Apartment Choice

Virginia Beach- based Croatan Investments has purchased Springhouse Apartment Homes , a 432- unit apartment community in Newport News, with plans for major renovations. "This is a beautiful community with both an incredibly stable operating history and enormous profit potential ," Croatan Managing Partner Paul Van said. Croatan plans to upgrade the common areas, including the exterior, clubhouse and pool area with the addition of an expanded fitness center , a community fire pit and sitting area, according to a news release. Each apartment interior will receive premium silver or black appliances, granite kitchen and bathroom countertops, custom kitchen and bathroom cabinetry with brushed nickel hardware , modern lighting packages and new plush carpeting and wood- grain plank flooring . Established in 2016, the core team at Croatan Investments previously worked together at investment firm FortCap Partners , according to a news release. In early 2016, Croatan purchased...

The struggles of the impoverished are well documented. But how about the unique pain and struggle associated with being wealthy in New York City? In her research for “ Uneasy Street : The Anxieties of Affluence” ( Princeton University Press , out Sept. 5), Rachel Sherman interviewed 50 New York-area parents of young children, whose household incomes ranged from $250,000 to $10 million and with assets totaling up to $50 million. These locals live pampered lives — with multiple high-end properties, teams of household employees and frequent, lavish vacations — but still, they do impressive mental gymnastics to avoid identifying themselves as truly rich. For instance: Helen, a stay-at-home mom with an annual family income of $2 million, describes herself as “in the middle, in the sense that there are so many people with so much money. They have private planes. They have drivers. They have all these things.” This kind of creative (and self-serving) logic is prevalent among Sherman’s su...

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866. VIII. HOW SHALL WE ENTERTAIN OUR COMPANY? “T he fact is," said Marianne, "we must have a party. Bob don't like to hear of it, but it must come. We are in debt to everybody: we have been invited everywhere, and never had anything like a party since we were married, and it won't do." "For my part, I hate parties," said Bob. "They put your house all out of order, give all the women a sick-headache, and all the men an indigestion; you never see anybody to any purpose; the girls look bewitched, and the women answer you at cross-purposes, and call you by the name of your next-door neighbor, in their agitation of mind. We stay out beyond our usual bedtime, come home and find some baby crying, or child who has been sitting up till nobody knows when; and the next morning, when I must be at my office by eight, and wife must attend to her children, we are sleepy and headachy. I protest against making overtures to entrap some hund...

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...