The Maximalist Home

In a time of fearful self-restraint, more is more

- MIREILLE SILCOFF

LAST JANUARY, shortly before the who declared covid-19 a pandemic, Sotheby’s in New York put together what was supposed to be a modest auction of a dead interior decorator’s things. Mario Buatta rose up in the 1980s as “the Prince of Chintz,” having decked out the homes of some of America’s wealthiest families (Doubledays, New houses, but also celebrities like Mariah Carey) in the manically floral, overstuffed country- house style of the early nineteenth-century English Regency. If the Regency had steroids and disco, it might have looked more like Buatta’s version of it. At any rate, when he died, in 2018, he left no will, only five storage units and two homes stacked to the ceilings with the types of finds one might imagine belonged to a man who slept on a Chinese four-poster bed crowned by an Ottoman-style dome near columns carved to look like windswept palm trees.

The auction was expected to attract a small crowd of insiders: establishment interior designers, ancient gentry with subscriptions to Town & Country — essentially, the sorts of people who might remember Buatta’s era of more-is-more excess first-hand. Instead, the auction turned into a two-day international selling frenzy. There were feverish bidding wars for just about every item: a dolphin-shaped Venetian grotto stand, a painted tole shell-form purdonium on wheels. An imperfect porcelain tureen shaped like a bunch of asparagus, estimated at between $2,000 and $3,000, went for $25,000 (all figures US).