How Art Mogul Louise Blouin Lost Her Fabled Hamptons Estate

Grab a coffee at the Golden Pear in Southampton, New York, drive due south almost a mile straight down Main Street, take a left onto Gin Lane. It’s just a five-minute drive. As your GPS will tell you, you’ve arrived. The storied street, one of the most exclusive in the Hamptons, runs parallel to the ocean. It’s filled with grand old shingled homes, some built in the late 1880s, hidden from view behind hedgerows of privet, a hardy shrub first brought to the Hamptons by English settlers in the 1600s.

From your turn onto Gin Lane, it’s another 0.7 miles to number 376. Here sits a cedar-shingled house—which you can’t see from the street—built in 1888 on the Rosa rugosa dunes for railroad tycoon Robert Olyphant, the great-great-grandfather of actor Timothy Olyphant. The house is rumored—but never proven—to have been designed by Stanford White, the Gilded Age starchitect and accused sexual predator. White was 47 when he allegedly raped 16-year-old Evelyn Nesbit and 52 when Nesbit’s then husband, multimillionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot him dead. The house, first known as Eden Cottage, has direct access to the beach. Film buffs may recognize it from Woody Allen’s 1978 movie, Interiors. Its own feature coffered ceilings, nine fireplaces, and French doors galore.

In 1990, Carl Spielvogel, the late ad mogul, and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the landmarks expert, bought the 12-bedroom house. The Spielvogels hired White’s great-grandson, architect Sam White, to restore the home, which they called Bonnie Dune—the home’s name since the turn of the century. Then they decided they needed a bigger place.

Enter Louise Blouin and John MacBain. The couple bought the estate for a reported $13.5 million in late 1997 and renamed it La Dune. The house had just been through a storm—perhaps it was an omen—but a steel bulkhead had been installed, and the sale went through. There was no bulkhead, however, to protect the MacBains’ marriage from the elements, which in the Hamptons includes a certain type of striving that can be as destructive as it is all-consuming.

As the MacBain family settled in, they built a second house on the Hamptons property, with interiors by the late Francois Catroux, a decorator to aristocrats, Russian oligarchs, and rich Americans. The guesthouse features nine bedrooms, eight baths, two powder rooms, a home theater, and a billiard room. Both homes boast gyms, saunas, and staff quarters. The compound sits on 4.2 prime oceanfront acres, with 19 bedrooms between them, two pools, and a sunken all-weather tennis court.

Blond, beautiful, and wildly ambitious, Blouin had made a fortune with MacBain, creating an international classified ad empire. La Dune was the perfect place to show off their success. But the couple, who brought their own strengths to the business, were growing apart. By 2000, they had divorced. Blouin began to travel the jet-setting art world circuit with auctioneer Simon de Pury, chairman of Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, who had become her boyfriend following the breakup of her marriage; de Pury hired her to be CEO. By 2003, her relationship with de Pury, and his company, had come to an end, and she moved into art publishing.

As she moved into the art world, Blouin launched a foundation, held “art Davos”–style “global creative leadership summits,” and handed out awards to world leaders (Bill Clinton), billionaires (Carlos Slim), Nobel Prize winners (Elie Wiesel; some neuroscientists), and famous artists (Jeff Koons). She threw parties for her foundation at places like the Venice Biennale with her then boyfriend Prince Andrew in tow. Her big ideas explored creativity and the brain, and using culture to promote world peace. Only her ego was bigger. She put her name in front of all her publications and websites. Blouin had an eye for talent but a manic nature, bombarding her staff with nonsensical staccato emails.

“She was fun. She was creative. But no one on her team took her seriously,” says a former publicist. And while Blouin would generously fly some staff on private jets for ski trips and invite others to work retreats at La Dune, allegations swirled that she cut people’s pay, fired them, or stiffed them altogether. In interviews with VF, ex-staff call her a “liar,” a “sociopath,” and “vindictive.” “A kinder word would be ‘delusions of grandeur,’ ” said one former executive. Blouin’s companies have also been sued by a landlord, a printer, and many others—according to reports and staffers interviewed by VF. The New York Post dubbed her the Red Queen for her penchant for wearing the color and for her Alice in Wonderland “off with their heads” management style. “She thought she was a genius, but she just wasn’t,” says one former senior staffer. “She presented herself as this brilliant businesswoman, a thinker, and a kind of tech visionary—like some kind of global figure in a Steve Jobs way.”

And now Blouin has finally lost La Dune. The estate was sold in a bankruptcy sale this winter. What has happened since then is not totally dissimilar from other stumbles and scandals in Blouin’s long public history: She is crying foul and unfair play, mulling her options to sue everyone from her brokers to the auction house that sold La Dune—even The New York Times, for an interview she gave after the sale. “Ms. Blouin contacted us to raise what she believed to be inaccuracies,” says a spokesperson for The New York Times. “We carefully reviewed those concerns and concluded the story was accurate as published. We stand by the reporting.”

The first time I spoke to Blouin, it was by phone, on her final night at La Dune. It had been more than a quarter of a century since she had first bought the Gin Lane estate. Her voice was calm, even, unemotional, and slightly regal, like Judi Dench’s fictional spy chief, M, in the James Bond films. That was the first of two long interviews. What followed was a flurry of emails, texts, and phone calls—I stopped counting after 50. At one point she sent me a digitally constructed “evidence” board, like the kind you see in the movies, featuring pictures of and red arrows around the people whom she claims have conspired against her. It would be incomprehensible to even try to detail it here. To sum it up, she has a lot to say.

For one thing, she insists, she does have empathy, and that’s why she went into the arts, and took care of her mother when she had Alzheimer’s disease, and her husband following a ski accident in 2015. She also says she is only just now unraveling a massive fraud orchestrated by key members of her publishing team, to the tune of millions. When she found out, she says, she shut down and transferred the New York office overseas.

The last time Blouin spoke with Vanity Fair for this story, she wanted to underscore points she’d emailed, texted, and called about. “I don’t pay things. When you are a chairman and CEO of a global company, you don’t pay things,” she said via Zoom. And then, a few breaths later, “I paid everyone, they stole the money on the other side.”

Some ex-staff interviewed by VF also believe there were some irregularities, but not on the scale that Blouin alleges. Others say their work practices were standard. Blouin claims the Manhattan district attorney opened an investigation; the DA declined to comment.

As for the house, “she has seller’s remorse,” said John Allerding, a lawyer for Bay Point Advisors, Blouin’s last lender. If there had been a minimum reserve bid, “we would have had no bidders and we would be in the same position as we were when we got involved in September 2022: two properties that nobody wanted, generating expenses.”

The Department of Justice has an ongoing investigation involving federal withholdings from Blouin’s employees’ paychecks that were never sent to the government. Blouin has lodged her own complaint against the government. When reached by VF, an IRS investigator and the IRS spokesperson declined to comment. From Europe, Blouin tells VF the company allocated money to pay the withholding but that it never made it to the federal government. She says she had nothing to do with any “fraud” because she didn’t run her company, and that she welcomes the IRS investigation. “The truth will finally come out,” she says.

“The Big Apple ate me,” Blouin says in another call, with a laugh. “I wasn’t lucky in New York.”

The house on Gin Lane is far from Dorval, the Montreal suburb where Blouin grew up in comfort, one of six children. Her parents ran an insurance brokerage. She went to private schools and sailed competitively. According to the Toronto Star, she traces her heritage on her mother’s side to Jacques Viger, the first mayor of Montreal, elected in 1833. Blouin attended McGill University but never graduated. She annulled her first marriage, to David Stewart, an RJR-Macdonald tobacco heir. In 1987, Blouin married MacBain. A Rhodes scholar and son of a Liberal member of parliament, MacBain was a rising star at Power Corporation, which was owned by the family of Blouin’s brother-in-law, Paul Desmarais Jr., who came from one of Canada’s wealthiest families. As the MacBains’ business grew, the couple moved to Europe and summered at La Dune, where they enjoyed family life with their three children and threw lavish parties. But MacBain did not share Blouin’s social ambitions, some say, and the couple grew apart.

Two years after buying La Dune, in 2000, the marriage was over but the parties continued. Calvin Klein, Ross Bleckner, and Bianca Jagger were among the many guests. Blouin sold her share of the business to her ex-husband for a reported $200 million. The men she dated during this new chapter—including Simon de Pury, the “Mick Jagger of auctioneers,” and Prince Andrew—were also drawn to La Dune.

For many years, La Dune was Blouin’s calling card, luring stars and their hangers-on through the oceanfront doors. But over time, it became an albatross. By 2018, a $26 million mortgage required additional lenders. In 2023, the compound was both in bankruptcy protection and on the market for an astonishing $150 million. It was also for rent for millions of dollars. “If she could have gotten a renter at $2 million or $3 million for the summer, which was possible, she would have been able to service the loan,” a broker who once worked with Blouin told VF.

Those who walked through the compound during its final months on the market told VF that it had great bones, but there was something tragic about it. One banker, who attended a lunch prepared by Blouin’s private chef on a terrace overlooking the ocean last summer, ultimately turned down her refinancing request.

“When people live above their means against assets they have or inherited in order to tread water, it typically doesn’t end well. Nobody thought it was worth $150 million. It felt like Grey Gardens, with faded Hiroshi Sugimoto seascape photographs on the wall,” he says. Such grand old houses, he notes, “get really beaten down by the ocean.”

Ultimately, on a cold winter night in January this year, Blouin lost La Dune in a live foreclosure auction that lasted a little longer than five hours, at Sotheby’s New York offices on the Upper East Side. The sale was the first time Sotheby’s auctioned real estate live alongside art, in a collection titled “Visions of America.”

“This should be a series on Netflix,” a would-be buyer whispered, referring to all the drama.

“I’m surprised she kept the house as long as she did,” a former La Dune worker had told me. “John, her ex-husband, was easy to deal with, but she didn’t spend enough on the home’s upkeep. She reminded me of Nick Nolte in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

The compound ultimately sold for $88.48 million, including broker commissions. It sounds like a lot, but the amount was far less than the debt on the property, according to Bay Point Advisors. Blouin voiced her objections to the sale, without legal representation, in a Central Islip bankruptcy court in February. She is currently contesting how funds from La Dune’s sale should be allocated. Court-ordered mediation with Bay Point is set for this summer. If unsuccessful, both sides will be back in court in late July, after this story is published. She also disputes whether she owes Bay Point. Blouin has long since shut down her art publishing empire, although she says she is building an online archive. She has also sold much of her trophy real estate, including a penthouse duplex at 165 Charles Street designed by her friend, Richard Meier.

Two women who worked for Blouin and sued Louise Blouin Media Inc. and its owner, Louise Blouin, for money owed say they are still waiting to be paid in full, despite a settlement agreement. Nevertheless, Blouin’s fighting spirit—and apparently her lifestyle—remains.

Everyone crafts their own story. In Blouin’s narrative, she is one of the world’s most successful self-made businesswomen, an internet visionary and a woman of big ideas for the better of all. By last winter, she was described in a Bay Point prospectus this way: “The origin of Blouin’s wealth arose through the co-creation of Trader.com, which performed a joint IPO on the Nasdaq and Paris Bourse in 2000, achieving a valuation of approximately $2.7 billion, Blouin held 22% of the shares.”

But she also sees herself as a victim.

As Blouin tells it, this whole experience has been quite enough. For one, she says, there was that woman—who introduced her to a “fake” buyer, a Dallas real estate developer who was actually indicted for allegedly scamming Chinese investors out of $26 million—who had snuck into La Dune during COVID and squatted in Blouin’s own bedroom for months. Imagine! In a house with all those bedrooms! “Why did she have to choose mine? She wanted to be me!” And the lenders—forget about it. “They go in and torture you, and they have been threatening,” she says. “Like gangsters.”

“This is what she’s always done,” says one of Blouin’s former senior execs. “She says, ‘I’m the CEO. I own the company, and I had nothing to do with anything going on in my company.’ That’s hard to believe. It’s like Donald Trump saying he didn’t know about payments to Stormy Daniels. It’s the same MO. Not taking responsibility and blaming someone else.”

Like Trump, Blouin has never filed for personal bankruptcy. “I’m not bankrupt. That’s nonsense,” she says. “I’ve been attacked by predatory behavior. I had classic mortgages for many years. This was one real estate transaction out of so many. It’s important to put it in perspective. We all make mistakes.”

A few weeks after we first spoke, I met Blouin in Paris, where she lives when she’s not in Switzerland, her primary residence. She had recently returned from a ski holiday. We rendezvoused at Hôtel de l’Abbaye, a vine-covered house in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens, within walking distance from Blouin’s home.

Blouin arrived on time, all in black, a hair band keeping her perfectly blond hair off her face. Her look was barefaced, revealing the confidence of a woman who looks at least a decade younger than her 65 years. She speaks Parisian French, with not a trace of her native Quebecois. At first, Blouin was reluctant to talk. But once she started, it seemed hard for her to stop.

While she was happy to discuss the brain, creativity, AI, and geopolitics, she was reluctant to discuss her social circles, which once reportedly included Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and Prince Andrew. Back then, Prince Andrew was the UK’s special representative for international trade and investment, and matched nicely with Blouin’s vision of global diplomacy through culture and trade (and money). According to the Daily Mail, around 2004, he was a “nocturnal visitor” to Blouin’s Holland Park home in London, and she began introducing him as her boyfriend.

Friends warned Blouin that Prince Andrew was a playboy, but she didn’t listen. Preparing for his visit to La Dune, she uprooted trees and planted new ones trimmed to the same height to line the driveway, according to reports. Once there, the prince enjoyed private Pilates instruction and massage. He watched The Lord of the Rings in her private screening room, and they’d end the days with dinner and walks on the beach. But it didn’t last. Their next rendezvous was months later, an unannounced visit to her Holland Park home, the Daily Mail noted. Then, say those reports, he ghosted her.

At the mention of the tainted prince’s name, Blouin shrugs. “No, nothing,” Blouin says when I ask if there were any signs of creepiness, given his association with Jeffrey Epstein. “He was fun. He’s nice, and he was always a total gentleman.”

Blouin says she never met Epstein or his jailed companion, Ghislaine Maxwell. But Andrew certainly didn’t help himself with that “terrible interview” on the BBC, she adds.

For Blouin’s adult life, mixing work and romance has come naturally. She made her fortune creating Trader Classified Media with MacBain. They started with a publication for car classified ads in Quebec and ended up with hundreds around the world, in print and online, from France, Germany, and Italy to Russia, China, Canada, and Australia. Then, while romantically involved with de Pury, Blouin became CEO of his auction house, Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg.

LVMH’s Bernard Arnault had wanted to turn Phillips into a global player, but he backed out after 9/11. It was a hard time to be in the luxury business. Blouin clashed with de Pury’s business partner and former Sotheby’s colleague Daniella Luxembourg, a talented Israeli art dealer. As Blouin realized de Pury would always side with Luxembourg and it became evident that Blouin was never going to invest in Phillips, the courtship came to an end. Blouin resigned after 10 months on the job.

“I came to Phillips to help them restructure because they had lost $100 million, and I did that,” Blouin says now. “I never wanted to invest. The auction business seems glamorous, but it is very tough. From the outside, it’s so sexy, all the nice jewelry and design. But it’s chaos. You are getting content from someone who died or gets divorced. Every day you have to restart. There are very few repeats. And it isn’t regulated.”

The auction business, she says, “is all about your contacts, and that’s what I hate about it. I hate asking anything from anyone. I just came in and cleaned up. I wouldn’t invest. Simon was so disappointed. I left him because of money. That I can share.”

Some men don’t kiss and tell. De Pury does. He wrote about Blouin in his 2016 book with William Stadiem, The Auctioneer: Adventures in the Art Trade.

“I next was involved with Louise Blouin MacBain,” de Pury wrote, “a female tycoon by whose entrepreneurial gifts I had been smitten. Her power and success, not to mention the Marie Antoinette splendor of her lifestyle, was aphrodisiacal.”

Blouin tells me the book was “awful.” De Pury did not return Vanity Fair’s requests for comment.

When I ask what she learned from that relationship, Blouin says, “Not enough. I should have learned to be more careful about people who always want my money.”

Instead of getting out of the art world following the breakup, Blouin dove deeper. Louise Blouin Media began to buy up art publications, starting with Art + Auction in March 2003. Modern Painters followed, then she created Artinfo, which famously imploded. Freelancers, who claimed they were owed money, even formed a group, WAAANKAA: Writers Angry at Artinfo Not Kidding Around Anymore.

Yet “no one was doing anything like this,” says Andrew Goldstein, a former executive editor of Artinfo. “It was a moment when art was starting to get into the culture more, so we took a different tack—not so academic and pious—and that became very successful, very rapidly.”

“But then one day, Louise walked in and said she wanted the name changed to Blouin ArtInfo,” says Kate Shanley, the former publisher of Art + Auction. “Overnight, the URL changed, we lost all our traffic, we couldn’t deliver campaigns, and everybody was screwed. Her name went in front of everything, and it totally screwed up the revenue. It was a very egomaniacal move, and just impulsive. She had creative ideas, but she had no sense of how to make them work. It’s almost like she could have had a really great empire, but she screwed it up.”

To VF, Blouin maintains “five or six” ex-staffers committed “fraud,” creating fake contracts, pocketing company money, taking unapproved luxury trips to places like St. Barts, and making side deals with advertisers. Then an employee “vanished” and allegedly took all her computers to South America, she says. In May, Blouin told VF the fraud and lost income was estimated at $10 million. By the end of May, that number was $18 million. “We are still unraveling it,” says Blouin. “I told the IRS I wasn’t involved personally and I never ran the company.”

One senior manager tells VF that staff were paid by checks signed by Blouin. “To suggest her finance staff were engaged in fraud beggars belief,” he says. “Louise controlled the finances. She decided what got paid from salaries to expenses.”

“She is narcissistic and will blame everyone else, not take responsibility, and exaggerate certain things with this fraud stuff,” says a former senior executive tasked by Blouin to find evidence of fraud. “Some is fraud, some isn’t. She’ll say all of it is.”

However, another former senior executive says that on a trip to Ukraine, Blouin discovered that she was paying for a larger operation than what actually existed.

In 2014, Shanley and Wendy Buckley, A+A’s former associate publisher, sued Blouin and Louise Blouin Media in New York Supreme Court. They claimed they were owed $235,000 and that they were fired after complaining. Six years later, Blouin agreed to pay in installments without admitting fault. Shanley and Buckley say they received the first $10,000 each, and that was it. Blouin disputes Shanley and Buckley’s claims.

“She was very heartless about it,” Shanley says, adding that she has been cooperating with the DOJ’s investigation.

As for allegations that Shanley was involved in any irregular business practices, she says, “That’s a lie. I have all ledgers to prove it. She knew everything I was doing.”

By 2016, Blouin had been named in the Panama Papers for having at least five offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands. Offshore companies are often used by kleptocrats, drug lords, and rich people to stash assets, dodge taxes, and protect assets from creditors. There can be legitimate reasons to have offshore companies. Blouin says she used the companies to buy real estate. In 2004, 3 Olaf St. Ltd was incorporated in the BVI and subsequently bought a trophy Notting Hill building that housed the Louise T. Blouin Institute. In 2013, leaked documents show that the British courts said the company was unable to pay its debts. In 2015, 3 Olaf St. (the company) sold 3 Olaf Street (the building) to another company incorporated in the BVI—Adena Property Investments—for $53 million, London title records show, as reported by the Toronto Star. Does Blouin still own 3 Olaf Street? She wouldn’t tell Vanity Fair.

Blouin, who never graduated from college, set up the Louise T. Blouin Foundation with the stated purpose of exploring the brain’s connection to creativity, inspired by her own dyslexia. The Blouin Foundation still exists, Blouin says. She hopes to hold the next summit in November around the time she says she will release her memoir, Obsession.

“If people understood the arts better, they’d understand culture and foreign policy better,” Blouin tells me.

“There is a lot of money to be made in the space between art and finance. Louise made nothing,” an ex-staffer had told me. “It’s almost heartbreaking—or tragic—how she lost everything, even her real estate. It’s like she drank her own Kool-Aid.”

For now, Blouin says she wants to raise $400 million to buy $1 billion worth of trophy real estate for her own real estate fund. She’s also compiling an online archive of her art publications over the last 40 years. Since 2011, Blouin has been married to a Canadian economist, Mathew Kabatoff, who worked at her foundation. He is 20 years her junior.

“The most important thing is to capture my business, not my social life,” Blouin tells me. “My work is my passion. When I had 20 million ads, that was my major success and career. The arts was, is, philanthropy.”

“All my life I’ve had fantastic success. I don’t have to prove myself,” she adds. “The truth will prevail.”