#RealEstatePorn: A Peek Inside My Neighbor Marc Jacobs’ Art-Filled Townhouse

Jacobs with former fiancé, Lorenzo Martone, on the beach in St. Barths. (See sofa tattoo, bottom left)

Marc Jacobs lives around the corner from me in the far West Village in a new four-floor townhouse. I’ve been curious to see inside but as yet, have not been invited. Although I AM going to a party a few doors down this next week, but now I won’t need to try to peer into the windows or into Marc’s backyard from an upper floor, as these pics allow us to ogle the luxury and high style of Casa Jacobs.

He bought the newly built home (designed by architect Robert A. M. Stern) in 2009 to share and his then-fiancé, Lorenzo Martone. It was just raw space, and interior designer Thad Hayes was hired to to oversee its construction and decoration. According to Mayer Russ‘s article in the new Architectural Digest, Hayes recalls a moment when he and Jacobs were discussing upholstery options.

“We were looking at a classic boxy Jean-Michel Frank sofa and Marc said, offhandedly, ‘Of course I love it—it’s tattooed on my torso.’ Then he lifted up his shirt and showed me the couch.”

Jacobs and Martone separated before the house was completed, and the fashion designer finished the project with John Gachot and Paul Fortune, Jacobs’s longtime friend and collaborator. Fortune says,

“I’d worked with Marc on his Paris apartment, so there was a certain comfort level. He had his ideas about the New York place, and I was there to see if those ideas would work.

One day Marc announced that he’d bought a giant sculpture of Dopey from artist Paul McCarthy’s White Snow series. The only place we could park it was in the television room, which was basically finished at that point. So we closed the street and craned the thing in through the back. You do what you have to do.”

Jacobs’s master bedroom boasts six paintings by painter John Currin and he has more Currin’s scattered throughout the house, maybe more than anyone else on the planet, besides the artist himself. A pair of bronze monkeys by sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne, also grace the master. Jacob’s said,

“I saw [the monkeys] in a picture in Vogue, and I became fixated. I had to have them. I called Paul Kasmin Gallery, I called Sotheby’s, and eventually I called [art collector and Warhol superstar] Jane Holzer. She introduced me to the Lalannes in Paris, and she found me the monkeys.”

Similar stories surround the acquisition of other important pieces in Jacobs’s burgeoning collection —Diego Giacometti bronze stools, a Pierre Chareau table and sconces, a mammoth Eugène Printz chandelier, a Samuel Marx secretary —as well as furnishings commissioned for the house.

It’s all pretty fab, if you ask me. Have a look. You can read the full story here.

(Photos, Francois Halard, via Architectural Digest)

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