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Michael Bruno is an American entrepreneur and the founder of 1stdibs, an online marketplace for antiques, furniture, jewellery, and art. [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 late 2012, 1stdibs received an additional $42 million in Series B funding from Index Ventures and Spark Capital. [14]
In January 2014, the Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba Group invested $15 million in 1stdibs to help the company expand its business in Asia. [14] By 2015, 1stdibs offered services in 17 countries, including the United States, several European countries, and Australia. [15]
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. [16]
In 2016, Bruno launched Design Carta, a private marketplace for art and design professionals. The site allows dealers to offer their latest finds to professional buyers before they post them on any open market sites. [17]
Bruno is a collector of historic properties and has been purchasing and restoring historic homes and properties since the 1990s. [18] He says his passion for historic preservation began with the purchase of a 1920s-era villa designed by William Templeton Johnson. [2]
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. [19] The Tuxedo Park home was featured in a July 2015 photo tour in design magazine Elle Décor. [10]
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. [20] The mansion was built in the early 20th century by American architect and urban planner Grosvenor Atterbury. [20]
As of early 2016, Bruno owns $15 million worth of property in Tuxedo, New York. Bruno announced plans to revitalize the town with an emphasis on New Urbanist principles, and in January 2016 he stated that his future projects and business endeavors in the area would include a farmers' market, a restaurant, an inn, and an antiques store. [4] In August 2016, Bruno opened Blue Barn, a new organic farmstand in Sloatsburg. [21] [22]
In 2016, Bruno started Tuxedo Hudson Realty, a commercial and residential real estate company focused on the town of Tuxedo. [4]
In May 2012, New York-based charity organization Lighthouse International honored Bruno and fashion designer Carolina Herrera for being "fashion visionaries." [23] Bruno was also a recipient of the 2012 "Innovators" award from the Sir John Sloane Museum Foundation. [24]
In October 2014, Bruno was the recipient of design and decorating magazine Traditional Home's first Trailblazer Award. [7]
Bruno lives with his partner Alexander Jakowec, a former antiques dealer. They have two English cream golden retrievers, Natasha and Boris. [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'.
Sloatsburg is a village in the town of Ramapo in Rockland County, New York, United States. Located east of Orange County, it is at the southern entrance to Harriman State Park. The population was 3,036 at the 2020 census. The village is named after Stephen Sloat, an early European landowner.
Irvington, sometimes known as Irvington-on-Hudson, is a suburban village in the town of Greenburgh in Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, 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.
The Allentown district is a neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. The neighborhood is home to the Allentown Historic District.
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.
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.
The Boston Post Road Historic District is a 286-acre (116 ha) National Historic Landmark District in Rye, New York, and is composed of five distinct and adjacent properties. Within this landmarked area are three architecturally significant, pre-Civil War mansions and their grounds; a 10,000-year-old Indigenous peoples site and viewshed; a private cemetery, and a nature preserve. It is one of only 11 National Historic Landmark Districts in New York State and the only National Historic Landmark District in Westchester County. It touches on the south side of the nation's oldest road, the Boston Post Road, which extends through Rye. A sandstone Westchester Turnpike marker "24", inspired by Benjamin Franklin's original mile marker system, is set into a wall that denotes the perimeter of three of the contributing properties. The district reaches to Milton Harbor of Long Island Sound. Two of the properties included in the National Park designation are anchored by Greek Revival buildings; the third property is dominated by a Gothic Revival structure that was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis.
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 Jay Estate is a 23-acre park and historic site in Rye, New York, with the 1838 Peter Augustus Jay House at its center. It is the keystone of the Boston Post Road Historic District, a National Historic Landmark District (NHL) created in 1993. The site is the surviving remnant of the 400-acre (1.6 km2) farm where US Founding Father, John Jay, grew up. It is also the place where Jay returned to celebrate the end of the American Revolutionary War, after he negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris with fellow peacemakers John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The preserved property is located on the south side of the Boston Post Road and has a 3⁄4-mile (1.2 km) view of Milton Harbor.
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.
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.
1stdibs 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.
St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo Episcopal Church, otherwise simply referred to as St. Mary's-in-Tuxedo, is an active Episcopal church in Tuxedo, New York, located within the historic village of Tuxedo Park.
St. Elizabeth's Memorial Chapel is an Anglican chapel located in the hamlet of Eagle Valley in Tuxedo, New York. Originally built as a chapel and final resting place for members of the Hamilton family, the chapel and the associated parish is notable for being at one time the only privately owned and administered Episcopal church in the New York Diocese.
