"It seems a bit excessive to rent and completely redo an apartment for a single burst pipe," writes Manhattanite Jeffrey Hurley to, and in, New York Magazine. "Has the productivity of the construction industry brought people to this? I would've thought a week at a nice hotel would have sufficed to mop up some water and redo the floors. It's borderline decadence." He just might have a point. There was something sort of vaguely almost excessive about modern furniture collector Sharon Colman's floor to ceiling apartment renovation, wasn't there?

Remember, she's the one who made the "unacceptable" "low-ceilinged postwar box apartment" that she was forced to move into when a pipe burst in her Fifth Ave. pad livable by hiring a team of avant garde architects to craft custom wallpaper and take three tries to paint the walls of the master bedroom "the right blue, somewhere between aqua and ice."

On the other hand, though, maybe Jeffrey is wrong to assume that Sharon's apartment makeover was a bit self-indulgent. After all, she characterized her budget for the project as ""modest-slash-laughable." Ha ha.

The Next White [NYM]

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