Wow, Look at Jezebel's New Headquarters

Thrilled to report that Jezebel has found the ideal new headquarters: An absolutely ridiculous Upper East Side townhouse with a dining room inspired by Versailles that will look magnificent festooned in discarded gummy candy wrappers. All we need now is $88 million, but that is the merest trifling detail.

Business Insider featured this monstrosity, which won’t exactly dampen your desire to eat the rich. But it will perhaps make you long for your own stunningly tacky haven from the world. Look at this, a room whose shelves Jezebel could fill with tattered copies of Us Weekly going back six years and all 4,572 of my advance reading copies:

It has a spiral staircase! Unfortunately, my eyes aren’t up to the task of deciphering that ballad scrawled over the fireplace; no doubt it’s truly peerless verse that has stood the test of time.

“The house was originally commissioned for an international silk trader in 1883 and then renovated into its present neo-Classical style in 1913,” according to Business Insider. So that’s how you get this ceiling.

It was this bathroom that sold Jezebel editor-in-chief Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on the move, as she is pretty sure there’s an experience shower back there.

The pictures are pretty good, but please don’t sleep on the listing itself, which is a masterpiece of persuasion. The mansion is described as being “in the tradition of” Stanford White, and also through the laws of transference it might as well be literally Versailles:

William Bosworth includes among his most famous designs Kykuit, the famed Rockefeller family estate north of Tarrytown in New York, where he worked closely with William Adams Delano and Chester H. Aldrich. Under the auspices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Bosworth was commissioned to restore the Palace of Versailles, France, which Rockefeller financed.

A century later, the present owner of 12 East 69th Street was influenced by the Palace of Versailles, which receives 3 million visitors a year, a testament to its international draw as a monument to timeless architecture.

I will never understand the enthusiasm of the mega-rich for Versailles, which is like opting for a Gatsby-themed wedding reception—doesn’t anybody ever check the Wikipedia summary to see how things worked out?