New York's multi-billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, guards his privacy with near obsession, refusing to publish details of where he holidays and swearing journalists to secrecy if they are granted an audience inside his home on the Upper East Side.
His interior designer, it turns out, is less discreet. Pictures showing Bloomberg's baronial taste in home furnishings have been out there for all to see on the website of designer Jamie Drake - or at least they were until a newspaper put two and two together this week and the pictures abruptly came down.
And it is not just the mayor's Manhattan residence which has been revealed but also his digs in Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, West London. Drake boasts he revelled in the "possibilities of eclecticism" saying "iconic, American contemporary art jolts awake the international mix of exquisite furnishings" at the "across-the-pond residence of a New York-based businessman".
Although Bloomberg, who founded the news business that bears his name and funded his mayoral campaigns from his fortune, has never pretended to be a man of the people, he does eschew designer clothing and can occasionally be spotted on the subway.
At home(s), it seems his taste is most elevated and the pictures - first published by the New York Times - prove the truth of what Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter once said of his friend, that he wants "to live large, like a 19th-century railroad baron".
