You can live like a very health-conscious Leonardo DiCaprio in the high-living movie star's Manhattan bachelor pad.
With 3,637 square-feet of living space, the 3-bedroom, 2½-bath apartment is listed for a sky-high $8.5 million because of its location in NYC's trendy Greenwich Village and a massive list of wellness-centric amenities.
According to the New York Post, the ritzy residence is located on the fourth floor of the an eight-story terracotta construction built in 1897 that's billed as the city's first "wellness building."
All units include vitamin C-infused showers to "help eliminate residual chlorine and promote healthy skin and hair," purified air and water, in-duct aromatherapy, and something called "posture supportive heat reflexology flooring" crafted from Siberian oak.
Other invigorating elements include a Circadian rhythm-sensitive lighting system, anti-microbial-coated white quartzite countertops, "bio-based" insulation, and irrigated interior planters. (The maintenance fee alone costs a whopping $6,188 per month).
More typical luxurious features include African Anigre cabinetry with satin nickel hardware and a 78-bottle dual zone wine refrigerator in the kitchen. The master bedroom is fitted with automatic window shades, a gray onyx Jacuzzi, heated limestone floors, and oak-toned vanities.
Learn more about the DiCaprio's former apartment via the realtor Brown Harris Stevens.
10 years in business is an accomplishment worth celebrating, especially in the shifting sands of the menswear world. On that note, award-winning menswear designer Todd Snyder is kicking things off the right way, teaming up with eyewear maker Moscot on the new Todd Snyder x Moscot 10th Anniversary Nomad Sunglasses.
The partnership revamps the Moscot Zilch Sunglasses, a personal favorite and a staple in Snyder’s own eyewear collection. The name is fitting for another reason, too: Snyder’s well-appointed NoMad flagship is a beacon for menswear aficionados, and the name also calls to mind globetrotting trips we’ve been dreaming of for months on end.
The great news is, the crisp and timeless Nomad Sunglasses should fit right in just about anywhere in the world. Snyder worked directly with Zach Moscot, the fifth generation of the family to run the famed eyewear business, to get the details just right. The sunglasses, which retail for $325, are made from premium Italian acetate and channel modern, sporty vibes.
Engraved details at the temple nod to both brands, while four frame and lens color combos offer up choices for every discerning fan of Snyder’s work.
It’s fitting that the sunglasses would also work seamlessly with a wide range of Snyder menswear, including the brand’s Dylan Jacket and modern tailoring in equal measure.
Snyder isn’t stopping just at eyewear, though: Throughout the rest of the year, Snyder plans to collaborate with other personal favorites and flagship store mainstays, including Timex, Alden and Birdwell Beach Britches. If the celebratory results are as stylish as these sunglasses, consider us sold on picking up plenty of new Todd Snyder gear.
The tragic death of Bob Carlos Clarke at the age of 55 in 2006 meant that he would never really gain the fame he deserved outside of the UK. Often called Britain’s answer to Helmut Newton, Clarke’s photographs express a similar darkly-sexy glamor, though with a bit more wit and verve. Widely imitated, Clarke’s work is finally getting the exposure it warrants, thanks to Opus, publisher of the world’s most impressive and exclusive luxury books.
Dark Deluxe: The Bob Carlos Clarke Opus, measures a massive 27.5” x 19.5”, and weighs nearly 40 pounds. It is hand-bound in leather and comes with a pair of black leather gloves, as well as a custom-printed aluminum chromalux photograph on the cover.
Limited to just 100 copies, priced at £7,500, (or about $10,000 apiece, available to order here), it contains 155 of Clarke’s most iconic images and “showcases Bob’s world on a scale never before attempted” while “bringing together the imagination, skill and controversy that epitomizes a legacy of imagery that is second to none.”
Opus partnered with London’s The Little Black Gallery and Clarke’s estate on the project, which features a foreword by legendary chef Marco Pierre White, the photographer’s longtime subject, friend and admirer. The seed for the book was planted when Opus co-founder and creative director Zenon Texeira got to spend some time with White in 2010, and dined at White’s oyster bar and grill in London, Wheeler’s of St James’s.
“On my first visit my jaw hit the floor when I saw the stunning, sexy photographic art on the walls at Wheeler’s,” Texeira tells Maxim. “It was all Bob’s work. From his portraits of Marco back in the day to the sexy latex-clad form of Rachel Weisz.
The giant gallery-sized prints that decorated the walls both upstairs and down were a visual feast in themselves, and this was before casting an eye on Marco’s mouth-watering menu. I soon researched all I could on Bob Carlos Clarke and bought several of his books including my treasured signed copy of [2002’s] Shooting Sex.”
Texeira, an accomplished photographer himself, says that his “aim with this project was to create an Opus that conjured up the emotions and excitement that I experienced that evening when I first dined at Wheeler’s and fell in love with a photographer that I had never met.” And as White writes in the book’s foreword, “Above all, what’s truly amazing is that [Clarke’s] pictures are iconic and have stood the test of time, they look as fresh and modern as the day they were taken.”
Clarke, who was born in Cork in Southern Ireland in 1950, expounds on his many sources of inspiration in pithy passages throughout the book (written shortly before he died), divulging how they eventually came together to help him create an entirely new visual language. “Mick Jagger and David Bailey were my role models,” Clarke writes. “Rock and photography: fashionably classless professions where bad behavior and promiscuity were compulsory. Basically, they fucked the best girls, made loads of money and got famous for it.”
Clarke notes that he “never gave much thought to what I did for a living until [a] friend asked me when I was going to stop ‘hunting women’ and do something decent. The way she said it made me seem like a serial killer. Maybe she had a point. With an obsessive compulsion I’ve taken more or less the same photographs over and over again during the past three decades. It’s not a job—it’s an addiction. I could’ve entertained a fashionable class-A drug habit, but chose instead to indulge what was, at a time when most of my world had gone stark raving gay, a highly unfashionable dependence on class-A females.”
When he occasionally questioned his motives, he thought that “a little intensive psychoanalysis might get to the root of the problem, but it’s something I’ve learned to live with. It’s not about getting laid, although that’s a tolerable side effect. Perhaps choosing a career saturated with femininity is a way of compensating for all the women I missed between the age of eight and 18. Photography isn’t a cure for my compulsion, but it certainly relieves the symptoms.”
Early on, Clarke writes, “I learned that a camera is a good excuse for anything. A person with a camera can make stuff happen. When I started my career as a photojournalist in Belfast in 1969, I quickly realized that the sight of a professional-looking cameraman was a red rag to rioters. Everyone wants to be a movie star and, in certain high-octane situations, the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred.”
How this eventually led him to explore the fetishistic side of sexual escapism makes for an interesting read. “What I liked about rubber and vinyl was the way it contained a body, concealing imperfections and defining contours beneath a gleaming synthetic ting it on, the models loved it. It became a new and exciting ritual, a way of being simultaneously exposed and impenetrable.”
The main problem with photographing sex, he notes, “is one of perception. What is it? A basic reproductive function, a profound expression of love, a pleasant recreational activity—or an exciting opportunity to wreck your life? Whatever you decide, it’s one of just two things that are essential for the continuation of our species. The other is food, and both are notoriously difficult to photograph. Hunger and lust engage all our senses at full volume, but vision is the only sense that supplies a picture.”
His darkroom, he writes, was “a combination of private club, surgery and womb—a sanctuary combining clinical efficiency with total security.” At the time advances in digital technology meant that “the fate of the darkroom is sealed,” however. “Soon conventional films will become extinct and hard economics will relegate the darkroom to antiquity. However, despite the remarkable technological advances in photography, it’s interesting to note that the best photographs were taken decades ago with the most basic equipment, often in the most primitive circumstances. The best recipe remains a sharp eye behind a sharp lens.”
As for inspiration, Clarke writes that “I scour other photographers’ work for inspiration, and in turn my own work is copied. Depending on my mood and the extent of the rip-off, it can be either flattering or infuriating…. Photographs of real-life events encapsulate a vast amount of information, far more than the photographer can assimilate at the moment he releases. The shutter. That is what makes pure photography so rewarding.”
No matter what, Clarke writes, “Through hurricane and holocaust we cling to the images of our past and the ones we love, as if to life itself. A photograph is the only physical proof that we really existed, that we were once strong and young and maybe beautiful. Modern legends like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Che Guevara would be faded anecdotes without the pictures. Their photographs embody them.”
Eroticism, however, which Clarke came to specialize in, “relies upon a finely-tuned conspiracy between the eye and the imagination. It’s an entirely individual response.” And that’s why, no matter how “sexy” the subject being photographed, “what excites one person may disgust another”—but it's never, ever boring.
*This article originally appeared in Maxim's May/June 2021 issue
Tag Heuer is doubling down with another limited edition luxury watch to commemorate Formula One's 2021 Monaco Grand Prix.
Even with a $6,500 price tag, the Swiss watchmaker's previous Monaco Green Dial sold out in weeks. Instead of offering another 500 examples of that timepiece, Tag remixed the model with a material seldom used in the long-running Monaco collection: titanium.
The Titan Special Edition's alloy case protects a glistening silver-colored dial, which offers enhanced visibility thanks to contrasting black subdials and indexes, as well as the multi-neutral-colored hands with photoluminescent coating.
Bright red accents on the central hand and 12 o'clock index marker add a little spice to an otherwise subdued color scheme, while a rubber anthracite alligator strap rounds out the aesthetic.
Powering the Titan is a modern version of the original Caliber 11 automatic chronograph movement featured in the inaugural 1969 Monaco.
Limited to 500 examples, the Tag Heuer Monaco Titan Special Edition is available to purchase for $7,900 now.
When I die and go to heaven there had better be DRC. For I certainly have not imbibed enough of the wines of the legendary Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. The juice of the gods sucked from the ground through Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes into your glass via Burgundy in France.
I often joke about drinking Withnail and I style, sucking on the marrow of life, drinking tea, and eating cake, and drinking “the finest wines available to humanity.”
Well this is no joke. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti—aka DRC to those lucky enough to drink it regularly—simply is the finest wine available to humanity. Full stop. Period. End of discussion.
If an angel were to land right now and be offered a glass he’d probably agree to cut off his wings and stay just for a refill. One refill. Even if it were from a dirty plastic cup in the back of a fancy restaurant from the remains of a bottle someone just splashed thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars, on.
That is how spectacularly transportive and ephemeral these wines are. Forget all the other so-called good stuff. For DRC will take you on an exclusive trip you will forever be at pains to to repeat, absent a war chest the size of a small economy.
I first imbibed the legendary elixir in a youth too full to remember them as well as I should, when they were expensive but not “unobtanium.” And again later with friends who were lucky enough to have somehow made hundreds of millions of dollars and acquired wine cellars to match.
These wines live in a rarefied atmosphere inhabited by those with impeccable taste, those who aspire to impeccable taste, and those who equate impeccable taste to spending lots of money. Occasionally even the latter group is right. Just as a broken watch tells the correct time twice a day.
In 2020 the world-renowned auction house Sotheby’s sold $19 million worth of DRC—impressive in and of itself. But as with every statistic it requires some context. That was more than their combined sales of the next six producers of Bordeaux at auction last year.
To add further color, and perhaps gild the lily a little, let us also remember that DRC produces only 5,000 or so cases of wine a year across all of its wines. The fanciest Bordeaux vineyards combined spit out just over a million cases of Grand Cru. Think about that for a second.
Burgundy is a land of folklore, magic, and legends. But DRC is acknowledged as the magnum opus. If you are ever offered a glass, cherish it, regardless of why. If you are ever offered a bottle, be thankful. And if you are ever offered a case, wonder what the hell you did to deserve it.
Despite having a reputation for hosting parties to die for, legend has it that DRC’s former owner, the Prince of Conti, who acquired the vineyard in 1760, drew the line at letting his friends actually taste this spectacular juice—it was just too special to be wasted.
And thus it went through time as the parcels of Grand Cru (comprising only one percent of all wine produced in Burgundy) were tended with a love and care that knew nothing of the heady heights of the atmosphere they would reach today.
As Don and Petie Kladstrup note in their fantastic book, Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure, the ethos was that latterly adopted by many a connoisseur: “Monsieur de Villaine at Romanée-Conti... believed that the winemaker was no more than an intermediary between the soil and the wine, and that he should interfere as little as possible.”
I like to think that a large part of what has made the wines magical is the nutters who have owned, nurtured and tended the vines over the years. And I mean that in the sincerest, most laudatory way. For I am sure had the Domaine fallen into the hands of more commercial, less passionate, and less obsessive hands, we would not be seeing the statistics we see today.
Again from Wine and War: “Although the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti would not begin showing a profit until 1959, it was still considered the standard-bearer of great Burgundy, a property that never cut corners or sacrificed quality for the sake of making money.”
The Villaine and Leroy families, and in particular Madame Bize-Leroy, have elevated something exceptional to a global pedestal based upon purity of vision and an unerring attention to that which matters.
As massage and beer is to A5 Wagyu, talking to your vines and playing them classical music is to fantastic Burgundy. I joke, but I don’t joke. For Madame Bize-Leroy is the rare bird who doesn’t give a toss what you or anyone else thinks.
Which is why that bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti you have been eyeing will cost you a cool $10,000 from your local purveyor of old and rare wines. And then a darned sight more from anywhere worth sharing it with friends.
