Editor’s note from the May/Jun 2017 issue of Luxury Listings NYC

This month, the beautiful Diane Lane graces our cover. 

The actress dishes on her new movie, “Paris Can Wait,” in which she has a dalliance with a Frenchman and eats a lot of croissants while taking a scenic road trip. (Alec Baldwin also stars as her husband in the film, directed by Eleanor Coppola, the 81-year-old wife of Francis Ford Coppola, in what, remarkably, is her first feature film.) 

As our reporter Isabel Schwab writes, Lane has made a career of acting out other people’s fantasies on-screen in exotic locations, in this movie and others. Most famously, she had audiences dreaming about Italy when her character spontaneously moved there and started fixing up a crumbling villa in “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

But the reality of creating fantasy is not all fun and games, and Lane gets into the behind-the-scenes considerations that go into her choices as an artist, being a woman in Hollywood today and the merits of speaking out politically, in our story starting on page 10. (That we met up with her in a windowless WeWork office in Chelsea added to the realism but did not diminish her fantasy-inducing charm.)

Maybe its just because we have Lane on the cover, but there is something cinematic in the lineup of stories we have in this month’s LLNYC.

This issue could read like a drama, with Lane in the leading role, in which a rich girl meets a rich boy in a ritzy location; the story that follows is equal parts celebration, adventure, betrayal and tragedy.

Our story opens in Midtown, with abovementioned boy and girl meeting at a charity gala in the spring. Candace Bushnell and Luann de Lesseps were there (page 46) to support the preservation of the Hearst Castle. 

From the beginning of a marriage
to the end of one, there is something cinematic
in the scope of stories in this month’s issue.
Or it could just be the fact that we have
Diane Lane on our minds. 

A few dates later — namely at fashionable new restaurants like White Gold on the Upper West Side (page 54) and the Wooly Public in the Woolworth Building, where they downed many glasses of the eatery’s signature drink, the Queens Park Swizzle (page 66) — they move in together. 

They’re shacking up at his place, which is at starchitect Rem Koolhaas’s long-awaited first project in New York City (our leading man is an architecture buff), located in the Flatiron District (see page 58).  They work long hours — he especially so, often getting called away on weekends — but the relationship blossoms. Not long after, he pops the question, proposing in Danny Meyer’s new spot at the top of 28 Liberty — the view is incredible (see page 70).

Wedding planning (page 8)! She goes on leave from her job and dives into it full time. The reception is going to be at Cipriani 25 Broadway — sure, it’s over the top, but they have so many people to invite, and it’s a fun venue; she is especially jazzed about the tabletop arrangements.

That summer, after the wedding, they rent a place out East. He’s had an amazing year with the run-up in the stock market, and that 10-bedroom house on Meadow Lane, incredibly, is not out of reach (see 34), maybe because the high-end market has started to soften of late. Still, it’s one of the priciest rentals on the market (OK, his parents also chipped in as part of the wedding present).

In the fall, she starts to puts her stamp on their Manhattan apartment as well, updating the kitchen and bathrooms with her favorite home furnishings finds (page 40) — including a copper tub and the latest smart appliances.

But one night when he is stuck at work again, she spots a text on his iPad. All those really late nights and weekends at work suddenly make more sense, and the world of infidelity opens up before her, along with the convoluted logistics necessary to keep the affair hidden (page 14). They enter marriage counseling; he later moves out.  Finally, she moves to Tuscany to restore a villa and find love anew.

OK, so back to reality. Elsewhere in the issue you’ll find our newly redesigned neighborhood section (starting on page 51), which gives us room to more broadly explore our ongoing coverage of the restaurants, stores, beauty trends and personalities making waves close to your home.

Finally, don’t miss our profile of Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert, the mild-mannered mastermind chef behind New York’s longest-running three-Michelin-starred restaurant (page 28). The fact that Ripert is a TV presence — he has his own show in its third season — but doesn’t live for the cameras is refreshing. No profanity-laced tirades or throwing pots and pans from this chef, who is a practicing Buddhist. Sometimes no drama is a good thing.

Enjoy the issue.