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How A College Dropout Built A $2.9 Billion Real Estate Empire
Like the Oracle of Omaha, Roy Carroll has made a fortune buying low and rarely selling. His sweet spot: cheap land that he’s turned into lucrative apartment complexes across the Southeast. Now Greensboro’s richest resident is biding his time, waiting for the coming real estate market collapse. At a monthly outdoor barbecue in a parking lot in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, roughly 80 employees of the Carroll Companies gather around a plastic table piled with trays of hush puppies, mac and cheese and gallon jugs of sweet tea. Clad in khakis, a striped polo and an Apple watch, Roy E. Carroll II blends right in, loading a paper plate with…
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In Paris, an Apartment Built on Heirlooms and Wicker
IN 1953, THE parents of Benoît Rauzy, 53, a co-founder of the design studio Atelier Vime, moved into a timeworn two-floor flat in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The neighborhood — a tangle of streets radiating from the 11th-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey — was in those days a sanctuary for artists, poets and freethinkers, a place where philosophers and writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would gather in cafes to share ideas. “There was a deep sense of intellectual freedom,” Rauzy says. His father, a dentist, had an office on the first floor of the six-story early 18th-century building, where he would tend to the neighborhood’s eclectic residents. “Some of them went…
