Empty Mansions

twelfth floor to the eighth. But then, well, the furniture would no longer be in 12W.
    Instead,Huguette approached a French furniture company, the renowned Pernault Workshops, with a request that it find original French pieces of the Louis XV period. Yes, the company explained, it might be able to find matching furniture, but the cost would be “staggering.” A rolltop desk in the Louis XV style could cost 10 million francs, or about $1.8 million. An alternative plan was offered by Pernault, one that could be accomplished for “a reasonable price.” It could make reproductions. Huguette agreed.
    The invoices from 1991–92 show the enormous expenditures for “the making and delivering of the copies of your own furniture.” For a Louis XV dressing table with three oval mirrors, a three-drawer commode table, two bedside tables, and a rolltop desk, all in solid oak, lavishly engraved and gilded, with floral inlaid wood and bronze trim, Mrs. Huguette M. Clark paid 2,497,000 francs, or $445,893. And those are 1991 dollars, equal to nearly $800,000 today.
    This was merely the beginning. For her bedroom, she ordered green silk draperies and a sumptuous green silk damask bedspread with matching cover for a bolster pillow, in a pattern showing Japanese musicians, just like her mother’s. These items cost 897,000 francs, or $160,178. TheLouis XV mantelpiece in the bedroom of Apartment 12W was removed, copied, and reattached, with the copy installed in Apartment 8W.
    All told, over three years, she spent $4.3 million on the renovation, equal to more than $7 million today. Without updating the bathrooms or kitchens.
    For nearly two decades, you could walk into the bedrooms of 12W and 8W, both overlooking the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Second Street, and see the same oak furniture, the same elaborate mantel, the same luxurious green silk damask bedspread. Aside from a slight difference in the placement of the doors and the radio cabinet in the closet, you couldn’t begin to guess what floor you were on.
    During that time, Huguette never spent a night there, never walked into either bedroom, seeing the results of the renovation only in photographs brought to her hospital room.
CHRIS

 
    H UGUETTE , who could have anything money could buy, had found one of the keys to true contentment: a personal assistant to help with her art projects and hobbies. Chris Sattler was Huguette’s greatest luxury. With an oval door-knocker beard and the sturdy build of a linebacker, the father of two young daughters spent his late forties and his fifties arranging Huguette’s dolls.
    The son of a family that did high-end painting and construction,Chris first visited her apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue as a volunteer in the 1970s, helping bag three hundred Christmas gifts. He said Huguette ordered the gifts each year from Au Nain Bleu and then had them delivered, anonymously, to an orphanage in Greenwich Village. In the mid-1990s, after Huguette had moved into the hospital, Madame Pierre arranged for Chris to create an inventory of everything in Huguette’s apartments. In 2000, Huguette called to offer him a full-time job as her personal assistant.
    Every workday for a dozen years, Chris began his morning by walking through each room of Huguette’s three apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue. With forty-two rooms, not counting the bathrooms, that was quite a chore. The daily walk was necessary, especially in the twelfth-floor dining room, where a portrait of a rose-cheeked girl dressed in a striped shirt with a bow tie and holding a parasol was signed “Renoir.” Across from it hung one of Monet’s Water Lilies, which hadn’t been seen in public since Huguette bought it in 1930. Beside the fireplace was another Monet, of poplar trees by the Epte River. This wasn’t the best place to keep the paintings, because old pipes up on the roof frequently leaked.
    The median size of a new home in the United States in 2010 was 2,169 square feet. Huguette had 15,000 square feet that she used as a warehouse, a lending library for her projects.
    Only a few rooms were still set up as Huguette had left them, with furniture arranged for regular occupancy: the dining rooms in bothapartments, her mother’s bedroom in 12W, and Huguette’s identical bedroom in 8W.
    To keep Huguette’s documents in order, Chris found a use for Huguette’s third apartment, 8E, which she bought in 1963, protecting her borders so she had no neighbors on the eighth floor.