In 2004, Rudy and I moved to London after I’d been offered a position running an auction house, a phenomenal chance to live, for the time, in the heaving center of the global art market. We’d spent the previous five years in a modest West Hollywood bungalow whose courtyard I’d planted with olive trees, geraniums, and pelargoniums that I had collected with my grandmother. For months before the move, I commuted from LA and always tacked on a few extra days to look at flats. Though I kept reluctantly adding money to our real estate budget, I found that the apartments only seemed to get bigger and uglier in proportion to the prices. I was beginning to feel desperate when a friend introduced us to an acquaintance looking for a “lodger.” I don’t think I’ve ever responded so viscerally to a series of rooms as I did to that apartment on Warwick Avenue. I loved it so intensely that, on our first viewing with the landlady, I cried. She was British enough to be embarrassed at my outburst, and promptly discounted the rent.
