Albemarle House looks impossibly large, even from the gates of the grounds, a
mile’s drive away. As you make your way through the gentle hills, its facade
bobs up and down, disappearing and re-emerging, before you crunch the white
gravel and it looms, all pristine, fallow-coloured brick, in front of you.
The house belongs to Patricia Kluge, a Baghdad-born Briton who was once half
of the wealthiest couple in America. She built it 25 years ago, an English
country estate re-created near Charlottesville, northern Virginia, and it
was part of the settlement in her 1990 divorce from her second husband, John
Kluge, a media tycoon who was worth $5.2 billion at the time. (The precise
sum she received was never revealed, but the amicable nature of the breakup
suggested that she was happy with it.) Last October, she put Albemarle on
the market — $48m (£32.5m) will buy not just the 45-room, four-storey,
neo-Georgian home, with eight bedrooms and 15 baths, but 300 acres of land;
there are three stocked ponds, a cabin, a swimming pool, ample gardens and
hunting grounds (the chapel where her mother is buried is not part of the
sale).
On the day I visit, Kluge, whose life has included a spell as a nude model,
and her third husband, William Moses, 63, a former IBM executive, are days
from moving to a home they built on another 2,000 acres they own nearby.
Spools of bubble wrap and boxes of books are scattered about. A billiards
table covered with a sheet serves as a staging area for small items to be
moved.
Kluge’s new five-bedroom home won’t accommodate the antiques, paintings,
housewares and bric-a-brac she has amassed over the years, so Sotheby’s is
holding a sale of her things on June 8 and 9. (An auction of her jewellery
in April brought in £3.5m.) It’s the auction house’s first on-site estate
sale in America for 20 years; if it fetches the estimated £9m, it will be
worth the effort. Albemarle will be open for public exhibition the week
prior; purchase of the £44 catalogue buys you entrance.
“This would be a great place to start,” Kluge says, leading me to the Roman
Gallery. She turns sharply and glides down a long hallway with arched
windows on one side, marble statues on the other and a bubbling fountain in
the centre. Her two dogs, Basil and Mr Choo, are underfoot.
“There’s Minerva, goddess of war; this is Augustus and this is Diana, the
huntress,” she says, her British accent tempered by American enunciation.
“For me, she symbolises somebody who likes to shoot and fish and climb
trees, which is what I do. I don’t climb trees any more, but...” She trails
off into laughter. That Kluge once climbed trees I have no way of knowing;
as for the hunting and fishing, she has mounted heads scattered through the
house to prove it. She points out her first partridge, a deer caught on the
estate and a swordfish she hooked in Bora Bora.
The gun room, painted hunter green, is off the foyer. Gun cabinets line the
wall. It’s surprisingly small, as is the media room across the way. Kluge
says she kept the original structure of the house and built around it.
Then it’s off to the opulent drawing room, where Kluge holds tea for friends.
The harp, harpsichord and baby grand piano give the impression of a French
salon. So do the giltwood wall lights ($50,000-$70,000), which she got from
the late Nancy Lancaster, niece of Nancy Astor and owner of Colefax and
Fowler.
We go on to room after room: chef’s kitchen, wine cellar, master bedroom,
theatre. When we get to the basement, she opens each cupboard, pointing out
light bulbs, linens, laundry. She knows where everything belongs.
In the library, with its dark wood and handsome pillars, Kluge points to an
ornate gold clock, an 18th-century Chinese imperial tribute piece adorned
with delicate flora and fauna, with four gold feet. It is the signature
piece of the auction, with an estimated price of $600,000-$1m.
Kluge says she bought it for its historical significance: it was created at
the peak of Imperial China; shortly thereafter, revolution unravelled the
country and led to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. “I
grew up in Iraq, which was a British colony, and I remember the revolution,”
she says. For Kluge, the Chinese clock had strong echoes: “I felt touched
that the emperors appreciated beautiful things, but this was also a symbol
of Chinese suffering.
“Excess, loss — then the people creating a new country for themselves. I
related to that: as a child, I had a similar experience.” Will she regret
saying farewell to her treasures? “Parting with things is not hard for me,”
she says. “There will always be more.Kluge is no stranger to upheaval. By
1965, Iraq, where she spent her childhood, was engulfed in civil unrest.
Three years before the Baathist revolution that eventually brought Saddam
Hussein to power, her English father and half-Iraqi, half-Scottish mother
moved the family to Britain. London in the 1960s was about three things —
Kluge didn’t indulge in the drugs or rock’n’roll. She posed nude for the
magazine Knave, run by her first husband, Russell Gay, and wrote a sex
advice column.
Her life is peppered with people who have become enamoured of her. Later,
after moving to New York, she got engaged to a doctor. It was then that she
met John Kluge. Although 34 years her senior, he pursued her so vigorously
that she broke off her engagement with the doctor and married him instead in
1981. The couple relocated to Virginia, completing Albemarle in 1985 with
David Easton, a neoclassical architect and designer. Around that time, they
adopted their son, John Jr.
You don’t build a home this palatial unless you plan on entertaining. Over the
years, Kluge has charmed thousands of guests, including Frank Sinatra, Tony
Bennett and Malcolm Forbes (millionaire founder of the eponymous magazine),
during torch-lit dinners in the lily-pad garden and three-day murder-mystery
whodunnits, with titans of industry playing the butler, gardener or man who
came in from the storm.
With the invitations came a packing list: garb for fishing and hunting, casual
wear for lunches, gowns and tuxes for black-tie dinners in the formal dining
room. The mahogany dining table, from 1825 ($80,000-$120,000), seats 16. Ten
English silver birds roost on it. They, too, are to be auctioned. The
bespoke wallpaper depicts the early days of America, and there’s a
wood-burning fireplace.
Saturdays were for playing croquet, riding on four-wheelers and taking in a
film in the cinema, which converts into a discotheque. Sundays began in the
chapel, followed by a lunch party, always ending with a game of cards.
Among the most magnificent soirées was the inaugural fête, a three-day affair
of carriage rides, hoedowns, dinners and dances, culminating in a picnic
under a white tent. “It was foggy that day,” Kluge recalls. “I have Scottish
blood, and, over the hills, 80 bagpipers came over. It was the most
stunning, moving sight imaginable. I felt as if all my ancestors were coming
to the party.certainly takes her hostess duties seriously, no matter what
the occasion. Since her son was little, she has thrown elaborate Hallowe’en
parties, dressing as a witch to frighten John Jr’s schoolmates and
transforming the cabin into a haunted house.
When we return from the garden, we have tea and sandwiches in Kluge’s private
kitchen. Evidently, years in Virginia have done little to suppress her
English sensibilities. The room has exposed beams and country accents:
copper pots, wooden mallards. There’s another wood-burning fireplace and a
stout red Aga. It was complicated, she says, being a foreigner in both Iraq
and Britain, and she finds solace living in America, where essentially
everyone is from elsewhere. She’s down the road from Monticello, the estate
of the country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, and she has done
something that eluded even him: produced wine in Virginia. She planted her
first grapes in 1999, and Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard is set to ship
35,000 cases this year. She says she’s selling her house to devote more time
to this, as well as her philanthropic work and family.
Albemarle was originally listed at $100m, but the price was cut by more than
half in March. “I didn’t want to do it, but [Sotheby’s] felt that maybe it
was a good idea,” she says. “What can you do? I would raise it to
$150m.Rankin, who is handling the sale for Sotheby’s, says the original
price reflected the valuation of other estates, but after six months with no
takers, it was cut. “What we avoided was doing what a lot of people do: they
go from $100m to $75m to $50m,” he explains. “She’s ready to move on
now.says she’s not sad to be leaving Albermarle, even though it will mean
paring back her grand lifestyle. She and Moses, now CEO of their winery,
will continue to entertain extensively, but there will no black-tie affairs
like the ones at Albemarle. “In a house like this,” she muses, “every party
is special, every dinner is magnificent, because to do it any other way
doesn’t make sense.” sothebys.com/kluge