The Museum of Me, Robbie Antonio’s new house in Manila, filled w portraits of himself

[_Cathy_]

The Museum of Me

Robbie Antonio’s new house in Manila, designed by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, will be filled with portraits of himself, by world-class artists such as Julian Schnabel, Marilyn Minter, and David Salle. Is the 36-year-old real-estate developer a patron, an egomaniac, or both?



The fortune for this unchained ambition comes from Century Properties, the publicly traded real-estate company founded by Antonio’s father, currently valued at around a half-billion dollars, according to Antonio, who manages the day-to-day operations. Most of their projects are in Asia, but Antonio also founded a separate, New York-based company to do developments there—including a collaboration with I. M. Pei on a luxury condominium, the Centurion. The family’s wealth is estimated at $300 million.

Antonio is constantly on the hunt for new Obsession commissions. In March, at New York’s Art Dealers Association of America Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, he saw a display of Karen Kilimnik’s storybook-style portraits of women. “Does she do men?” he asked the gallery representative. (Kilimnik has not yet been drafted for the Obsession project.)

The artists he has enlisted in this quest seem bemused by Antonio’s aggressive approach but powerless to resist it. “His enthusiasm for all kinds of things is endearing—he kind of pulls you into his orbit,” says painter David Salle, who did a double portrait of Antonio next to Stealth, putting the lord alongside his manor, an updated riff on the Gainsboroughs and Sargents of old.

The Los Angeles-based painter Kenny Scharf portrayed Antonio as “a chic space alien,” complete with antennae. “We had dinner, I took his picture, and we talked a lot,” says Scharf of getting to know Antonio. “He wanted it immediately, and I told him he couldn’t have it immediately. He was very impatient.

“He’s a good-looking guy, and he obviously likes that part about himself.”

One thing that has helped persuade the artists to participate—beyond the $50,000 to $100,000 that Antonio is paying for each piece—is that he has done his homework. Photographer David LaChapelle recalls that, when Antonio showed up for their first meeting in Los Angeles, “he had a book of mine with literally thousands of Post-it notes.” Two months later, LaChapelle photographed Antonio against a flamboyant “millionaire’s pinball machine” backdrop.

LaChapelle takes pains to put the Obsession series in perspective. “The tradition of wealthy people wanting portraits of themselves goes back as far as art history,” he says. “It’s very easy for people to criticize him, but the more art, the better. It will be up to him to have a well-rounded project and not just a vanity project. And the collection will set him apart.”

Perhaps. Certainly having a Koolhaas house-museum is a distinction that few can claim. Plenty of people have tried to commission a Koolhaas home, but he says he was waiting for the right client—and the perfect project. “We were desperate to do more houses,” he says. “It is particularly exciting because, if you do a house, inevitably you have to engage with a person. So nothing more intimate exists.”

Somehow, Antonio’s hyper-specificity about what he wanted struck a chord. “Actually, I’m surprised they never kicked me out of their office, because I gave them, like, 50,000 images of what not to do and what to do,” says Antonio.

“Half of them were contradictory to each other,” says Koolhaas of the requested features. “Then we decided to basically not be our normal, occasionally dogmatic self but to completely adopt his point of view and see where it would end.”

Even Antonio’s architectural references were outsize. When it came to the 25,000-square-foot Stealth, he and Koolhaas used the floor plans of the Whitney and the Guggenheim as comparisons.

“It’s an enormous vision,” adds Koolhaas. “We’ve never had somebody with so many things he liked, so many things he wanted.” Originally, Antonio wanted Koolhaas to design a revolving building that would rotate a few times a month. “But I thought that would be detrimental to my budget,” Antonio says. Perhaps the most fantastical element in the finished house is near the bar on the first floor: a circular section of the wall behind it can actually flip open, hinging at the top and leading out onto the garden—giving new meaning to the phrase “man cave.”

Most of all, it was the distinctness of the Obsession project that appealed to Koolhaas, who notes dryly that “in every suburban house you see a Richard Prince Nurse.” Koolhaas says he was attracted by the notion that Antonio was testing “how far you can take patronage, or how far you can get art to represent yourself, or how you can [make] your own reputation through art.”

That was the only vote of confidence the collector needed. “I really went for it,” Antonio adds.

The Museum of Me? Robbie Antonio?s Rem Koolhaas?Designed Home, Full of Portraits of Himself | Vanity Fair