First Look Inside Lauren Bacall's Dakota Apartment of 53 Years

By Hana R. Alberts Mar 9, 2015, 2:35pm EDT

Star of the screen, stage, red carpet, and more, Lauren Bacall passed away last year. For the last 53 years of her life, she lived at the Dakota, and her three-bed, 3.5-bath in the iconic building is already on the market, asking $26 million. But the staged listing photos don't give a sense of what it looked like when Bacall actually lived there, since her extensive collection of art, furniture, couture, collectibles, and more have all gone over to Bonham's, where they will be auctioned on March 31 and April 1. The catalog (warning: PDF!) for that auction, which clocks in at a massive 375 pages, also includes photographs of her nine-room, Central Park-facing Dakota home before it was stripped. They reveal a woman who relished antique items of any kind, from chaises to mother-of-pearl chests, who treasured art and lined her walls with it.

Bacall bought it back in 1961 for a couple of tens of thousands of dollars (reports vary from between $28,000 and $48,000). She lived there ever since, in the company of bold-faced names as neighbors like Boris Karloff, Judy Holliday and Roberta Flack. While her late husband Humphrey Bogart was never formally a resident, homages to him dot the space. Admiring her apartment of so many decades, "moderation" doesn't seem to be in her vocabulary. That seems about right.