That Versace Sale

Gianni Versace was as we know shot a couple of years back. As a result of that all of his possessions and the furniture from his various houses has been sold off. The only problem was that Gianni had such strange taste, rather like some sort of Egyptian mafiosi sort of thing, that no one was quite sure who would buy them.

Fortunately the sale went very well.

But that did not prevent the auctioneer raising 7.4 million pounds ($10.4 million) from its London sale of the contents of late Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace's Lake Como villa late Wednesday, roughly three times expectations.

"With heated bidding ... extending beyond 12 hours, the day sale turned into an evening sale too," said Mario Tavella, deputy chairman of Sotheby's Europe.

"Gianni Versace's passion for collecting ranged from contemporary masterpieces by artists he supported and with whom he developed friendships to the neo-classical works combined to create his own personal Arcadia at Villa Fontanelle.

The question on everyone's mind really at the moment is who was buying all of this stuff. For much of it really was quite garish and extreme.

But apparently if you're a designer then a liking for that sort of stuff is good taste even if the rest of us think that it is indeed too weird to be desirable.