Photo courtesy of The Estate of Huguette M. Clark, from the book Empty Mansions via Bill Dedman Whereas mogul William A. Clark, a copper baron and politician who died in 1925, had exacting standards for his eye-popping mansions—his Fifth Avenue manor on NYC's 77th Street had 121 rooms, 30 bathrooms, and a golden chamber that well put the "gilded" in the Gilded Age—his daughter, reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, whose 2011 death spurred a tangle of slogging inheritance battles, siphoned her energies and cash into home details on a much tinier scale. One of her Japanese miniatures, for example, required getting special permission from the Japanese government to use rare cedar reserved solely for imperial buildings. She spent $80K to get it built. "You could call them dollhouses, but they were really historical art projects," said investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who—quite literally— wrote the book on Huguette Clark's houses, large and small. "Lik...
