This weekend, the exclusive cluster of Long Island villages known as the Hamptons is bulging again in the biggest invasion of the summer. The assault is nothing new. Affluent Manhattanites have for decades stormed the Long Island shore throughout August, and celebrities such as Steven Spielberg and Martha Stewart are longtime summer residents. But even the Hamptons have never seen anything like this. The youngest, richest generation in American history has arrived, gobbling up multi-million dollar holiday houses faster than builders can erect them and creating a summer feeding frenzy that makes the roaring 1980's look like the Depression. Forget the humble seaside cottage. Forget taste. The new billionaire wants excess and he wants it now.
Jay Lieberman knows this. That's why he is smiling. The Southampton builder's latest house - a speculative project - will fetch at least $8 million, in cash. "Whoever takes this house will be a client with a lot of money who walks in an' says, `Wow!' " Lieberman recently told the New York Times. One of the bathrooms, for example, has a $3,000 shower. Each bathroom tap cost more than $2,000.
A century ago, there were only a handful of American billionaires. As recently as 1982, Forbes Magazine counted just 13 billionaires in US. Last year, it counted 267 Americans with a net worth above $1 billion. Many are hyperactive trading-floor millionaires and dot-com billionaires in their twenties and thirties who suddenly realise they need a few mansions and a lifestyle to match.
Builders and estate-agents in rich enclaves such as the Hamptons are ecstatic. But some architects and designers now realise that satisfying young, impatient clients means creating - often from scratch - a "personal" style that most callow billionaires are too busy to cultivate for themselves.
Inland from the Hamptons, in the mansion-studded neighbourhood of Bedford, New York, Barry Gesser's house is a perfect example. On a recent afternoon, guests sipped bottled water on the terrace. A peacock strutted across the velvet lawn. In the entrance hall, a well-bred clock discreetly announced the hour with a muffled chime. "It looked as if someone had been living in that house for 25 years," designer Carey Maloney recalls, "as if he probably inherited the place."
But Gesser, a single, young Wall-Street fund manager, had bought, not inherited, the house, pool, stables, tennis courts and multiple garages. He also purchased the lived-in look. For a fee reported to be "in the low millions," Manhattan designers selected and arranged the books in the panelled library, the magazines on the coffee table, even the family pictures on the mantlepiece. "I told them `I don't care what it takes,' " a satisfied Gesser later commented, " `Just do it.' "
Impressed by the legendary design blitzkreig that transformed Ronald O. Perleman's Easthampton mansion in just five weeks to coincide with a 4th of July party, Gesser arbitrarily set the same holiday deadline. This gave Maloney, his colleagues at M (Group) and a team of 170 experts just six weeks not simply to renovate the mansion but to install the trappings of a tasteful life, down to the coathangers and the peacocks. It worked. Only the most uncharitable guest at Gesser's summer party would have noticed that the robin's-egg glaze on the dining room walls had just dried, that not a book in the library had been cracked.
The good news for designers and "lifestyle consultants" is that these neophytes need help, costly help. The bad news is that many of these neophytes never outgrew adolescence. As design clients, their attention-span is short, their tempers often shorter, and their expectations unrealistic. "They're only interested in surfaces, impressions," one Connecticut-based architect recently complained. "The 1980s Wall Streeters at least made an attempt to understand design. Now, all they want is styled image."
Making new money look like old money is a venerable impulse. But Carey Maloney recently identified a new craving among his clients: speed. "The faster your house is built or renovated, the more you must have spent on it," he explains, "And that shows how rich you are. It's that basic."
And what does the impatient client want? "We Wall Streeters want the best," Barry Gesser recently told the New York Times. "We want to buy the right stuff, but we don't necessarily know what it is." In his case, designers showed Gesser photographs of suitable furniture and antiques. It took him less than a minute to select almost 50 pieces. Sotheby's Restoration, a branch of the auction house, then handbuilt the dining room chairs and other items.
Books are a particular challenge. "They all have to have a panelled library," Manhattan designer Carl d"Aquino recently complained of his Wall Street clients, "but they don't have any books. They don't even read magazines!" Carey Maloney had a practical solution. His team raided a local bookstore - systematically and alphabetically. "My partner did A to L. An associate did M to Z. I did biographies, gardening and history." The result was a library that Gesser might have accumulated. Had he been a reader. Had he had the time.
As the Bedford project accelerated, something odd happened. Maloney and his colleagues gradually realised that they were creating not just an image for their client but a kind of life. "It was fun drawing up lists of little things for him in the back of the limousine going to and from the site," Maloney recalls. "We subscribed to magazines for him so that he'd get stuff in his mailbox. Vanity Fair for his girlfriend, that kind of thing."
The designers even signed Gesser up for membership in the Bedford Historical Society. They placed his name on the mailing list of local theatre groups and music festival organisers. "It was just to get him involved in the place," Maloney explains, "To give him a sense of community. Remember, his background did not train him for that kind of thing."
Gesser and his contemporaries are trained to make money, to make it fast, and to pay others to handle the tedious details of everything from social planning to lawn care. Back in the 1980s, when Mafia boss John Gotti had dozens of full-grown palm trees replanted in the gardens of his Casey Key palace in Florida (where they promptly died), Gotti's old money neighbours sneered. A decade later, in a salute to "The Billionaire Next Door," Forbes Magazine describes one young Californian tycoon "wearing his perky 33year-old wife on his arm, supervising the installation of fullgrown palm trees just flown in from Hawaii". No sneering.
When Barry Gesser moved into his Bedford house, his life - or an idealised version of his life - was waiting for him. Only one detail gave the game away. The many frames intended to hold Gesser's family photographs instead held pictures of Carey Maloney's chihuahua, Pancho. Gesser's office had not come up with human snapshots in time, so the small dog filled the gap.
AND Pancho stayed. "When we went back to the house eight months later, not a thing had been changed," Maloney recalls, "Our client had been there twice. He was completely uninterested. The housekeeper hadn't moved a thing." Shortly afterwards, Gesser put the house up for sale. All of which makes a designer's job not exactly thankless (clients such as Gesser typically pay the full fee in advance) but somewhat dispiriting. "This kind of project has fantasy appeal," Maloney concludes. "But there is no personality involved, no humour or sensibility. We prefer the challenge of limitations." Excess, however, is more profitable. One of Maloney's recent commissions just turned into a race between three billionaire brothers. The winner will be the one whose house is finished first.