Marissa Mayer Has A Giant Model Of This Diner In Her Backyard
But we also learn a lot about Mayer's taste in decor. It's weird yet playful.
There is a computerized baby grand piano, a three-foot bronze frog, and a bunch of Jeff Koons balloon dogs in her kitchen.
And then there's the 15-foot model of a diner that Mayer and her husband had forklifted in over the back fence so it can sit in their yard. We think it's this diner (at right), which we found on Google Street View.
Here's an excerpt from the Vogue profile focusing on her home design taste:
It’s a midsummer evening in Mayer’s backyard in Palo Alto. A green lawn large enough to accommodate a skating rink for holiday parties is framed by an irregularly shaped flower border and shaded by a spectacular live oak tree. To one side stands a work of sculpture: a three-foot-tall bronze frog. From the house comes a tinkle of Mozart, playing on a computer-driven baby-grand piano.
... Mayer turns more gregarious as she explains the presence at one edge of the garden of a two-story, miniaturized model of Palo Alto’s Peninsula Creamery, a local diner where Stanford students go for milk shakes (the pineapple malts are Mayer’s favorite). She and her husband, Zachary Bogue, a venture capitalist who invests in start-ups focused on “big data,” bought the fifteen-foot, red-and-white playhouse at a benefit auction and had a forklift deposit it over their redwood fence the previous week.
Macallister [Mayer's son] won’t be old enough to play in the structure for a while, but Mayer seems to have bought it just as much for herself. Her taste runs to the brightly colored and lighthearted—“happy art,” she calls it—like the plate-mounted Jeff Koons balloon dogs in her airy kitchen and the Roy Lichtenstein print in the front hall of her cheerful, comfortable, but not especially grand Craftsman-style house. In the dining room, an entire wall is covered with purple-and-gold marquees that Mayer and Bogue had made for the tabletops at their wedding, printed with words representing their favorite things. These include on her side PEPPERMINT, COLORS, PARIS, and ETRO. Tonight she is wearing an Oscar de la Renta dress, with daubs of yellow, blue, and green on a white field, reminiscent of her most famous product: the Google home page.