HighAmericans may be feeling tough economic times, but you wouldn't know it from the home-décor boutique operated by Manhattan socialite Nina Griscom.
At Griscom's Upper East Side shop, the offerings include such high-priced baubles as a $9,000 snakeskin console, a $3,200 tobacco-leaf telephone table, a $1,000 African feather headdress and a $500 Thai clutch bag made, Griscom says, by "the weaver to the queen."
But even among the shows of excess, one set stands out. Prominently displayed on a table in the front of the store are four large, smooth, lacquered objects that look exactly like, well, women's rear ends. Called coco de mer seeds, the decorative accents are in fact a kind of collectible designer coconut -- with a designer price tag of $2,400 each.
I gasped when I first heard the cost. I was out to dinner with an older friend, a woman with a gift for evocative stories, and she was regaling the table with her most recent purchase: a mystical seed of a palm tree that grows only on two islands in the Seychelles, off the eastern coast of Africa.
The giant seed is "reminiscent of a woman's hips and thighs," she said. "It's like a modern piece of sculpture, but the artist was Mother Nature."
She described how she had seen one of the seeds in a friend's home and had coveted it ever since, finally buying one at Griscom's shop.
"You paid $2,400 for a coconut!" I said in shock.
"It's not just a coconut," she said. "It's a coco de mer."
Griscom saw her first coco de mer seed at the Armory antique show in Manhattan and began buying them for her store through international collectors.
Slide show: Socialite's high-priced trinkets
The seeds' rarity and time to maturity account for the high price, she says. "You can't just go down to Florida and shake a tree."
The giant palm seeds, the largest in the world, grow on the islands of Praslin and Curieuse. The trees grow to 100 feet tall and often live more than 400 years. Each nut takes about seven years to mature.
"It was called coco de mer because Portuguese sailors found them bobbing around in the Indian Ocean and assumed they were from giant palm trees that grow under the ocean," Griscom says. "Of course, they're not."
Royals such as France's Louis XV and European nobles valued the "love nut" for both its rarity and its erotic appearance, cleaning the shells and decorating them with jewels. (Although the scientific name is now Lodoicea maldivica, the curvaceous seed was once called Lodoicea callipyge -- the second word coming from the Greek for "beautiful rump.") The coco de mer seed was also considered an aphrodisiac that helped a woman's fertility.