My Home is Missing

Introduction to My Home Is Missing

by Jacob Lazard

This is not a story about grandeur. It is not a story about Fifth Avenue penthouses, wrap-around terraces, or ten gleaming professional-grade grills that no one in their right mind knew how to operate. Well—it is all those things. But first and foremost, this is a story about what happens when two perfectly sensible people buy the most magnificent apartment in New York… and promptly lose their way.

It is, in the truest sense, based on a very real, very true sequence of events—events that actually happened, to actual people, in an apartment that actually exists (and still swallows visitors whole to this day). Every wrong turn, every bewildered stare at a wall of unlabelled switches, every moment standing in a kitchen large enough to host a banquet while wondering where on earth they’d put the kettle… all of it really happened.

Neal Sainsbury and Sophie Rothschild were not, by any measure, extravagant people. They were careful. They were practical. They had spent twelve years together mastering the art of living comfortably in spaces that made sense—flats where you could reach the fridge without stepping into the bath, where the bedroom was clearly visible from the hallway, where a “home appliance” meant a kettle that plugged into a wall and did exactly what it said on the box. They saved diligently. They planned meticulously. And when at last they walked into that penthouse—with its swimming pool, its private cinema, its cedar sauna, its two guest suites masquerading as “staff quarters,” and that legendary kitchen—they thought they had found their dream.

They were half-right.

What they hadn’t bargained for was the apartment’s other superpower: hiding ordinary, everyday homes so thoroughly beneath marble, mahogany, and state-of-the-art automation that they simply couldn’t find it anymore. They had bought every luxury money could buy. What they hadn’t been told was that warmth, familiarity, and that quiet feeling of belonging—those you can’t order from a brochure. Those you have to hunt down, room by endless room, while trying not to get lost in your own corridor.

This is the comedy of what happens when you outgrow your own expectations. It is the chronicle of two people who set out to settle down and ended up exploring. Who bought ten ovens and learned to cook on one. Who stood on a terrace overlooking all of Manhattan and realised the most spectacular view in the world means nothing unless you know which way is home.

Every mishap you are about to read really did occur. Every wrong turn, every phantom voice from a motion-activated speaker, every evening spent wandering corridors with a map and a flashlight—all true. The names have been changed to protect the embarrassed. The number of grills has not.

Read on, then, and laugh along. Because the truth is this: you can buy the finest address on Fifth Avenue. You can have the best view in New York. But home? Home is the one thing you can’t buy. Sometimes—when you have everything else—it’s also the one thing you have to go looking for.

And sometimes… It's hiding behind the main gas valve.