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## The Boy Who Wouldn’t Be King

### Ten dazzling (and, of course, delicious) cakes will add a touch of artistry to your special day.

- By Sara Cardace
- Updated November 15, 2005

- Photo by Nikolas Koenig / Courtesy of Christie's

Caption or Slide Show teaser text here

#### Home Design: The Secret City

The Cheap List: From Aburiya to Frankie’s to Zozo’s Juice & Grille.

Take a tour of Manhattan's striking new townhouse.

- Main Page
- The Boy Who Wouldn't Be King
- Hoop Dream
- The Personal Museum
- The Disappearing Study
- A Rudolph Masterpiece
- A Voyeur's Scrap Book
- More

Every house has a story, some more dramatic than others like the tale of the brand-new townhouse on Greenwich, which thwarts sidewalk voyeurism with a sheet of steel. “Exactly three years ago, we came out of Pastis--it was my birthday and we saw a building for sale,” says a fairly recent London transplant to New York. “It was a 50-year-old derelict building; we were literally buying the land.” That birthday girl and her husband bid on it the next day, eventually paying $1.6 million. A few months later, the shell fell down on its own and had to be demolished by the city.

And last week, the couple and their three young children moved into a 5,000-square-foot townhouse on the site, one of only a handful built from the ground up in Manhattan in the past 50 years.

Architect Matthew Baird wasn’t a stranger to small lots. Perhaps most disappointed of all, in retrospect, was Smith herself. “I hope I have the brain to differentiate when someone just wants to kick me down the stairs for a laugh, or when someone’s actually trying to explain to me what’s wrong with the book. When I was writing The Autograph Man, I thought my father was dying, I was incredibly miserable, I really disliked my life, and I wrote a book which was very angry and sad. But it also was about something important to me, and maybe I didn’t express it properly. On Beauty might be cased up in a nicer icing, but it is about many similar things.”

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> “When I was writing The Autograph Man, I thought my father was dying, I was incredibly miserable, I really disliked my life, and I wrote a book which was very angry and sad.”

Smith’s icing is a structure that mimics E. M. Forster’s Howards End. And if the novel is more conventional than her previous books, its characters are more fully realized. Professor Howard Belsey and his tattered family have only the highest ideals, but temptation – particularly physical beauty-makes hypocrites of them all. The public’s obsession with Smith’s own has, she acknowledges, helped shape the novel. “I think if you’re a woman your looks are an essential part of you because the world makes them so. When my book came out, how I looked was somehow a

See Also: This week, acclaimed mixologist Douglas Ankrah of London’s LAB bar joins Audrey Saunders at her West Village cocktail shrine Pegu Club. He’ll be serving drinks from his new book Shaken and Stirred, including the Indian Summer (made of raspberries and gin) and the P-G breeze (pomegranate puree and passion fruit juice). Or try definitive versions of warming fall favorites like the Old Fashioned or the Rusty Nail.

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October 20, 2005 issue of New York Magazine

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