Speaking with Mr. Slonem, it is easy to become confused, for in referring to this person or that he does not distinguish between the living and the dead. (“The countess predicted I would buy another plantation,” he says, the countess being one Xacha Obrenevitch, a spiritualist of the 1920s who, as Mr. Slonem understands it, was an intimate of Rudolph Valentino. Mr. Slonem has also heard from Valentino, who once came to him when he was meditating and demanded to be painted dancing the tango. The series sold rather well, Mr. Slonem says.)  THE notion that less is more has never appealed to Mr. Slonem. In New York City he rents 30,000 square feet — about 80 rooms — of former office space in the West Village, which houses 35 birds, tropical plants and wildly colored areas. The yearly rent is about $300,000, a spectacular deal in New York.  He also owns the Cordt mansion, a 19th-century home in Kingston, N.Y., which he bought in 2001 for $770,000, and the Albania plantation house in Jeanerette, La., a property so grand that it was used as a setting for the 2006 remake of “All the King’s Men,” inspired by Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana. (The mansion’s appearance in the film was a good thing, Mr. Slonem says, because the money he was paid helped offset the cost of termite damage.)  His newest home, here in rural Louisiana, is a faded, dream-inspiring pile with 18-foot ceilings, circular staircases and a filigree wrought-iron entrance. Inside, where there was significant deterioration, some walls have been repaired and painted. The red room, on the ground floor, is really red, with red walls and a half dozen red velvet sofas.  But for the most part the old plaster walls, here yellowed and peeling, there the color of neglected pearls, have been left to be what they are. Mr. Slonem’s antiques, some from expensive shops, some from flea markets, seem to have always been here. When he takes a pair of 19th-century girandoles to the third-floor sitting room and places them on the mantel, one feels as if the house is reaching out to embrace them.  Mr. Slonem bought the house, originally listed at $1.2 million, for about $625,000 in 2005. He has now spent, by his calculation, a few hundred thousand in renovation: completely rewiring the house, replacing rotted floorboards, refurbishing plumbing and the pool. Not included in those figures are the furnishings. There is also Mr. Slonem’s own brightly colored art; hothouse flowers and birds, saints and of course Valentino share space with portraits of Louisiana landowners long dead. And Mr. Slonem is not finished: paintings and furnishings are still arriving. When you have 18-foot ceilings, you have a lot of space to fill.  The only thing likely to remain vacant in this house is the refrigerator. It generally contains Diet Coke, which he has for breakfast when nobody fetches him coffee, cheese and smoked ham, slices of which he takes to the back veranda and tosses on the floor for the demanding new cat in an attempt to halt its yowling.  The cat, a young male desperate for attention, may be one acquisition that will not find a permanent home at Lakeside. Mr. Slonem, outfitted this warm Louisiana morning in a pink shirt and chino shorts, is showing annoyance. He likes cats, he says (he has three back in New York), but this one has serious dependency issues.  Cat fed, Mr. Slonem settles into a sitting room near a black-and-white photograph of the glamorous and imperious Countess Obrenevitch — if she were to tell you to buy a house you wouldn’t want to cross her — and talks about how he came to own his three 19th-century properties.  “You know, I probably shouldn’t put this out in public, but I talk to psychics constantly,” Mr. Slonem says. “My first house was predicted by my friend Michael Butler, who channels Valentino. I also went to Tulane, and I could eat the dirt here. I just feel connected here. I love the moss and oak and camellias. It’s my idea of beauty on earth. I don’t think it gets any prettier than this on the planet.”  Understood. But why did Mr. Slonem, who already owned a plantation house 100 miles away, need another one?  “I think we’ve already established it’s not a question of need,” he says. “It’s a question of rescue, mission, hopeless falling-in-love.”  Mr. Slonem’s origins? Unlikely as it seems, the United States Navy. His father was a submarine captain; the family moved often. Mr. Slonem credits the hothouse flowers and lush foliage that later appeared in his work to time spent in Hawaii; his experience there also provided the beginnings of his interest in spiritualism. Great and exotic homes have figured in his imagination from the time he was a boy.  “I was this misfit child,” Mr. Slonem says. “They were always telling me to tone it down. When I was a kid I wanted to build the Eiffel Towel in the backyard. I was always looking for something to do. Models of Polaris nuclear submarines weren’t doing it for me.”  When he was older and studied at Tulane, in New Orleans, he was fascinated by lore about the opulence of early-19th-century Louisiana plantation life — from the point of view of the landowner, not the slave, of course.  “They would send the slaves out with spiders imported from China and they would weave their webs in the trees, and they’d have them dusted with gold dust for weddings,” Mr. Slonem says. “It was a quite interesting, very lavish place at one time, and it all came to a halt.”  Mr. Slonem, whose gallery, Marlborough Chelsea in New York, says his paintings have sold for up to $70,000, claims not to know how much it costs to maintain five homes.  “I’d probably drop dead if I found out,” he says.  Subject change: how’s the love life?  “I haven’t had a relationship with somebody since I started buying houses,” he says.  “I don’t know. These houses are pretty all-consuming.”  The cat keeps howling. Mr. Slonem throws some more ham.  Mr. Slonem says that one morning he went swimming and saw faces looking at him from the trees, and a psychic friend later identified them as slaves who died in an epidemic. He’s also seen a woman in a blue antebellum dress passing through. He says that not only do these old houses choose you, but somehow you are metaphysically adopted by all the families that lived in them before, and those people tell you what they think.  He is aware that most people consider this spiritual world mumbo jumbo?  “Listen, if I cared what most people thought at this point in my life I would be in a straitjacket,” Mr. Slonem says. “I don’t care anymore. There was a time. Going through school was really hard. It’s why I don’t want to be reincarnated. I don’t want to go back to junior high school. It was horrible.”  Do the spirits ever comment on what he is doing to the properties?  Yes they do: Mathilda Cordt, now dead, who owned the Cordt mansion in Kingston, once told Mr. Slonem he was putting too many nails in the wall and she didn’t like that one little bit. Emily Cyr Bridges, who owned Albania, demanded flowers on her grave. (That demand was actually made to someone else on the property, but Mr. Slonem made sure it was honored.) He is thinking of buying a home in Virginia for his parents, and Abraham Lincoln has been coming to him when he meditates, discussing homes.  A few days later this reporter calls Mr. Slonem back. With everything else going on the world, why would Abraham Lincoln discuss real estate?  Mr. Slonem seems to rankle at the term, which does, after all, suggest base finance.  “I keep trying to explain that, in my belief system, these things are great havens of enchantment and wonderful experiences,” he says.  O.K. So how’s the cat?  “He’s really good. Except a psychic I just spoke to said he might have feline leukemia and might not live very long.”  But he goes on to send the cat to the vet and get two more cats to keep him company, anyway.
The New York painter Hunt Slonem purchases a plantation house in Louisiana that a psychic told him to buy.