Let's say that instead of being born to middle class parents in a blue collar suburb outside Detroit, you were born to a Dubai real estate mogul or an heiress to a paper towel fortune. Or maybe instead of going to school to study classics or anthropology or ceramics, you studied business or better yet, finance. While others are diddling around with clay and wearing black and knocking back happy hour specials, you have set your sights on one goal, and it's green and rectangular and made of a sturdy paper that won't disintegrate in a wash that, if all goes according to plan, you'll never have to do yourself.
The price most of us must pay for failing to be born into extravagant wealth or being so shortsighted as to follow our dream into the arts or teaching or becoming pediatricians is that we will never know what it means to throw open the door to our five bedroom suite at The Mark in Manhattan. The $75,000 per night price tag (which reportedly makes it the most expensive on Earth) is a detail for the accountants, a footnote to be breezily regarded later, if at all, just like the freestanding fireplace and the heated bathroom floors and towel racks.
You know the feeling that you, a taxi dispatcher or a public defender or ikebana practitioner, feel when you slide the key card into the door of a normal, one bedroom hotel room? Maybe it's quite nice— maybe it has a partial ocean view, high thread count sheets, a complimentary robe tucked in the closet. Is your joy marginalized knowing that somewhere, an oil baron or prince is entering the Mark's penthouse from one of three private elevators, padding across a white oak floor into the Grand Ballroom, so named for its 26-foot tall ceilings? That the kitchen is filled with Miele and Gaggenau appliances that guests will surely never use, that there even exists such a thing as an "infinity bathtub" and that your plebeian skin will never know the joy of bathing in one? You were just delighted to see that this Marriott had Aveda soap!
Interestingly, the sumptuous pied-à-terre was originally advertised as a $60 million home, which found no buyers. According to the Telegraph, it "languished unused for years," a frustrating thought considering the thousands of families evicted each year for their inability to pay the city's increasingly impossible rents.
But that's life and capitalism, and moreover, what you get for neglecting to become a Russian oligarch who wouldn't notice the hand-crafted cabinetry unless it was imperfect. At which point an entire fleet of factotums would be ordered to burn.
