"I made the change from a common thief/ To up close and personal with Robin Leach."
Nothing quite crystalizes that line from Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy" for me than the Setsuo Ito house that frames the video. For one thing, it's as '80s as Robin Leach. For another, it's as high as it gets in New York luxury living.
Ito's "Island in the Sky" is the 12,000-square-foot home in the Hamptons where Biggie Smalls recorded all the best scenes in "Juicy": the party at the pool, the afternoon champagne service, the interview on the balcony (maybe with a journalist from The Source?). And to this day, it's still all good. Baby bay-buh.
The video is, anyway. The home itself can't find a buyer. Despite the views across the Hamptons afforded by the roof-top (!) hot-tub—from Water Mill to the Atlantic Ocean—the palace that Ito built has lingered on the market for years.
The New York Daily News has this week's listing (and many lucious, copyrighted photos); the home is up for $10.975 million. Curbed Hamptons noted back in January that the home appeared to have found a buyer, but that sale failed to materialize. In fact, the building's been on the market since 2007, when it was first offered for a whopping $30 million, according to Curbed. Ito himself put it up for $18.9 million in 2008.
Another notable effort came in 2011, when Ito hoped to auction the home in order to raise funds for victims of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan (and presumably to get it off his hands). But no bidder emerged, even for the discounted price of $7.92 million.
The home doesn't exactly scream austerity, but then, no one in the Hamptons has ever had to eat sardines for dinner, and it appears that its residents drink champagne whether they're thirsty or not. "Island in the Sky" remains, however, a perfectly good reason to watch "Juicy."
