Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Because the piece was in the New York Times‘s Great Homes and Destinations section, it was less a profile of Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby than it was a profile of Touby’s loft in Gramercy Park. It is an extremely nice loft, and extremely expensive—purchased for $3.9 million in 2009 and since renovated for another $2 million. The loft features what is surely the world’s first “hand-woven leather, chain-mail and fur indoor swing” not expressely designed for BDSM play; a “sprawling sectional sofa” that set Touby and her husband, Jon Fine, back more than $30,000; and a $3,500 coffee table, which is described in the Times as among Touby and Fine’s “relative bargains.” Whenever I read details like this I think about what Joan Didion said rose in her throat when, as a twentysomething, she witnessed the excesses of the moneyed Manhattan elite—a “Veblenesque gorge,” she called it, after the economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”
