In what now seems the quaint era of Truman Capote’s baroque social diagrams, what distinguished the truly wealthy from the merely rich was the better vegetables they served: “tiny ones.”
Were Capote alive today to freeload off his social betters, the details he would most likely espy might not involve the fare at their tables — even the mega-rich do takeout — but the Hallstein water they import from Austria, or their $15,000 computer-operated Danish TopBrewer coffee systems, or the $700 hand-embroidered monogrammed towel sets they order from the cult Florentine linen shop Loretta Caponi, or even the subtle toggles they use to switch off a light.
Lately throughout gentrified Brooklyn — or Hollywood on Hudson, as some call a borough now home to Adam Driver, Matt Damon, Michelle Williams, and Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz — the brownstone superrich signal domestic chic with decorative details like a $220 light switch manufactured by the English company Forbes & Lomax.
For the average home renovator, of course, a $22 Leviton light switch from Home Depot does the job just fine. Yet no five-story Brooklyn Heights behemoth, where the obligatory uncurtained windows open up on scenes reminiscent of ethnological dioramas (Exhibit A: Lives of the 21st-Century Technocrats), can be considered complete anymore without Forbes & Lomax toggles in each room.
“They’re house jewelry,” said David Hottenroth, a partner in the architectural firm Hottenroth & Joseph, referring to the elegant 1930s-style switches made of nickel, bronze and brass.
Or they are a domestic version of Kendall Roy’s Loro Piana baseball cap in “Succession” (remember “Succession”?): absurdly costly, yet so subtle you only notice them if you already know how expensive they are?