Cary Cimino didn’t see any reason to wait to get married to set up his dream home.
A private investor who has spent 15 years working on Wall Street, Cimino recently bought a 2,100-square-foot condominium in a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side–then spent upwards of $700,000 (not including art work) to spruce it up.
“No one wants to live like they did in college,” says the 36-year-old Cimino. “We are finding ourselves in our thirties and forties, single, with the means to live well.”
Cimino’s taste in living well runs to 17th Century and 18th Century French and Italian.
“Everything in the den is Louis XVIII and Charles X,” he says; the lighting fixtures include drilled-out candlesticks and an electrified candelabra.
In the bedroom, a television set hangs from the ceiling in an antique box. He outfitted the dining room with formal silver and formal china (both Christofle) as well as informal china (Wedgwood), including a separate set in pure white for meals served on his deck.
Cimino says his girlfriend “just loves everything, from the antique rugs to the Pratesi sheets.” (Starting price for such sheets: around $1,000 for a queen-sized full set).
The economy has been good to a lot of people during the last few years. And among them are quite a few bachelors–from Wall Street investment bankers to California entrepreneurs–who don’t see any reason to live like frat rats until they hear wedding bells. They have the cash, so why not spend some?
Most pads aren’t quite as lavish as the digs of Oracle Corp.’s Chairman, Lawrence Ellison, a bachelor who is building a $40 million estate, modeled on a Samurai village, on 23 acres in Woodside, Calif. But many wealthy, single men are improving their living conditions. Some common denominators among bachelor pads of the 1990s: Two or more bedrooms, exercise gear, home offices and well-equipped, if underused, kitchens.
Indeed, a lot of these guys don’t have much time to enjoy their souped-up bachelor pads. Many of them work 18-hour days, travel a few weeks out of every month, and order food in when they do come home.
Joe Zaja, a 38-year-old Chicago bachelor, has lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a building he owns since 1990, but he had the stove hooked up only last month.
The one room Cimino didn’t overhaul in his New York apartment was the kitchen; he just changed the color.
“When I do get married I will need a full formal kitchen,” he says. For now, “the caterer is really the only one who uses the kitchen. I have Cap’n Crunch and coffee in there.”
Jennifer Post, the New York-based decorator who redid Cimino’s place, loves working with bachelors.
“It’s very straightforward,” she says. “They’re under an extreme amount of pressure. They buy an apartment for upwards of $400,000 and they know what they want after you present them with three to five concepts. They don’t want to see 40 drapes.”
But just because the bachelors have spent a small fortune on their homes that doesn’t mean they take any better care of them. Post arranges for their plants to be watered ($30 to $60 a week) and their wine cellars to be restocked (clients spend anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a month), and keeps an eye out for those finishing touches.
Recently, she found Scott Stackman, a 31-year-old sports fan and owner of a women’s-wear business, an antique baseball mitt ($20) and an antique golf club ($300) for his New York apartment, which he has spent around $400,000 to renovate.
“Just yesterday at Sotheby’s, I bought three prints because one of my guys is a member of Ducks Unlimited,” a hunting group, Post says. Total cost for the duck pictures: $1,280.
Today’s upscale bachelors are “short on time and big on money,” says Barbara Corcoran, chairman and chief executive officer of Corcoran Group, a New York-based real estate firm. Years ago, if brokers had to show a bachelor’s apartment to a possible buyer, they were cautious, she says.
“It was likely to have brown walls.”
Now, says Corcoran, “we make the assumption that if it’s a bachelor’s apartment it will be improved and over-improved.” In the last year and a half, Corcoran Group has sold 180 apartments to single men. Their average net worth: $1.35 million; average income: $265,000.
“I was at the stage in my life when I was tired of living in a one-bedroom,” says Buckner Brown, a 42-year-old investment banker. Three years ago, Brown bought a three-bedroom New York apartment with a 2,500-square-foot terrace, brought in a decorator and created what he describes as a “traditional, yet stylish apartment, very masculine, no chintz.”
He has 5-foot black speakers in the middle of his living room, a Sub-Zero refrigerator in his kitchen, and a mini-golf range (with a net) on his terrace.
David Spencer, a 35-year-old Rockefeller descendent, bought a $1.6 million, 5,000-square-foot house in Hillsborough, a tony San Francisco suburb. He keeps a restored antique pool table in the living room.
“It can easily be turned back into a living room if and when the situation calls for it,” he says.
After a few years of spending most of his time in a small percentage of the house, Spencer is now renovating–turning the dining room into a den, and the den into a “family room,” complete with a 60-inch TV screen with surround sound–“key for a bachelor pad,” he says–stored in a birdseye maple cabinet stained cranberry brown.
Although he was engaged when he bought the house, the engagement was broken off before the couple moved in. Spencer, who works as community liaison for the San Francisco Giants baseball team, decided he would still enjoy the place as a single guy. So far, he says he has spent more than $250,000 to fix it up.
On a more modest scale, 27-year-old David Ebersman, a director of development with Genentech Inc., a South San Francisco, Calif.-based biotechnology company, recently spent $410,000 to buy a four-bedroom house in San Francisco.
“I bought a house I could potentially expand into,” he says. For now, he uses the three extra bedrooms as a guest room, a work-out room and a home office, “even though I never work at home.”
Of course, many single guys buy homes for the same practical reasons that family men do.
Chris Hauswirth, 29, spent just over $500,000 in 1995 for a three-bedroom, two-bath house in San Francisco.
“There are the obvious benefits of owning a house: the tax break, building equity, and I got tired of throwing rent money down the drain,” says Hauswirth, a financial adviser. “Also, most of my investments were tied to the market. I wanted to diversify.”
