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Spring 2017 $15.00 JAC0R-TRORNTON AN0 IAN OWNBEY BUMPERG lifestylesmagazine.com LAURENE POWELL JOBS EMERSON COLLECTIVE be just as happy living out of a suitcase as she did when her career took her from London to New York and Hong Kong and back—has been lovingly curating these collections with Richard for their inspirational value. 'Can you guess what this is?" To understand the decor, imagine that Archi• Richard Garriott de Cayeux—gamer, pioneer, tectural Digest (Lael'il'm) took a field trip to the adventurer, and eclectic collector—presents a Museum of Natural History (Richard). three-inch-long black cylinder from a cabi• "I'm the one with the collecting hug," he says net of 19"'-century scientific instruments. He as she nods in agreement. watches intently as I turn it over in my hands, a Do you want to see some of his other stuff? puzzled look on my face. Richard doesn't wait for an answer before It could be a fancy fishing reel, I say, even as starting a whirlwind tour that spans five floors I note, too late, that it is ringed with numbers. and millions and millions of Earth years. "A lot of people think that," he says, smiling In the parlor, he shows off a shining suit of in delight that he has stumped yet another armor and an African lion rug lounging on a person, "It's actually a Curta mechanical calcu• table below a prim and proper gilded mirror. lator which Curt Herzstark started developing In the dining room, he takes a child's delight in the 1930s." in pointing out the shrunken heads and hu• His wife, Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, who man hearts, antique vampire-hunting kits, is sitting next to him on a staid sofa in the stuffed animal heads, and an arsenal of ancient parlor of their Manhattan townhouse, adds weapons that look like they belong on the set that it was the pinnacle of portable mechani• of Game oflhrones. cal calculating until 1970s, when electronic cal• A tall man with short grey hair and a long culators came in, Ihe Curta is one of the many mini-braid that runs down his hack, Richard eccentric objects on display at their home that leads the way downstairs to what he calls the fuel Richard's creativity. "History of Universe and Life on Earth" exhibit, "These collections are a tribute to explorers which features, among other curiosities, me• and creators of the past, present, and future," teorites from Mars, the moon, and Mercury; a says Laetitia, who—while admitting she would handful of hair from a woolly mammoth sealed

124 LIFESTYLES MAGAZINE SPRING 2017 PROFILE RICHARD AND LAETITIA GARRIOTT DE CAYEUX

in a picture frame; a fragment of the Berlin Wall; and a toilet from a Soyuz spacecraft. 'Ihere's also a spacesuit. Its not the one Rich• ard wore during his 2008 Soyuz TMA-13 flight to the International Space Station. His is at the U.S. Space 8c Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala• bama, next to the spacesuit of his father, NASA astronaut Owen Garriott. Oh, he almost forgot. Stand on the stair landing with him and look straight up. See that? It's a Sputnik hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier! Richard, a flown astronaut and a found• ing father of the video game and commer• cial spaceflight industries, and Laetitia, the co-founder of the space technology company Escape Dynamics, met by chance in St. Barts. enactment, his guests—dressed in vintage duds—had to swim Quickly, they realized they had strong com• for their lives at the end of supper) and for many years built monalities. Both got their start early and both Halloween haunted houses that had people do things like walk are visionaries with a passion for innovation through fire. and entrepreneurship. Many of his exploits are chronicled in his new memoir, He dropped out of college to make games, Explore/Create. "I published the book because I wanted to dare soon becoming a gaming icon. other people to be creators and explorers," he says. He notes be• She, one of the younger in her class at Har• ing creative starts with being curious. vard Business School, wrote a business plan Take liquid-nitrogen tanks. There are lots of them on Manhat• for a revolutionary egg-freezing technology tan streets, hut most people don't even notice them. To prove it, venture that would allow women to proactively he Googles on his iPhone, and dozens of photos pop up. preserve their fertility options long before the It also involves really looking at what you're seeing and look• technique became mainstream, and started ing at things differently—at the details. her own investment fund. "If you are an architect, you can learn to draft and do all the He takes risks (he's been trapped under the standard tropes of the trade," he says. "But if you go out in nature Titanic, suspended in space, and hopes to be and see—really see—how the mountains rise and look at every• among the first colonizers on Mars). She takes thing from the trees to the ants, you will cast a broader net for calculated risks (At Elon Musk's birthday parly; inspiration, and the better you will be." she did wing walking, which she says was like Adds Laetitia, "There's an explorer and a creator in each of us. "dancing in the sky.") But, despite impressing Creativity starts when you don't limit yourself to what's possible. the Russian cosmonaut training team by com• You have to believe everything is possible." pleting neutral buoyancy training—a require• After all, she offers, science starts as science fiction—it begins ment for spacewalk preparation—she declares in the mind of a creative thinker, someone not bound by the she isn't readv for spaceflight. She hopes rules of reaiity; Richard won't leave Earth again until the kids Richard agrees, adding that "creativity comes from within and are older, to which he says, "Don't worry, they're from without. It's inspiration in, inspiration out. Good design coming too!" requires a vast array of inputs." He grew up wanting to fly in space like When Richard is creating a new game, he immerses himself his father had. She grew up surrounded by in research. "In my early games, the idea was to fight monsters scientists at the dinner table. Her grandfather, and find treasures," he says. "Later, I wanted to reward players Andre de Cayeux de Senarpont, was the first who acted like proper heroes, so I had to come up with a moral Ereneh planetary geologist. Many have heard of philosophy. I looked at everything from the Ten Command• him: The Cayeux Crater on the moon is named ments to the Seven Deadly Sins, but there was no modern refer• after him. ence for what I liked. So I made up my own philosophy. 1 spent And...well, you get it, a year crafting my own sense of virtues revolving around truth, Richard, aka Lord British, has always thrived love, and courage." on adventure, whether in real life or in game- After extensive study, he also created "Logos," a universal screen hfe. pictorial-driven language for game players that he has contin• He hosts fabulous parties (at his Titanic re- ued to refine for two decades.

126 LIFESTYLES MAGAZINE SPRING 2017 PROFILE D AND LAtTITIA GARRIOTT DE CAYEUX

Richard—whose latest online game. Shroud of the Avatar, will be released this summer—divides his time between Manhattan and I Austin, Texas, where his video game-developing company, Por- talarium, has its headquarters. Although Richard and Laetitia have separate business ventures, they work as a team. He's her in-a- pinch IT backup, and she makes the financial decisions. When Richard is not physically in Austin, he walks the halls of the Texas office as a telepresence robot, which he thinks is very ef• fective—and a lot of fun. At home, Kinga. their four- year-old daughter, has been sitting on his lap during test runs of Shroud. t "Every time she comes home from school, she says, 'Papa, Papa,

SPRING 2017 LIFESTYLES MAGAZINE 127 PROFILE RICHARD AND

Family at Explorers Club gala following their family! expedition to South East Asia. '

are there any monsters around? Let s go fight some monsters!" I drive with the mouse but she directs conceptually what we're doing," he says. "She and her younger brother, Ronin, don't play my games—yet. But they do play simple iPhone games." After Richard and Laetitia got married (at their ceremony, they floated "magically" into the air to seal their vows with a kiss) and had children, their adventures became family af• fairs. They took Kinga and Ronin to Southeast Asia where they spent time with the isolated tribes of Laos and Thailand. "We hiked up into the forest, kids on our backs. They were five months and two-and-a- half years old," Richard says. Last year, they went to El Salvador and Honduras. "It was an active volcanic region with thermal vents," he says. "I knew there had to be life forms in the vents that had never been sampled, so I filled up water bottles with The family's next adventure is undecided. Richard advocates the samples and brought them back. When for the North Pole. I.aetitla's condition is it must be an expedi• they were tested, unique life forms were indeed tion where Kinga and Ronin would search for Santa—and (per• found." haps more successfully) for the effects of global warming. This reminds him of interesting discoveries China is also at the top of their list—the kids are learning closer to home. Mandarin. "I feci one of the great gifts to give children is fluency Did you know that meteorites fall from the in other languages," Laetitia says. sky all the time? The next really big adventure may be dictated by her career. "If you go to where the rain washes off the "I'm closing chapters and getting ready to start new ventures," building—in a downspout or a mud puddle— she says. and get a magnet, you can pick up some that "And 1 will follow her wherever in the world she needs to be," are the size of a grain of sand or rice," he says. Richard says, adding that he's following the lead of his older "Then you can get a kid's microscope and study brother, Robert, who also was his business partner for many years. them." "Our business followed his wife's career," he explains. "The

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company started in my mother's garage in Houston, but we spent three years in Boston because his wife got a job there before we came back to Austin, where I wanted to be." So it was that Richard moved to Manhattan, where Laetitia had her investment business. "Richard is a bit of a feminist," she says. "And when we married, we had an interesting discussion about what to do with our last names. He told me that he didn't think women should take their husband's name because..." Richard: It goes back to when women were prop• erty. Laetitia: So I said, 'Great. Just take my last name, and he was like, no, no, no, I can't,' 1^ Before he can counter, she continues, much to his amusement, Laetitia: He had an interim solution that he tried to offer that was really bad, Richard (in a whispered aside): It was brilliant. Laetitia: He said, 'Let's have the girls have my name and the boys have your name." 1 told him I didn't like this be• cause the kids would feel like they each belong to one parent. Richard: Naming is a convention. In Bhutan, where we spent our pre-honey- moon, each generation gets a new last name. Lm happy with any solution that is not patriarchal or matriarchal, 1 think everyone should just keep the name they grew up with. I liked the idea that a girl takes her father's last name and a boy takes his mother's. Laetitia: It's creative. Richard: It's balanced. Laetitia: But it's not practical. If I traveled outside the country with a daughter who does not have the same last name, I need paperwork signed by you or someone saying I'm the mother. Richard: But the only way to break the patriarchal past is to break from it. Laetitia: I believe it's in anyone's power to change society, but we may want to re-evaluate the 'how.' Richard: It has to start somewhere. So it came to be that they put their last names together, his first, hers second, but ultimately in first place: Garriott de Cayeux. LM

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