging from Henri Matisse’s The Dance to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Grillo. Equally enticing for connoisseurs was the glimpse the museum gave into the well-curated tastes of its mastermind, Bernard Arnault. An avid art collector, the chairman and CEO of the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton put his sophisticated stamp on the groundbreaking institution, furnishing it with works from his personal collection and securing original commissions for its gallery walls. Arnault’s background in fashion has no doubt inspired his passion for art, and he brings the two worlds together as no one else can. At its CEO’s behest,…

Watches THE SWISS WATCH industry, long known for its opacity, holds few secrets for Thomas Mao. Not only has he provided management consulting services to many of the top brands in his capacity as a trained economist and academic, but his activities as the founder of ThePuristS.com (one of the first online communities to focus on high-end collecting) and now PuristSPro have actively disseminated his rich insider perspective. Mao’s interest in high complications dates as far back as his early teenage years. His acquisitions in later life have followed a more meandering path, according to “the intersection of personal taste and financial ability,” as he puts it. Mao’s horologic preferences, while not ofeat, steer away from popular models. In his early years, he explains, he “tended to pick things that…

Watches MANY WATCH enthusiasts take a reserved approach to revealing their brand allegiances. But Shawn Carter, better known as Jay Z, is renowned for rapping about his affections for specific brands, most notably Audemars Piguet, Rolex, and Hublot. In fact, in a body of work that currently spans 19 solo and collaborative albums, Carter has made more than a dozen watch-brand references—though some of those lyrical shout-outs reflect business ventures as much as they do his own affinities as a collector. In “Otis,” his 2011 song with Kanye West, Carter dropped the line “New watch alert—Hublots.” The lyric, as confirmed in Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s 2012 biography Empire State of Mind, foreshadowed the rapper’s collaboration with the Swiss brand. (Carter had previously partnered with Audemars Piguet in 2005.) “Here we have…

WINE Raised in Evanston, Ill., the financier, master bridge player, and New York City restaurateur Roy Welland developed an appreciation and passion for wine by periodically auditing the collection of his father, who regularly shared with his children bottles from their birth years. (Happily, Welland and his siblings were all born in excellent vintages.) Welland began to buy seriously in the late 1980s, while working on Wall Street. Ultimately, he amassed a collection that was once valued at approximately $15 million and comprised 100,000 bottles, which helped fill the cellars of his two former Manhattan restaurants, Washington Park and Cru. “Coinciding with my restaurant interests, I traveled to Burgundy frequently and befriended many of the region’s winemakers,” Welland wrote in the catalog for Wally’s Auctions, which sold his entire collection…

A Stand on Ceremony FORMAL EVENTS usually call for a tuxedo—that’s why they call them black-tie occasions—but Pal Zileri (palzileri.com) suggests an alternative to the traditional tux: a single-breasted silk dinner suit ($2,995, including the pants) worn over a superfine merino-wool turtleneck ($295). “We created a clean, cool look with evening-wear jackets and turtlenecks,” says Mauro Ravizza Krieger, the brand’s new creative director. He says the look was inspired by Halston, his former employer, who donned a white or black turtleneck and sleek jacket for nearly every occasion. Krieger has been instrumental in transforming Pal Zileri; the 45-year-old brand had been known for its classic menswear, but it has become a source for more stylish yet still exceptionally tailored suits and sportswear. —JILL NEWMAN ELEMENTS OF STYLE Sartorial Electives THE…

IT HAS BEEN SAID that in 1968, no production car could cover a kilometer faster than the V-8-powered Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale—not even the Lamborghini Miura or the Ferrari Daytona, each of which was equipped with a V-12 engine. Alfa Romeo engineers understood that speed is a function of weight as well as engine power, and with its tubular aluminum frame and aluminum body panels, the 33 Stradale weighed less than 1,600 pounds, making it far lighter than its higher-powered contemporaries. The same principle of lower power and lesser weight guided the design of Alfa Romeo’s new 4C Spider—the convertible counterpart to the 4C Coupe, which was a Robb Report Best of the Best honoree this year. The mid-engine two-seater features lightweight construction, an efficient power train, and plenty of…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, on a crisp spring evening in Barcelona, an eager and thirsty crowd assembled outside the Catalan capital’s Palo Alto Market, a hefty former factory wrapped in the bright pinks and purples of climbing bougainvillea. Just after the last drops of daylight had slipped away, the industrial structure’s heavy doors swung open, allowing the patrons, sober and silent, to file inside. Darkness and several dozen mirrored stands awaited, each topped with a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a single glass. After each guest claimed a lectern, a series of scalloped partitions descended from the ceiling to an ethereal soundtrack. With no distractions or further instruction, the patrons, isolated within their shimmering private chambers, had little more to do than pour themselves glasses of the new 2005 vintage. Despite…

ON NOVEMBER 11, 2014, when an anonymous individual bid around $24 million for a pocket watch at a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva, some observers perhaps imagined the buyer to be a pampered potentate determined to prevail at any cost. Others, however, surely recognized that this price—the highest yet paid for a timepiece at auction—was insignificant compared to the rarity of the piece in question, which remains the most advanced watch made before the era of computer-assisted design. Completed in 1932, this intricate 18-karat-gold specimen by Patek Philippe features more than 900 parts and 24 functions, including chimes, a perpetual calendar, and a celestial map of the sky above the original owner’s Fifth Avenue residence in New York. The banker Henry Graves Jr. did not commission the Henry Graves Jr. Supercomplication…

SPORTS MEMORABILIA Marshall Fogel played baseball when he was growing up in the 1950s and became interested in learning the game’s history. In the 1980s he attended his first baseball memorabilia expo, in Chicago, and spent several thousand dollars on numerous pieces, including a 1953 Topps Mickey Mantle card in mint condition. That experience, says Fogel, “lit the match.” Since then he has continued to acquire trading cards and other rarities, and today, in his 70s, Fogel owns one of the world’s finest collections of baseball memorabilia. It includes Babe Ruth’s handprint on a signed sheet of paper, a Sandy Koufax game-used glove, and the uniform that Joe DiMaggio wore when he hit his last home run, during the 1951 World Series. Among the more than 200 game-used bats in…

Automobiles WHEN PETER MULLIN saw a Delahaye for the first time, 35 years ago, it sparked an enduring fascination with French automobiles, especially prewar models. “They were the apex,” he says, “the ultimate combination of shape and styling, engineering, and performance.” Within six months of that introduction, Mullin began amassing his collection, acquiring prewar vehicles built by Delahaye, Talbot-Lago, Delage, Bugatti, and other French manufacturers. “They all melded into one beautiful focus,” he says. Today, Mullin’s collection is more than 150 cars strong. The best examples are displayed at the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, Calif. They include a 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic that is one of only two Type 57SCs in existence and a 1934 Voisin C-25 Aerodyne, which won Best of Show at the Pebble Beach Concours…

Thoroughbreds SHEIKH MOHAMMED bin Rashid Al Maktoum has nearly cornered the market on Thoroughbreds. His breeding operation, Darley Stud, has farms in England, Ireland, the United States, Australia, and Japan, and stands as many as 50 stallions at any given time. Sheikh Mohammed, who ascended to vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and emir of Dubai nine years ago, first became interested in Thoroughbred racing in the late 1960s, while he was a student at England’s University of Cambridge. In 1992 he established his own racing stable in Dubai, named Godolphin after one of the 18th-century Arabian stallions from which, it is said, all modern Thoroughbreds have descended. (Darley is another.) His horses spend the winters at Godolphin, training for the series of races that Dubai…

JEWELRY This much is known: Danielle Steel has written 142 books that have sold an estimated 800 million copies worldwide; she set two Guinness World Records for the longest time spent on the New York Times best-seller list; and she has been published in 43 languages in 69 countries. What is less known is that Steel has amassed a stunning and significant collection of jewelry over the years. Though press-shy on the topic (Steel declined, through a representative, to be interviewed or even acknowledge a collection), she occasionally shares with her hungry fans small gems about her private life, revealing preferences that range from the straightforward (bangle bracelets) to the spectacular (a display of Graff diamonds at an antique fair in Holland once drew an enthusiastic “Major, Major Wow!!!” from…

ART David Geffen certainly knows talent when he sees it. The 72-year-old entertainment mogul made his first million at 27, working as an agent for a previously unknown singer-songwriter named Laura Nyro. His Asylum, Geffen, and DGC record labels helped introduce the world to Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, and many other acts. In 1994, with the director Steven Spielberg and the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, he cofounded DreamWorks SKG. And even fickle Broadway has bent to his touch: Geffen was a producer on the megahits Cats and Dreamgirls. It is no surprise, then, that his vision and tastes have translated to an art collection that has few if any peers. Though intensely private about his collection, Geffen has shown…

WINE A senior adviser to Goldman Sachs and a co-owner of Colgin Cellars, Joe Wender began exploring wine in the early 1970s, when he was a student at Harvard Business School. “I just found wine to be so interesting and delicious,” says the collector, who grew his 25,000-bottle collection slowly over the course of many years. “In the ’70s, wines were relatively inexpensive, but I had no money to buy them. And I was living in New York City for most of the ’70s and ’80s, so I had limited space to store the wines. Once I bought property in California, I started buying in greater amounts from wine merchants, directly from wineries, and from other collectors.” Wine education played an essential role in shaping Wender’s destiny—both personally and as…

ART At the age of 14, Liu Yiqian quit school to help his mother sell handbags. He later became a taxi driver. Then, in the 1980s, he started playing the stock market and discovered he was very good at it. Now the 51-year-old chairman of the Shanghai-based Sunline Group wealth-management company—and a billionaire—Liu is the proud owner of a $400 million art collection, for which he has built two private museums to house and display. The collection, which is curated by his wife, Wang Wei, focuses on traditional, revolutionary, and modern Chinese artworks, and includes scrolls, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and decorative works. A few of his most valuable pieces include a Ming-era silk tapestry (for which he paid $45 million at auction); a rare Song-dynasty vase ($14.7 million); and a…

Watches CONNECTIONS, FORESIGHT, and timing allowed Marcus Margulies, a British watch collector and retailer, to assemble one of the most important collections of early Audemars Piguet wristwatches outside the company museum. Margulies enjoyed an education in the subject almost from birth. His father was in the watch business, and as a young man Margulies served apprenticeships at several Swiss watch factories. This experience, along with the knowledge derived from his long relationship with Audemars Piguet, provided a crucial advantage as wristwatch collecting came into its own in the mid-1980s. Vintage Patek Philippe and Rolex examples were traded regularly during that period, but dealing in the much smaller production of Audemars Piguet, much of which was not cataloged with regular serial numbers, required Margulies’s specialized knowledge. Like many collectors at the…

NEW BOND STREET’S boutiques did not lack for foot traffic on a particular summer day earlier this year, but perhaps no shop on London’s famed thoroughfare was as lively that afternoon as Bally. Inside, on the store’s second level, clients gathered around as a master craftsman used various cloths to apply dye to men’s leather shoes. He was layering and achieving different textures in the way that an artist puts paint to canvas. It was a special one-time event, a chance for patrons to see firsthand the company’s capabilities, and so customers continued to stroll in as the artisan worked before his rapt audience. Some considered acquiring new customized pairs, selecting bespoke touches—finishes and hand-painted symbols—in high-voltage hues, including purples and greens. The details delighted, and quite possibly surprised, the…

THE METROPOLITAN Museum of Art has long transported visitors through time and space, sending them to ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, and the Roman Empire in a single day. This month, the New York institution will offer the rare opportunity to own a piece of the history displayed in its famed galleries with an unprecedented auction of English furniture, porcelain, and silver. Featuring more than 200 lots, the sale—Property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: American Collecting in the English Tradition—will take place October 27 at Christie’s New York. Many of the pieces, which come from the Met’s expansive collection of European sculpture and decorative arts, have remained secreted away in storage for several decades, never before seen by the general public. “This is like opening a closed box for the…

WINE A founding member of the hip-hop band the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond—aka Mike D—collects records in the same way he collects wines: by the thousands. “For years, while out on tour, we would wake up and hunt down the best vinyl-record stores, always searching for rare records or music we had yet to discover,” he recalls. “After being exposed to wine, it became a similar pattern. The end result is, I still love listening to music so much but have more records than I could listen to and, yup, #rapperproblems, I have more wine than I could ever drink.” Diamond’s eureka moment occurred on a surfing trip to Costa Rica. His fellow traveler, the New York wine merchant David Sokolin, shared an assortment of wines, including Champagne, several white…

JEWELRY What to wear, what to wear? That decision was easier than usual for Dede Wilsey 10 years ago, when the de Young Museum was unveiled in San Francisco following a $200-million-plus renovation for which she had raised almost all the funds. Three parties marked that occasion, granting Wilsey the latitude to choose three different outfits and three different sets of jewelry to celebrate the project’s completion. However, the 10th anniversary of the de Young’s reopening will be commemorated this October with but a single event. As of late July, she was still weighing her options, not ready to hazard a guess at what jewels she would don on that day. Wilsey’s love of jewelry started early. Her father, the diplomat Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., nicknamed her Sparkle after the…

JEWELRY In a remarkably short time, Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani amassed what is likely the most important collection of historical Indian jewelry in private hands today. The Qatari national, who serves as the CEO of the QIPCO holding company and is a first cousin to the emir of the country, first became interested in jewelry from India in 2009, when he viewed the Maharaja exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. In his pursuit of Indian jewelry’s finest examples, historic and contemporary designs alike, Sheikh Hamad enlisted Amin Jaffer, international director of Asian art at Christie’s. In less than two years, Jaffer meticulously assembled more than 400 pieces of jewelry and jeweled artifacts, whose origins range from the Mogul era to the 21st century. Sheikh Hamad’s prizes include a…

WINE G eddy Lee, the lead singer and bassist of the Canadian rock trio Rush, can thank his bandmate Alex Lifeson for getting him hooked on wine. When Rush was touring back in the 1970s, promoters would ask about backstage requirements, and Lifeson would request wine. One night in 1974, a promoter invited the musicians to dinner at a Milwaukee restaurant and ordered bottles of Château Margaux and Château Latour. “I was really struck by the earthy, foresty flavors,” said Geddy in a 2011 interview with the Canadian magazine Quench. “I was really kind of shocked by the uptick in quality from what we’d usually been drinking.” Thus began his journey into the world of wine. At first, he simply collected the gift bottles left in his dressing room. In…

Jewelry IN 2012, JEWELRY AFICIONADOS enjoyed an uncommon look at the magnificent adornments of Lily Safra. Christie’s Geneva offered 70 lots of the Brazilian-born philanthropist’s jewelry in the Jewels for Hope charity sale that May. In addition to benefiting a wide range of worthy causes, the auction, which was 100 percent sold by lot and value, provided a rare glimpse of Safra’s extraordinary collection and refined taste. The top lot was a ring by Chaumet that showcased an exquisite cushion-shaped Burmese ruby of 32.08 carats. Fetching $6.7 million against an estimate of $3.1 million to $5 million, it was at the time the most expensive ruby ever to sell at auction. But clearly Safra is not just enamored of large stones. She also has a penchant for remarkable designs, such…

WITH THE ECONOMY healthy and so many recently introduced models in production or in the pipeline, now seems like an opportune time to be in the market for a new aircraft. But whether this really is the right time to buy may depend on when you plan to sell that new plane. According to Bill Quinn, president of Aviation Management Systems in Portsmouth, N.H., and a member of Robb Report’s Private Aviation Advisory Board, the business-aircraft market typically operates on five- to six-year cycles, meaning that downward and upward trends tend to last that long before the market peaks or bottoms out. How long the market stabilizes at the top or the bottom is less predictable. “If you assume that we rode the bottom in 2010, then 2016 could be…