“I love houses,” Stephen Schwarzman told The New Yorker in 2008. “I’m not sure why.”
An armchair psychologist might make a decent guess. Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the private-equity behemoth Blackstone, is a modern-day Ozymandias. His houses are not humble homes but sprawling monuments to power, success, and status. Not trophy assets but entire trophy cabinets—many of which, curiously, were once owned by the great robber barons of the 19th and 20th centuries, and almost all of which have a knack for irking neighbors with their various adjustments, demolitions, and surgical tweaks. Look on my poolhouse, ye mighty, and despair!
