Today the Wall Street Journal lifts the curtain on Mansion, the paper's new residential real estate page. According to a release sent out earlier this week, Mansion, which publishes weekly on Fridays as a stand-alone section, will be a "home of both aspiration and real estate realization" and include coverage of industry stats, "iconic buildings," and big-time listings. The section absorbs the Journal's Private Properties column, aggregates the paper's recent Houses of the Day, and adds other print and video features, such as Portfolio, "a look inside the real estate portfolio of a well-known person"—poet Maya Angelou, for example—and House Call, in which "a notable person recounts a real estate adventure." (Today, actor William Shatner recalls a "crumbling old home" be bought earlier in life in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: "What a piece of property, but what an old house. [...] But what about the pipes that are rotting? What about the roof and the shingles that were falling off like autumn leaves in the wind?")
As for the name: "We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire," said WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson in a statement. So far, though, the page is cloaked in coverage of the aspirational—high-rises with in-unit parking, a Jersey parcel asking $107M, residences in luxury hotels, an ultra-modern Napa Valley home that cost $10M to build—and not, say, the imaginary mansions of one's mind's eye. One thing's for sure: the Journal/Times Exclusive-Listings Deathmatch rages on.
· Mansion [WSJ]
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