Come on My Horrible House Tour!

You're gonna hate it

It so often happens that I make fun of an inexplicably tacky and obscenely expensive Zillow house and then worry that maybe it’s somehow owned by really nice people. But listen: It never is.

Case in point… This $65 million Upper West Side 7-story Beaux-Arts townhouse. It’s actually a gorgeous 1910 construction from architect CPH Gilbert, but oh lord, the things these current owners did.

Let’s consider the evidence against them.

Exhibit A: All that gorgeous shelving, filled with books-by-the-foot.

Exhibit B: This fireplace art does look built-in, so maybe we can’t quite blame the current owners, but it features the shocked-Native-Americans-looking-at-boats-from-shore art I’ve mostly seen inside places that are like LOL, this country club is named for the people our ancestors obliterated. (I’d love to read an essay on the history of this art trope, if anyone knows a good one.) Weirdly, it doesn’t help that the piece is awkwardly blocked by… a wooden ironing board?

Exhibit C: If I had to pick a comfortable seat in this room, I guess I’d go with the table.

Exhibit D: It seems the decorator got “inspired” by the ceiling? Listen, Priscilla, SOME OF US GET MIGRAINES.

Exhibit E: This thing dominates a horrible wooden kitchen. Is it… a baptismal font? An extremely posh rabbit hutch? A confessional?

Exhibit F: I actually do get jealous of big gorgeous dressing rooms on Zillow. Not this off-center discount Versailles nightmare.

Exhibit G: There’s this thing where realtors blur out the reallllly expensive art. But like… we know exactly what that is. And you’re keeping it in the bathroom??

Exhibit H: This bizarre couch-behind-a-couch setup.

Here’s the other side of the room. My guess is that the ceiling slit in front of the fireplace is for a movie screen. Cool if so, but the people on that back couch still can’t see because their view is blocked by… another wooden ironing board.

Exhibit I: While it does have this to-die-for terrace and top-floor solarium…

…this is what they did to the poor elevator:

So who owns it?

Oh, I’m SO glad you asked.

It’s this woman, Dina Wein Reis, who in 2011 pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and then served 19 months in federal prison.

She is considered an art and furniture collector, which I guess is technically true.

Here’s what she did, in addition to desecrating that mansion: She’d lure upper-level marketing execs to the house pretending to consider them for a high-paying executive job. She’d flirt a lot. Then she’d ask for high-end merch that she was going to distribute as free samples (through a non-existent company) to get whatever brand in front of a huge market; instead she used a middle-man to sell the goods at full price.

She used the proceeds to pay for art for her home, which would further impress the CEOs, etc. etc.

She got caught because she was horrible to her assistants. After one missed work for her grandfather’s funeral, she texted, “I’m sorry about your grandfather. You’re fired.” She canned another for breaking her foot. (That’s the one who turned her in.)

The Good News:

The original owner was Herbert Horace Vail, chairman of the American Book Company—which published educational books including the McGuffey readers. If you buy this place (please do, and invite me over) you could redecorate beautifully AND you’d get a bookish Gilded Age ghost.

Join my for more Zillow adventures, and please send me your best/worst finds!