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A piece of rock history is set to hit the block.

Rocker Eddie Van Halen’s 1982 Kramer electric guitar will be auctioned by Sotheby’s New York during the house’s inaugural Grails Week from Oct. 21-28. According to estimates, the guitar, which was custom-built for the Van Halen star, is expected to fetch a whopping $2 million-$3 million. A previous Sotheby’s sale for a guitar owned by Van Halen — that one on display in the band’s “Hot for Teacher” music video — netted $3,932,000 in April 2023.

Based on Van Halen’s original “Frankenstein” design, the piece was extensively played during Van Halen’s 1982-83 tours, seen onstage during concerts in Philadelphia; Caracas, Venezuela; São Paulo, Brazil; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Van Halen gifted the guitar to longtime friend and guitar technician Robin “Rudy” Leiren, who later sold it to Mick Mars, former lead guitarist and co-founder of Mötley Crüe. Mars used it during the recording of the hit Dr. Feelgood album, including on the track “Slice of Your Pie.” 

The guitar will be on display in Monterey, California, from Aug. 13-16, a date that coincides with RM Sotheby’s Monterey auctions. It will mark the first time the guitar has been seen in public in more than 40 years since Van Halen last played it in concert. Sotheby’s Grails Week is curated to showcase items from the worlds of film, music, TV and comics.

“Played during some of Eddie’s most iconic performances and later used by Mötley Crüe’s Mick Mars, this instrument connects two giants of heavy metal,” explained Ian Ferreyra de Bone, Sotheby’s managing director of its luxury division. “With its custom build and incredible backstory, it’s a true grail — exactly the kind of piece we had in mind for Sotheby’s first-ever Grails Week, which shines a spotlight on the most sought-after treasures from music, film, TV and comics and puts Sotheby’s right at the center of pop culture.”

Van Halen died following a battle with cancer at age 65 on Oct. 6, 2020.

Over the years, Elle Decor has opened the gates to some of the most breathtaking gardens in the world—spaces that blur the lines between landscape, art, and fantasy. There’s Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent’s Eden-like French estate, which is dripping in German irises and perfectly clipped parterres. In Monaco, designer John-Mark Horton transformed a tri-level garden overlooking the Mediterranean into a fragrant escape of romantic decay. And in East Hampton, Ina Garten’s gardens are an idyllic explosion of dahlias, white hydrangeas, and, if you visit her 25-tree orchard in May, apple blossoms.

These are gardens shaped by the personal obsessions of aesthetes who treat the outdoors with the same care as their interiors. Indeed, a garden isn’t just a place to grow things and show off your horticultural prowess, it’s a reminder that beauty can be cultivated over years, even decades, and that slowing down to watch something bloom is always worth it.

Whether you’re designing your dream landscape or just looking for a little green escape, these gardens from the pages of Elle Decor offer plenty of inspiration. Just be warned: You may find yourself searching obsessively for vintage urns, or whispering sweet nothings to your hydrangeas. We won’t judge.

Rachel Silva is the associate digital editor at ELLE DECOR, where she covers all things design, architecture, and lifestyle. She also oversees the publication’s feature article coverage, and is, at any moment, knee-deep in an investigation on everything from the to the on the internet right now. She has more than 16 years of experience in editorial, working as a photo assignment editor at Time and acting as the president of Women in Media in NYC. She went to Columbia Journalism School, and her work has been nominated for awards from ASME, the Society of Publication Designers, and World Press Photo. 

After years of prison and conniving her way into luxury, Anna Sorokin has New York talking about her again.

This time, it is not posing as a German heiress or being jailed for four years, instead the convicted fraudster has been left “disturbed” and “horrified” after three rabbits used in her photoshoot were found dumped in a nearby park.

Sorokin, who also went by the name Anna Delvey and is the subject of Netflix’s Inventing Anna, shot to infamy after a high-profile court case. The fraudster, who masqueraded as an heiress, swindled the wealthy in Manhattan with an invented trust fund.

But this latest saga involves a photograph on her Instagram account, in which she is pictured outside a Tribeca subway station with a black ankle monitor – stipulated under the terms of her 2022 prison release – and holding two leashed rabbits.

Days after posing for the photographs, social media users were quick to link the abandoned bunnies with Sorokin after the animals were spotted in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

“I felt ashamed and embarrassed to be associated with it,” Sorokin said of the affair. The 34-year-old said she was not responsible for the rabbits and was “horrified” to learn they had been dumped.

The first bunny, a one-and-a-half-year-old Harlequin lop, was found in the bushes by Terry Chao near a cardboard box used as part of Sorokin’s photoshoot last week. On Thursday, another rabbit was found near the same cardboard box, followed by a third on Sunday, near a black carrier bag, she told the New York Times.

The man who photographed Sorokin, Jasper Egan Soloff, told the newspaper through a lawyer that it was not his shoot and claimed to have no knowledge of how the animals were obtained or handled.

Another person involved in the shoot appears to have apologised and taken responsibility in a since-deleted Instagram post.

“When I realised the rabbits were being surrendered to me I panicked. At 19, with no experience caring for animals, no pet-friendly housing, and no knowledge of available resources, I felt overwhelmed and made the worst possible choice,” he reportedly wrote.

“Believing, mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option.”

He added that they were being fostered by someone in New York, while Sorokin said she offered to help rehome the rabbits when she learned they had been abandoned.

People on social media have accused Sorokin of animal cruelty. Many commenters decried her use of the animals as props, and warned against photographing bunnies on leashes on their backs, a position known as trancing that can be harmful to the animals.

“I do not eat meat, and I had no involvement in the acquisition, transport, or return of these animals. I would never condone these actions,” Sorokin told the website Page Six. After being convicted in 2019 on multiple counts of larceny and theft, she was released after nearly four years in jail and a further 18 months in immigration detention for overstaying her visa, and was told to refrain from posting on social media.