What's it like to know that your family paid you $400,000 to fuck off forever?
I keep coming back to that original article. Mark says it’s remarkable that they’ve mostly only had to replace art and furniture rather than fixtures—after Anna and Edward died in 1935, the house sat empty for a decade, but nothing was stolen or stripped out. The McCloskeys have had fun seeking out objects original to the house as well as filling it with their own antiques, including a rare 1560 stipo a bambocci carved wooden cabinet made in Genoa and a Louis XIII homme-debout (“standing man”) armoire, so named because, during the Reign of Terror, a gentleman could hide inside one. Known any antique dealers? I find them to be quirky, shrewd bargainers - who will absolutely cut you a deal if they like you or raise the price when you're an asshole. It's a market segment where you are judged by character, not wallet. Unless this couple treats antique dealers very differently from the way they seem to treat everyone else, they've been overpaying a lot. Mutherfuckers paid to have an organ they can't play restored. I'll bet the "fuck you price" on that one is something to see.When Mrs. Wallace died, Mrs. Faust helped them comb through Selkirk’s listings so that they could buy back objects original to the house. But, they say, things sometimes magically showed up, too—like the time a friend in Atlanta called from an antiques fair to tell them about “this guy who’s been trying to sell these books of photographs of a house in St. Louis” that turned out to be big folios of the house. Or the little gold-and-silver–framed portrait of the three youngest Busch girls that randomly surfaced at an auction; it’s a reproduction of a painting that hangs in the house. Of note is the fact that virtually all of the art, furniture, and tapestries are authentic 14th to 17th-century antiques collected by the couple.