Follow LA Observed on Twitter here
Meridith Baer furnishes and decorates homes specifically to hook potential buyers. A New York Times Magazine writer lusts after the image of a life she created — mountain bike included — in an otherwise empty loft in the National Biscuit Company building in Downtown:
Hand-selected from the firm’s inventory, which takes up 135,000 square feet of warehouse space, they are exactly the objets that I would own in the urban-bohemian-plutocrat-Angeleno version of my life. There in the dining room are the Louis XV chairs and settee, the Aubusson carpet and the slightly kitschy hand-carved wooden candelabras, all set off by the stone urn covered in moss — which I surely picked up somewhere in my travels — and the ersatz Giacometti sculpture. There is the 30-foot port-colored velvet curtain that falls the height of the entire loft. But to show that I am not mired in the distant European past, there are the off-white Philippe Starck chairs and, in the bathroom, his Louis Ghost chairs. To show I am not a culture snob, there are the Stephen Verona black-and-white prints of populist heroes like Leonard Bernstein and Henry Winkler. And to show that I am not some prissy collector, there is the mountain bike, hanging by hooks from the ceiling.Someday soon, at its current $2.9 million asking price or something lower, somebody, my West Coast fantasy version of me, will buy Biscuit 703, and when that happens Meridith Baer’s trucks will back up to the freight elevator and cart all her furniture and effects — the curtain and the settee, the Aubusson and the Starcks, the piano and even the copy of Thomas Keller’s “French Laundry Cookbook,” which now sits on the kitchen countertop, helpfully opened to Page 27 — back to the warehouse,
Photo: Catherine Ledner for The New York Times