For once, the developer Michael Shvo was in the market for himself. Real estate being his business, he was not about to settle for a conventional East End shingle house for his Hamptons retreat. In 2007, after touring upwards of 40 less-than-ideal properties, he lit on a listing for a modernist gem, and without pausing to negotiate, ponied up the asking price sight unseen. Appreciating its simple geometries flooded with crystalline light, he was already envisioning a backdrop for his burgeoning cache of hard-edge and Color Field painting from the 1960s.
“It’s a gut feeling,” says Shvo of the impulse buy, reclining in a Poul Volther sling chair in the large, open living room. “That’s how I fall in love with art, that’s how I fall in love with real estate, that’s how I fell in love with my wife. I’m very consistent.”
Seven years on, Shvo and his wife, Seren, whom he met in Istanbul in 2009 through a mutual friend, have maxed out the house’s wall space and are populating the garden with pieces by their favorite artists: the husband-and-wife team of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne.
All the art is set against a field of shimmering white—walls, floors, furniture. For a man who, at the height of the 2000s real-estate boom, coined the tagline “Let’s Shvo” as a way of doing business, it’s awfully serene. Paintings by Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis mingle with Harry Bertoia gongs and whimsical Lalanne fauna around a 1970s Karl Springer coffee table set with Nir Hod’s cocaine-line coasters. (“Funny story,” says Shvo. The artist, a friend, showed him an early version over dinner at New York City eatery Pastis. They left its itting on the table, which caused “a bit of a conundrum” for the waitstaff.)
“When we decorated, it was very important for us that it feel like a summer house, with the connection between interior and exterior,” he says, gesturing to the sliding glass doors that span the length of the living room and open onto a pool deck and two acres ringed by trees. “In here you have your Lalanne sheep, and out there you have 15 sheep in concrete. There’s a great continuation of the story of the art all around the property.”
Despite their connections with art cognoscenti—Shvo counts architect Peter Marino and former Sotheby’s chief auctioneer Tobias Meyer as friends—the couple work without an adviser or designer. “He has a great eye, both for art and for architecture,” says Seren.
Shvo has been collecting seriously for just over a decade, ever since he saw a pink Takashi Murakami Hiropon screen print in a Phillips preview and won it for $8,000. “When I want a piece of art, I do my best to get it and, thank God, normally succeed,” he says. The Murakami still hangs in his New York office—“We never sell,” says Shvo. His buying spree has continued steadily.
The couple follows the international art circuit, attending the main fairs in New York, London, and Miami, and shopping at jgm Galerie in Paris, Almine Rech in Brussels, Ben Brown in London and Hong Kong, and the Third Line in Dubai. During his frequent business travels, he is often in communication with specialists Robert Manley and Barrett White at Christie’s and Scott Nussbaum at Sotheby’s.
“I purchase a lot of work at auction,” he says. “It’s quite rare to get great Color Field works from a gallery; they just don’t have them. You do better at auction because unfortunately, in many cases, when someone passes away and the estate goes to auction, they become available.” One notable exception is Morris Louis’s “Alpha Kappa,” 1960, a 150-inch-wide piece that Shvo bought through the shuttered Haunch of Venison in 2010. It now anchors the dining area.
Favorite pieces like this one uncork a flow of factoids. Citing the 1985 catalogue raisonné by Diane Upright, Shvo explains, “This is actually one of the first paintings that Louis did in his ‘Unfurled’ series. Most of them are quite large. The paint he used, Magna, was made specially for him, and he mixed it with turpentine to get the stain. And his studio wasn’t this wide. He had to bend the canvas to get the paint to run down each side,” he notes, indicating the V shape. It was this kind of total recall that prompted Seren, after she moved to New York, to take additional art history classes “just to catch up with him,” she says. “He knows a lot and reads everything.”
Opposite the Louis, above the living room fireplace, pairs of dots in maroon and tangerine march down an unprimed vertical canvas, “Lalala,” 1976, by Tom Downing, a student of Josef Albers and a rather deeper cut from the Color Field catalogue. “I love Tom Downing; we have three paintings by him,” he says. “I didn’t ask who he was in the Washington color school or the hard-edge school when I bought these, but visually they all worked together and made a coherent story.”
That narrative, as one moves around the house, is one of crisp lines and punchy hues that reflect the optimism of the postwar period, as well as sunlight. A Kenneth Noland hangs above the front door; Leon Polk Smith’s lozenge-shaped “Red and Black Waves,” 1960, appears in the hall; and a pair of Paul Feeley canvases bend straight lines to curves. “All these works have a very strong architectural connection,” says Shvo as he strides into the master bedroom and points to “my favorite painting in the house,” a rare, pristine canvas by John McLaughlin in black, white, and cool concrete-gray. “He traveled to Asia and was inspired by the whole Zen approach,” says Shvo. “I love it because it’s very classic, symmetrical, clean—the same as this house.”
Beyond the Color Field works, the Shvos have a sizable collection of Pop art—pieces by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg as well as a prized Tom Wesselmann, “Mouth #8,” 1966. Many of these are on display in the Shvos’ Manhattan home, the interior of which, in contrast to their Hamptons house, is lined in dark, exotic wood that plays well with Art Deco furniture by Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jules Leleu, Jean Dunand, and in particular André Sornay. In total, the couple’s art and design holdings number around 330 pieces. “We try to display as much as we can,” says Shvo.
The third segment of the art collection is, without question, the Lalanne works. Shvo first encountered Les Lalanne at Ben Brown’s booth during the inaugural Art Dubai fair in 2007. “It’s a world we are very passionate about,” he says. “We have a very intimate relationship with Claude,” whom they visit in France. “Through her,” adds Seren, “we get to know the stories behind the pieces, which connects us even more.” By now the Lalanne menagerie includes the aforementioned sheep, several monkeys, two cows, Claude’s “Pomme bouche,” 1975, in the kitchen, and a large version of her “Lapin de victoire” standing sentry poolside (“very Alice in Wonderland,” says Shvo). There are other artists and works that don’t fall neatly into these categories, he adds, but “they all live happily together.”
Both of the Shvos’ homes are full of legible and luxe pieces that bring them unabashed joy. “I don’t really believe that art is something you should look at and have someone explain to you why it’s important or why it’s beautiful,” says Shvo. The son of organic chemists, he makes no bones about the fact that he left college in his native Israel. “My belief in art is that you look at it, you feel it’s beautiful, it speaks to you, and you have a connection with the piece. If I want to study it, I’ll learn, I’ll ask. But if I have to have that interaction first, in order to appreciate a piece, it’s not a piece for us.”
A gut instinct was behind his $23.5 million purchase last summer of a former Getty gas station smack in the middle of New York’s Chelsea gallery district. “The corner of 24th Street and Tenth Avenue is a Picasso, a Warhol—it’s irreplace- able, the heart of the art world; you can’t buy that again,” says Shvo. Eventually a tower will rise there, with 10 unique residences designed by Peter Marino. But last fall, in a reprise of the marketing stunts that propelled Shvo to notoriety (in addition to running 24/7 sales offices, he’s launched projects with exclusive, red-carpet parties), the site hosted occupants of a rather different stripe: Shvo’s flock of Lalanne sheep, arranged on grassy hillocks and attended 24 hours a day by security guards. The temporary installation, a partnership with dealer Paul Kasmin, was extended three times and received 1.5 million visitors over the course of its run.
“The number-one reason ‘Getty Station’ was so popular was because it was beautiful,” says Shvo. “And it was beautiful for the six-year-old kid who walked in and asked me if the grass was real, and it’s beautiful to somebody who understands the Lalannes’ original intent in creating the concrete sheep: to bring the French countryside into the urban environment, into the Parisian home. And to take that to another level, they’re Surrealist artists, and what’s more surreal than sheep grazing at a gas station in Manhattan?” Shvo has another such installation planned for a new development downtown at 100 Varick Street for Frieze Week this month.
The world of ultra-high-end real estate, which Shvo takes credit for pioneering through such projects as Giorgio Armani’s first residential commission, has much in common with the art market. “I always look at the correlation,” says Shvo, “and I truly believe art that’s unique, that’s one-of-a-kind, really has no price, the same way real estate that is unique has no price—it’s whatever someone’s willing to pay.” He pauses. “People always ask me, do you buy art as an investment? But that’s an insane question, because once you spend millions of dollars on art, clearly it’s an investment. But we’ve never bought art in order to say we’re buying it for $1 million and we think it’ll be worth $2 million tomorrow.... For me that has nothing to do with collecting art, only trading art.”
Shvo is nonplussed by the meteoric rise of young guns like Lucien Smith and Oscar Murillo at auction. The only artist he and his wife own who might be considered a member of that superhot class is Adam McEwen. He contributed the red text canvas above their bed in Manhattan that reads “Fuck you very much.” “I bought that at the Guggenheim Ball in 2006,” recalls Shvo, “and I don’t care that it’s worth 30 times as much today—I don’t want to sell it.”
“Honey, can you get the Sotheby’s sheet?” asks Shvo. Seren brings a printout of a lot from the February 13 day sale of contemporary art in London. “We had wanted to buy this piece for three years, but the edition is sold out,” he says. The C-print from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s “A Perfect World” fashion shoot, which ran in W in September 1999, featuring a chicly clad model posed against the glass doors of the Shvos’ Hamptons house. Shvo chased it to £42,500 ($70,000), more than double the high estimate. When the prize is personal, price is no object.
