Tag: Lifestyle

Half a mile off the Connecticut shore, a powerboat cuts through the choppy surf as it nears a 135-year-old lighthouse. “Imagine doing this in a 12-foot rowboat,” says 70-year-old Frank Sciame, one of the boat’s passengers, noting that lighthouse-keepers once rowed to shore. The boat pulls up to a pile of seaweed-covered rocks, where a small, temporary dock bobs amid the waves. In Top-Siders and a button-down shirt, Mr. Sciame steps onto the dock and grabs a rope to help tie up the boat. Then he nimbly ascends a rickety steel ladder and steps inside the lighthouse, grinning.

For nearly 30 years, art and antique dealers Barbara and Lloyd Macklowe filled their East Hampton home with rare furniture, sculptures and paintings. Located on a spit of land between Georgica Pond and the Atlantic Ocean, the roughly 6,100-square-foot house has bedroom furniture designed by Eugène Gaillard, upholstered chairs by William Morris and a collection of Americana, from weather vanes to toys to advertising signs. Now, the founders of New York’s Macklowe Gallery are listing the waterfront property for $60 million.

It is the end of October, and Michigan vineyard owner Phillip M. Cifuentes is counting the days. He is holding out for the right moment to pick his Cabernet Franc and Merlot grapes, key components in fine Bordeaux red blends, letting the fruit mature until the beginning of November. “Our reds are going to go as long as possible,” he says.

Justin Maxwell Stuart was once in the habit of taking his dog for daily walks around Fulham Cemetery, a Victorian burial ground close to his West London home. In 2015, he noticed a For Sale sign had gone up outside the cemetery’s tumbledown, neo-Gothic-style, three-bedroom lodge house, originally built to house cemetery staff. Intrigued, he decided to contact the estate agent. That decision was the first step in an epic three-year, $3.3 million building project. The lodge has been renovated, extended and transformed into a contemporary house with an open-plan living space, a basement swimming pool complete with waterfall, and a primary suite that occupies the entire second floor.

The longtime homestead of a Rhode Island political dynasty is going up for sale. A roughly 20-acre farm in Warwick that was home to the late Sen. John Chafee and his son Sen. Lincoln Chafee is listing for $5.95 million. In addition to serving as senators from Rhode Island, both men were also governors of the state. The younger Sen. Chafee, who was mayor of Warwick in the 1990s, was a candidate in the 2016 presidential race.

Robby Krieger, 75, is a guitarist and singer-songwriter who was a member of the Doors. He is the author, with Jeff Alulis, of the memoir, “Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying and Playing Guitar With the Doors” (Little, Brown). He spoke with Marc Myers. Like all good rock ’n’ roll childhoods, I was sent away to boarding school in my midteens. My grades in high school were crashing and I was getting into trouble with friends.

Sharen Jester Turney, a former president and CEO of Victoria’s Secret, and her husband, Charles Turney, are listing their New York City penthouse for $18.5 million. Located on Park Avenue South in the Flatiron district, the condo is roughly 4,000 square feet with three bedrooms, floor-to-ceiling windows and intricate plaster moldings on the ceiling, said listing agent Michael Graves of Compass. The unit also has views of the Empire State Building , the Chrysler Building and Gramercy Park, he said.

This spring, Kiss frontman Gene Simmons rolled the dice on Las Vegas. With his longtime Los Angeles estate on the market, the rock star paid $10.8 million in cash for a “thoroughly modern” mansion in the tony Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. The only problem? His wife, model Shannon Tweed, and their two adult children never wanted to spend time there, preferring to stay at the family’s other homes.

Parents have endured a pandemic, school shutdowns and child-care disruptions. Now they have to grapple with “Squid Game.” Jaime Bilicki’s 11-year-old son recently came home from school asking if he could watch the show, a new hit on Netflix . She wasn’t familiar with it. “I’m thinking something to do with SpongeBob,” said Ms. Bilicki.

One day, out of the blue, my dad decided to turn our back porch into a screened-in back porch with a big cathedral ceiling. We didn’t need a screened-in porch with a big cathedral ceiling. No one had asked for one. The existing porch worked just fine and wasn’t even that old. He’d never even mentioned the project until the day the work crews showed up. The project dragged on forever, but my extremely impatient and cheap father never complained about the delays or the money once, which was beyond weird. Then it dawned on me and my siblings: Dad was convinced that as long as the porch was under construction, our mother, who had late stage cancer, wouldn’t die. We thought he was nuts. Maybe he was. But the fact is that Mom enjoyed many afternoons on that beautiful, completed screened-in porc...