“I haven’t made many mistakes,” Louise Blouin said soon after her compound in the Hamptons was sold out from under her in a bankruptcy auction. “You can’t judge someone because they have an issue once in their life. I’m sure Steve Jobs didn’t have a perfect track record.”
Ms. Blouin, who grew up in a small town in Quebec, rose to the top tiers of society in New York and London a little more than two decades ago. She made a name for herself as an art-world mogul and a host of heady salons and glittering parties filled with artists, scientists, dignitaries and billionaires. But her time as a power player seemed to come to an end on Feb. 13, when she entered a drab bankruptcy courtroom in Central Islip, N.Y.
Trim and fit, with long blond hair, Ms. Blouin was dressed for the hearing all in black — black trench coat cinched at the waist, fitted black trousers and black sneakers. Having informed the judge in December that she could not afford a lawyer, she arrived in the company of her third husband, Mathew Kabatoff.
The judge, Alan S. Trust, heard hours of testimony as he considered whether or not he would approve the sale of La Dune, the beachfront estate that Ms. Blouin had once hoped to sell for no less than $115 million.
The property had been on and off the market for several years before an anonymous bidder struck an agreement to buy it for nearly $89 million at a bankruptcy auction at Sotheby’s Auction House in Manhattan on Jan. 24. In court last week, Ms. Blouin, who is in her mid-60s, did her best to thwart a sale at that price.
Only in the Hamptons can an $89 million residential real estate deal be considered something of a flop. But a similar estate on nearby Meadow Lane recently fetched $112 million. Perhaps more important to Ms. Blouin and her associates, the price tag for La Dune fell millions short of the debt on the property, according to John Isbell, a lawyer who worked on the deal on behalf of the real estate lender Bay Point Advisors.
