The thrill of the chaise...
Socialite sells £40k sex chair collection (don’t worry, they haven’t been used)
THEY’RE certainly not to everyone’s taste and you’d have some explaining to do if the neighbours ever saw them.
A multi-millionaire socialite is selling her collection of sex chairs – but promises they’ve never been used.
Amanda Eliasch is getting rid of the £10,000 leather seats, which come with stirrups, as she clears out her £8.3 million west London home. Once described as the Imelda Marcos of Chelsea, Mrs Eliasch turns 60 next year and has decided she no longer needs four sex chairs.
Nor does she see any point in keeping 250 pairs of designer shoes, 300 black jackets or a lifesize sculpture of a baby elephant.
Those items are being auctioned tomorrow, before the chairs go under the hammer at an art and furniture sale next month.
Mrs Eliasch, 59, the former wife of tennis racket billionaire and exTory Party deputy treasurer Johan Eliasch, said she bought the ‘Tally Ho’ stirrup chairs following her divorce to ‘feel like a dominatrix and scare off men’.
But she claimed she had never used the seats, which were created by the British artist and furniture designer Mark BrazierJones. ‘I’ll be 60 next year and my life has changed,’ Mrs Eliasch told The Sunday Times. ‘I have a lot of clobber and I need to get rid of some of it. I don’t need four sex chairs. What am I going to do with them at 59? I just think they’re beautiful and fun.’
The daughter of the late British journalist and author Anthony Cave Brown and a friend of the Duke of York, Mrs Eliasch and her husband were once the toast of London society. They married in the dinosaur section of the Natural History Museum in 1988. The couple had two sons but divorced in 2007 following Mrs Eliasch’s 11year affair with a plastic surgeon. The most expensive item from both auctions is a £75,000 life-size baby elephant sculpture by the British artist Marc Quinn. Other highlights include a Dolce & Gabbana jacket made of red squirrel fur and high heels from brands such as Prada, Gucci and Jimmy Choo. They will be sold with 700 items from Mrs Eliasch’s wardrobe at The Swan auction house in Tetsworth, Oxfordshire.