 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(February 2020) |
Michael Bruno is an American entrepreneur and the founder of 1stdibs. [1] He is also the founder of the home design app Housepad, [2] Tuxedo Hudson Company [3] and Tuxedo Hudson Realty, [4] and Art-Design-Carta. [5]
Michael Bruno was the fourth of six children. He was born and raised in Larchmont, New York. [6] He is a former competitive swimmer and Junior Olympics winner. [1]
Bruno studied business at San Diego State University and later moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a real estate broker. [7]
During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, Bruno worked as a real estate agent for Sotheby's real-estate division in San Francisco. [8] [9] Bruno says he was inspired to get his real estate license at age 19 after reading Napoleon Hill's 1937 self-improvement book Think and Grow Rich . [10]
In 2001, after moving to Paris, France, Bruno created 1stdibs.com, an online luxury marketplace for antiques, jewellery, and fine art. [11] He said the idea for the company came to him while visiting the Clignancourt flea market in Paris. [12]
In 2011, Bruno accepted a $60 million investment from venture capital firm, Benchmark, and stepped down from his role as CEO of 1stdibs but stayed on as chief creative officer. [13]
In 2012, Bruno bought a 12,000-square-foot mansion in Tuxedo Park, New York. The mansion was designed in the early 1900s by John Russell Pope. Bruno also owns a historic park adjacent to the Tuxedo Park property. The 55-acre park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York City. [14] The Tuxedo Park home was featured in a July 2015 photo tour in design magazine Elle Décor. [10]
In 2015, Bruno launched an interior design app called HousePad, a digital household management tool that allows homeowners to communicate with family, guests, interior designers, and staff. [15]
In 2016, Bruno launched Design Carta, a private marketplace for art and design professionals. [16] He also founded Tuxedo Hudson Realty, a commercial and residential real estate company, [4] and Blue Barn, an organic farmstand, that same year. [17] [18]
In May 2012, New York-based charity organization Lighthouse International honored Bruno and fashion designer Carolina Herrera for being "fashion visionaries." [19] Bruno was also a recipient of the 2012 "Innovators" award from the Sir John Sloane Museum Foundation. [20]
In October 2014, Bruno was the recipient of design and decorating magazine Traditional Home's first Trailblazer Award. [7]
Bruno is a collector of historic properties and has been purchasing and restoring historic homes and properties since the 1990s. [21] He says his passion for historic preservation began with the purchase of a 1920s-era villa designed by William Templeton Johnson. [2] Bruno owns several additional historic properties in and around Tuxedo Park, including Loomis Laboratory, a stone castle built in 1901. [4] The Loomis Laboratory building serves as headquarters for Bruno's Housepad app. [4] Bruno and his partner Alexander Jakowec purchased a 14,000 square-foot mansion on Coopers Neck Lane in Southampton, New York in 2015. [22] The mansion was built in the early 20th century by American architect and urban planner Grosvenor Atterbury. [22]
Bruno lives with his partner Alexander Jakowec, a former antiques dealer. [11]
Tuxedo Park is a village in Orange County, New York, United States. Its population was 645 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Poughkeepsie–Newburgh–Middletown metropolitan area as well as the larger New York metropolitan area. Its name is derived from an indigenous Lenape word of the Munsee language, tucsedo or p'tuxseepu, which is said to mean 'crooked water' or 'crooked river'.
Irvington, sometimes known as Irvington-on-Hudson, is a suburban village in the town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, New York, United States. It's a suburb of New York City, 20 miles (32 km) north of midtown Manhattan in New York City, and is served by a station stop on the Metro-North Hudson Line. To the north of Irvington is the village of Tarrytown, to the south the village of Dobbs Ferry, and to the east unincorporated parts of Greenburgh, including East Irvington. Irvington includes within its boundaries the community of Ardsley-on-Hudson, which has its own ZIP code and Metro-North station, but which should not be confused with the nearby village of Ardsley.
Alexander Jackson Davis was an American architect known particularly for his association with the Gothic Revival style.
Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site is a historic house museum in Hyde Park, New York, United States. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1940. It is owned and operated by the National Park Service.
Lyndhurst, also known as the Jay Gould estate, is a Gothic Revival country house that sits in its own 67-acre (27 ha) park beside the Hudson River in Tarrytown, New York, about a half mile south of the Tappan Zee Bridge on US 9. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.
Aby Rosen is a German and American real estate tycoon living in New York City. He co-founded RFR Holding, which owns a portfolio of 93 properties valued over $15.5 billion in cities including New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Tel Aviv. Highlights include the Seagram Building, W South Beach, The Jaffa Tel Aviv, Gramercy Park Hotel, Paramount Hotel, and Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino, among other properties. Rosen is also a member of, a founding investor in, and the landlord of the CORE Club in New York.
The Staatsburgh State Historic Site preserves a Beaux-Arts mansion designed by McKim, Mead, and White and the home's surrounding landscape in the hamlet of Staatsburg, Dutchess County, New York, United States. The historic site is located within Ogden Mills & Ruth Livingston Mills State Park. The mansion, a New York State Historic Site, is considered a fine example of the great estates built during the Gilded Age.
Wilderstein is a 19th-century Queen-Anne-style country house on the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York, United States. It is a not-for-profit house museum.
West Park is a hamlet on the west side of the Hudson River in the Town of Esopus, Ulster County, New York, United States. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area became attractive to the well-to-do seeking second homes because it provided privacy, clean water and relatively inexpensive property.
Locust Grove is a National Historic Landmark estate located on US 9 in the Town of Poughkeepsie, New York. The 200-acre park-like estate includes homes, a carriage house, ice house, trails, a flower garden, and vegetable garden, and it overlooks the Hudson River from a bluff. The property includes a home designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis for Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. An Italianate style mansion, it was completed in 1851.
The Palmer Woods Historic District is a neighborhood located in Detroit, Michigan, bounded by Seven Mile Road, Woodward Avenue, and Strathcona Drive. There are approximately 295 homes in the 188-acre (0.76 km2) district, which is between the City of Highland Park in Wayne County and the City of Ferndale in Oakland County. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The Detroit Golf Club is nearby.
Elie Hirschfeld is an American real estate developer, philanthropist and art collector based in New York City. He is the son of the late real estate mogul Abraham Hirschfeld.
The Rufus M. Rose House is a late Victorian, Queen Anne style house located in the SoNo district of Atlanta, Georgia. Occupying a narrow lot on Peachtree Street, one and a half blocks south of North Avenue, the house was built in 1901 for Dr. Rufus Mathewson Rose. The architect was Emil Charles Seiz (1873–1940), who designed many residential and commercial structures in the city, including the 1924 Massellton Apartments on Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Beechwood is a Hudson River estate in Scarborough-on-Hudson, in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The estate was most notably the home of Frank A. Vanderlip and his family, and is a contributing property to the Scarborough Historic District. The house and property were owned by the Vanderlip family from 1906 to 1979. The property is now a 37-condominium complex as the result of a development project that began in the 1980s.
Locusts on Hudson is a 76-acre (31 ha) estate in Staatsburg, New York, owned by hotelier André Balazs. The property has both an operating farm and manor. The historic estate now acts as an events venue due in part to its naturalistic landscape. A portion of the produce and animals of the farm are sent to The Standard Grill, The Standard, High Line Hotel, and Narcissa at The Standard, East Village Hotel, also owned by Balazs, in New York City, New York. Designed by architect John Churchill in the early 1940s, the estate's manor is of a neo-baroque style. Beside the manor, there are many grey and white antique remnants of dairy barns on the property.
Rockwood Hall was a Gilded Age mansion in Mount Pleasant, New York, on the Hudson River. It was best known as the home of William Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller. Both brothers were co-founders of the Standard Oil Company. Other owners of the house or property included Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, William Henry Aspinwall, and Lloyd Aspinwall. The property was once up to 1,000 acres (400 ha) in size; the mansion at its height had 204 rooms, making it the second-largest private house in the U.S. at the time, only behind the Biltmore mansion in North Carolina. The estate is currently an 88-acre (36 ha) section of the Rockefeller State Park Preserve.
1stdibs.Com, Inc. is an e-commerce company. It has an online marketplace, which sells luxury items such as high-end furniture for interior design, fine art and jewelry. The company has been recognized for "pushing the antiques business into the 21st century." Originally, founded in Paris, it is currently headquartered in New York City.