Loot – Luxury Living, Goods, Services and Reviews

Private museums can be vanity projects -- if beautiful vanity projects -- where people who have spent their lives collecting can show off the fruits of their labor. The Maeght Foundation, the Berggruen Museum, the Frick. But what to make of a museum that's a marketing machine?

The Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco is the corporate showcase of a software company best known for Auto CAD, hugely popular among architects. Part exhibition space and part informational tour, the gallery, open twice a week to the public, would be a drag, yes?

Headlines about art auctions mostly trumpet sales in the millions. But spend enough time looking through the auction catalogs and you'll be treated to something very different. Knickknacks.

Auction houses don't love to advertise that they're selling tchotchkes, but it's a necessary part of the business. Often, to get an estate that includes a valuable painting or piece of furniture, they have to agree to take what in collectors' minds might be less desirable pieces -- a silk couch, a set of silver flatware, or other, vaguely valuable things.

Consider the puff pastry: airy and voluminous, sweet and savory, flaky and moist. To make real puff pastry, layers of dough and butter have to be delicately, painstakingly folded, often hundreds of times, at 68 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. Mash the layers and there will be no puff to the pastry. Layer the butter and dough at a warmer temperature and the layers will congeal.

So which places in New York, a city rife with French bakeries, give such a sophisticated dessert its due? Here are a few of the best. If you try all six, you'll be 30 pounds heavier but immeasurably more enlightened.

Booming, say the shopkeepers. (Of course, they are the shopkeepers.) To hear them tell it, residents of Washington, D.C., far from hunkering down in the face of austerity, are throwing caution, and their disposable income, to the wind -- at least in the luxury sector.

“We were certainly anticipating feeling the effects of the sequester,” says Matthew Rosenheim, president and co-owner of Tiny Jewel Box, a high-end watch and jewelry store downtown. “We’ve had the best June, July and August in the history of our company.” Rosenheim cites Rolex watches as a best-seller, along with what he describes as the bridal side -- engagement rings, wedding bands and gifts.

It's fall and you want to watch the leaves do just that. Where better than Vermont?

How about Cape Cod?

Yes. Summer is over. You're back at your desk.

But! New York's fall cultural life has begun at museums, concert halls and performance venues. There are the big milestones, like opening night at the Metropolitan Opera on September 23, but there are also some less trumpeted events to get excited about.

It was recently reported that exotic pets are forbidden in the new New York skyscraper One57, colloquially known as "the billionaires building." Such restrictions conjure a wealthy eccentric with cheetahs. But for about the price of a pure-bred Newfoundland, a pet with an "exotic" designation conferred by the U.S. Department of Agriculture can be yours.

A Fennec fox, which an unofficial Bloomberg arts desk poll has deemed the Cutest Animal in the World, will run you around $2,000. If you'd like something equally energetic but a little hardier, Coatimundi, a relation of the raccoon, sell for around $800. Or if, in lieu of the Joneses' chocolate lab, you'd like a zebra grazing in the yard, you can have one delivered for around $5,000.

Summer, by most measures, is over. But with temperatures in the New York metro area in the 80s and 90s, it doesn't feel like it. And because someone, somewhere, decided arbitrarily that after Labor Day shorts and sundresses and seersuckers were inappropriate, and everyone inexplicably decided to go along with it, dressing for the weather has become tricky.

There are a few easy outs.

It's been difficult to peg the trends at this season's New York Fashion Week, probably because fashion this year is (thankfully) all over the map. With one exception: Nikes.

The sneaks are on everyone from models to creative directors to PR people to random hangers-on. The two favored types seems to be Flyknits and Nike Free 5.0+s in black, worn by men and women alike.

New York Fashion Week can look like an elaborate nod to a few obsessed bloggers. Attendees -- a mix of press, fashion editors, stylists, buyers and fashion directors -- have probably seen much of the line beforehand. By the time the lights go down and the models hobble out onstage, the audience isn't all abuzz with "Will it be pastels or minimalist chic?"

So why hold the show at all?