expire-images:2008-11-16

Luxury Condo Building To Rise In Kandahar

Filed under: Estates

Picture this: luxury condo apartments with marble floors, coffered ceilings and underground parking selling for $45,000 to $65,000. It sounds like a deal except for the fact that in real estate it all comes down to location. The Al-Jadeed building is in the city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and still not the safest place to live. Developer Ahmed Khan says the seven-story building is the first luxury building in the area and he believes that private business can rise again in Kandahar. He says the building will have electricity and wireless Internet access 24 hours a day which are luxuries in the area. Even though Kandahar is Afghanistan's second-biggest city by population, this building will only be the second one in the city with an elevator.Three security guards posted at each of the two entrances at all times. Rents for the suites in the building are estimated to be in the $250 to $400 a month range which is far above the usual rent in the city. Many of the buyers and renters are Afghans living in the West who still want a pied a terre in their homeland.

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Tags: afghanistan, ahmed khan, al-jadeed, expire-images:2008-11-16, kandahar, taliban

Laurence Graff's Spendy Week

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Jewelry, Auctions, Celebrity Shopping, Art

Renowned jeweler Laurence Graff has a habit of spending big at the big jewel and art auctions but this week Graff really went overboard spending $40 million this week on rare red and blue diamonds in Geneva and scooping up contemporary art in New York. Bloomberg reports that Graff paid $8.4 million for a Warhol soup-can picture, $15.7 million for Warhol's double image of Elvis Presley. as well as Warhol pictures of Jackie Kennedy and Truman Capote and Jean-Michel Basquiat's portrait of Sugar Ray Robinson. In an interview Graff was quoted as saying that what he bought he mostly got at low estimates and that he thinks they will go higher (this even as a prominent art dealer named Warhol and Basquiat as two of the most overpriced artists). Graff wasn't just buying, he also sold $10 million of art at this week's auctions.

Also on Graff's shopping list this week on the business side was the 493 carat Letseng Legacy, the world's 18th largest known diamond. Graff and manufacturing partner SAFDICO beat out 10 other diamantaires, eventually paying $10.4 million.

[Thanks, Lana]

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Tags: art, basquiat, diamonds, expire-images:2008-11-16, laurence graff, LaurenceGraff, letseng legacy, warhol