House Beautiful
Welcome to La Enchantada, my summer home here on the rhapsodically beautiful island of Martha’s Vineyard. I trust you enjoyed your gondola ride across La Enchantada’s moat.
Before we step inside, you will note that La Enchantada is a classic Palladian villa in design—a la Palladio’s majestic Renaissance villas in Vicenza—only not dinky. It is 82,000 square feet, excluding the cricket stadium and hydroponic forest in the basement. Local land-use crackpots are trying to limit the size of new homes here to something like 3,000 square feet, which is ridiculous. I have birdbaths bigger than that.
You are standing atop the highest hill on the island, affording sweeping vistas of the mighty Atlantic Ocean on one side and the gentler waters of Vineyard Sound on the other. An historic clapboard Methodist church stood on this very hill when I bought it, requiring me to hire a teenaged pothead to burn it to the ground in the dead of night. I was fined twelve million dollars by the local preservationist fussbudgets, which I paid promptly and for which I have yet to receive a thank you note.
Upon excavating the hilltop for La Enchantada’s foundation, workmen discovered that the site had been a sacred burial ground for the Wampanoag, the Native American tribe that has inhabited this island for thousands of years and whose descendants still reside here. I had the bones gathered into a Dumpster and deposited thoughtfully in front of the nearby tribal headquarters. Tribal leaders sued me nonetheless; another fine, which I paid in full, and yet the encampment of noisy protesters outside La Enchantada’s entrance gates, which you passed on your way here to the hilltop, remains. I apologize.
I designed La Enchantada myself, although I did hire Robert A.M. Stern to add the charming vernacular “Shingle Style” touches for which he is so renowned, and that honor La Enchantada’s New England location. Hence the cedar shingles, dormer windows, thirty-two lighthouse-shaped towers, and seven-mile widow’s walk on the roof. I am fond of standing on my widow’s walk at the close of each day, to watch the sun set over the Sound and to gaze upon the homes of Steve Rattner and Dirk Ziff, which are enormous but mere huts, sad and meager, compared to my own.
Seasonal workers find it next to impossible to secure affordable rental housing on this resort island, which is why I have graciously built cinderblock dormitories behind La Enchantada, in the swamp at the bottom of my hill, for the ninety-five in help I require. These buildings are invisible to the naked eye, prettily shrouded by the native poison ivy I have allowed to grow free over and around them. Workers do not complain about the poison ivy, or the flock of heirloom sheep that share their quarters, although by mid-August several of them customarily attempt to murder me in my sleep. Hence the moat.
Our tour will continue inside La Enchantada, where we will pause to take in the foyer, whose walls and rotunda ceiling are lined in pages from the Gutenberg Bible, which I sliced out of my own personal copy and decoupaged as a healing act of craft therapy in the wake of my third or seventh divorce.
We will then progress to the living room, an exact replica of the Main Concourse at Grand Central Station, including the glorious painted constellations of the firmament as well as the circular Information Desk, which houses Schatze, my pet baboon, and his concierge veterinarian. Sadly, the other rooms of La Enchantada are currently closed to public view, as we are in the midst of a major expansion.
Do not neglect to remove your shoes before crossing the threshold. No need to scuff the diamonds in the floors.