Walk 10 blocks farther, to Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach, and you'll find Russian buyers tearing down old homes and putting up sprawling affairs designed in the Roman Imperial style, with massive bronze crests, spiked gates and enough marble to empty the quarries of Carrara.
The windows — triple-paned affairs designed to let in thermal energy from the sun and prevent it from radiating back out through the glass — caused months of delay, not least because the very best windows of this sort are hard to find in the United States.
The two five-part motets are intense, slightly dour affairs, designed to be sung at funerals, while the pair of laments both feature striking violin obbligatos; the two arias are also haunted by death, though, like most of the works here, the harmonic richness of the music makes them seem anything but lugubrious.
Special guest speakers/transformers/facilitators are also tapped to be part of the events, which are typically longer weekend affairs designed to allow attendees to "upgrade" their personal software, for lack of a better phrase.
Football has never been judged on calendar years and the anachronism here only heightens the sense of a jarring, clumsily decadent affair designed for, well… not for us, anyway.
Sony's remote control is a two-handed affair, designed like an Xbox game controller, with a BlackBerry-style keyboard and arrow keys that slowly, awkwardly move the cursor around the screen.
Like the restaurant, where three of his four children work, the book is a family affair, designed by his daughter Tamara and photographed by his son-in-law, Jason Fulford.
But The Battle of the Five Armies, lest we be in any doubt, will be a far more serious and sombre affair, designed to link the new trilogy to the moodier Lord of the Rings.
The first salvo was the opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, a visually extravagant affair designed and animated by Hewlett ('what you see is me, what you hear is Damon').
Elizabeth has gathered what's left of her squabbling clan at the family hunting lodge outside Syracuse (a dark-wood affair, designed by John Lee Beatty) for one last morning of game shooting before her elder, golden-boy son, Duncan (Evan Jonigkeit), ships off to France with his regiment.
