A Google Street View photo captures scaffolding outside the Loeb mansion, which has been restored to its 1882 grandeur. The Loebs are suing the owner of the neighboring mansion, which was built as part of a row but has since been stripped of its whimsy, for allegedly sending water into the Loebs’ townhouse.
Photo: Google Maps
Michael Loeb’s mansion on East 72nd Street looks more like an extension of the Frick than the home where the venture capitalist and his wife, Margie, raised triplets. The couple spent umpteen million dollars and most of a decade restoring the 1882 Neo-Grec to fit their collection of spindly 19th-century furniture and oil paintings: They sourced period-specific etched-glass chandelier shades from a dealer in the Mojave Desert, then paid someone to drive the haul carefully cross-country; stained-glass windows are by Louis Comfort Tiffany; and bookcases were pulled from a townhouse owned by the Roosevelts. The wallpaper throughout is custom — and it was allegedly ruined by a leak that started next door in Gloria Vanderbilt’s childhood home, per a lawsuit filed on Loeb’s behalf last week. It seeks $180,182.53 for repairs, including damage to wallpaper that was “hand-printed and gilded on gold-leaf.”
Per Antiques & Fine Art magazine, the gold leaf was the Loebs’ design solution to the home’s major setback: 19th-century townhouses are dark, and period-appropriate lamps (at gas-jet levels of brightness) don’t do much to lighten things up. The Victorians shined their walls with bronze dust, but it oxidizes, so the Loebs tried gold, buying up “the entire inventory” of “a mother and son team in Japan who carried on a multiple generation vocation of adhering gold to paper, a process that involves much skill and careful lacquering to achieve a sustainable result,” according to the lawsuit.
Adding the 1882-appropriate patterns involved hiring “extremely experienced artisans to print a unique design which required 14 mixed colors upon such gold leaf paper.”
Note the use of the verb required. The Loebs don’t seem like people with patience for second best. A Steinway in the music room dates to the year the house went up, and the design of a fireplace mantel was based on a shadowy outline the original had left in the plaster. As Antiques & Fine Art explained, the precision seemed “all the more urgent” because the brownstone was one of only two survivors of an old, prestigious row, and “the other one, to which the Loeb house is attached … has been stripped of its exterior ornament and charm and painted white.”
That’s the Vanderbilt house, whose owner Loeb is now suing. Once chopped into eight apartments, it was glued back together into three airy luxury units with sleek lines and updated appliances that could have worked on Succession.
Surprisingly, a single anonymous buyer took them all in 2022, filing under the “Pinkheart Trust.” The suit argues that water had trickled down through an “opening in a portion of Defendant’s side” of a shared wall and through “gaps in the waterproofing” in a “niche” above a Loeb skylight. The Loeb suit also alleges the neighbor failed to respond to four separate written notices sent last year asking the trust “to take all necessary action to stop the water infiltration.” Then, in the fall, the Loebs took action themselves, making repairs and sending a bill in what the suit describes as “one last attempt to reach an amicable resolution with Defendant.” They say they never heard a peep, and the lawsuit argues the whole ordeal meant they “endured a substantial and unreasonable interference” in their “use and enjoyment” of their mansion. Thankfully, they have a 16,000 square foot, 12-bedroom home in the Hamptons only a short helicopter ride away.