The Prince of CHINTZ

On a January day in New York, Sotheby’s salesroom on Manhattan’s Upper East Side rippled with anticipation. Already, 4,000 people had visited the pre-sale exhibition of the Mario Buatta: Prince of Interiors auction. Now, the sale itself was about to begin. Two days, 969 lots, 1,200 bidders and eight auctioneers later, the 22-hour bidding marathon came to an end with the famous interior designer’s antique furnishings making a cool $7.6m – more than double Sotheby’s high estimate. ‘We knew we would get an uplift because it was a single-owner collection, but we weren’t expecting it to go that high,’ says Sotheby’s Dennis Harrington, who had to order a second print run of the catalogue, so popular the sale proved.