Island Life: Profiles of folks who celebrate Palm Beach living
Island Life: Nick Kassatly has Palm Beach hometown in his blood
Years before Nick Kassatly became an attorney and real estate associate in Palm Beach, something imperceptibly transpired during his childhood on the island.
While then a tennis and lacrosse player at what’s now called Palm Beach Day Academy, and the then-young son of a beloved Worth Avenue boutique owner, his hometown got into his bones.
“Everything that makes Palm Beach special — that’s something that gets in your blood from the time you’re young and you don’t even know it,” Kassatly told the Daily News. “It’s with you wherever you go.”
Island Life: Wealth manager finds wisdom in Palm Beach's people
Beyond its natural beauty and “unmatched” quality of life, there’s a lesser-understood attribute about Palm Beach that’s meaningful to island resident and financial adviser Diego Urrutia.
Here it is: Palm Beach may be widely known as an affluent resort town, but there’s wisdom aplenty here.
“There are people from all walks of life living here now, with different and diverse backgrounds (and) if you lean in and listen carefully, there’s a lot you can learn,” Urrutia told the Daily News.
Island Life: Pioneering female sports journalist now focused on memoir, Palm Beach life
As Kay Iselin Gilman devotes time to writing a memoir, it’s safe to make an assumption: She’ll finish it.
After all, the Palm Beacher has written books before — successful published tomes — including co-authoring a how-to-achieve-success primer for women and a book about the New York Jets pro football team.
Writing is one of her first loves, which decades ago spurred her career as a pioneering sports columnist for The New York Daily News.
Palm Beach Life: Breakers' human resources exec happy to make a difference
Denise Bober remembers well a morning more than 30 years ago when she was driving over the Flagler Memorial Bridge and fully realized what a difference she could make in people’s lives.
“Ahead in the distance, there was The Breakers and I had to pinch myself because I thought, `I’m going to a job where my goal is to make people’s lives better,’” Bober recalled to The Daily News.
She’s not talking about pampering The Breakers’ guests, although they’ve received that kind of attention since the hotel’s 1896 founding. What Bober’s 35-years-and-counting role has entailed at The Breakers involves its 2,300 diverse employees, a.k.a. “team members.”
Island Life: Palm Beachers 'have a lot in common,' says real estate broker Alison Newton
You know that popular theory about “six degrees of separation”? The idea that a chain of six acquaintances or fewer connects any person with another person in the world?
Alison Newton has thought about it and how it relates to Palm Beach, where she’s lived for 21 years.
Her conclusion: The island has changed a lot in recent years, but what hasn’t changed is that it’s “no more than one degree of separation because we all have a lot in common with each other here when you connect the dots,” she told the Daily News.
Island Life: Rec director Bresnahan lives the Palm Beach life he touts in his job
When Mark Bresnahan extols the virtues of living a healthy, happy and purposeful life — supporting others in that endeavor is part of his job, after all — he’s not just talking the talk.
The avid fitness buff who quaffs a green smoothie each morning seizes every day “as an opportunity to give back, learn something new and find adventure.”
That would even include how he proposed to his wife three years ago: on a commercial airliner over the loudspeaker (with the plane crew’s permission and blessing) as passengers clapped and cheered.
Island Life: Rick Wentley, welcoming sunrises in 'most beautiful place' he knows
Anyone under the stereotypical impression that shopping in Palm Beach is hoity-toity hasn’t visited the longtime lair of Rick Wentley.
Amid beach gear, apparel, custom surfboards, novelty items and more, P.B. Boys Club on South County Road is as much a surf-and-prep shop as it is a local hangout.
To Grateful Dead tunes and other background music, visitors young and old engage in easygoing conversation — often with Wentley, who, after decades in business, continues to write every sales ticket by hand.
Palm Beach's past, present equally glorious for interior designer McMakin
Considering she’s known for, among other things, her impeccable taste and the charming residential and commercial interiors she designs, imagining Mimi Maddock McMakin wearing “snake boots” while racing across a lawn after a downpour seems out of sync.
But when you’re a fourth-generation Palm Beacher, as she is, dealing years ago as a child with snakes and other critters was once routine — especially on a post-rain walk to school.
Busy, and loving it: Nick Coniglio embraces family, business and Palm Beach life
The daily life of longtime Palm Beacher Nicholas “Nick” Coniglio might seem exhausting, but it does his heart good in many ways.
After a predawn workout and exercising (paddle-boarding, say), he spends his day running his businesses followed by after-school sports coaching or other activities involving his five children.
Gab-filled dinners with the kids and his wife Carissa (a Palm Beach native and real estate agent with Tina Fanjul Associates) lead to homework time and lights out before Coniglio is up again at his usual 4-ish a.m.
Gallery owner and author Deborah Pollack reflects on artsy, fun side of Palm Beach
What are the odds of meeting a Palm Beach art expert, gallery owner, historian and best-selling nonfiction author who once starred on a TV soap opera with the late Christopher Reeve and Jennifer Aniston’s dad?
They’re entirely in your favor: Meet Deborah Pollack.
For more than 25 years, Pollack and her husband, Edward, have helmed their eponymous art gallery — specializing in important 19th- to mid-20th century American art — on the second level of 205 Worth Ave.
Four Arts' Aiello has deep family ties to Palm Beach's past
Sometimes while strolling in the center of town, Kristin Aiello is reminded of the longtime South County Road meat market her great-grandparents and grandparents owned and she can’t help but marvel: Just how many notable Palm Beach dinner conversations took place over an Aiello’s Market roast?
While the family owned the market from 1928 to the 1970s, various members sometimes lived in a house behind and an apartment above it, including her grandmother, Roxie Ann McCarter Aiello, a graduate of Good Samaritan Hospital’s former nursing school.
'Changing more than it has in the last 50 years': Impressions of Palm Beach from photographer Nick Mele
Midcentury high-society photographer Slim Aarons, sentimental illustrator Norman Rockwell and eccentric filmmaker Wes Anderson: What do they have in common?
Who knows? But here’s one: They’re among artists who Palm Beach photographer Nick Mele said have influenced his work.
Mele’s style has captured the attention of folks in the places he shoots, including Palm Beach, Newport, R.I., and Washington, D.C.
A published coffee-table book about Palm Beach homes and gardens is among Mele’s most recent projects, but much of his work — whether commercial or fine art — is a whimsical, nostalgic, glamorous and often irreverent tongue-in-cheek take on American luxe living.
Palm Beach native Lilly Leas Ferreira, a Pulitzer, reflects on island life
It’s tempting to draw parallels between the successes of fourth-generation Palm Beacher Lilly Leas Ferreira and the late entrepreneurial fashion icon Lilly Pulitzer.
After all, they’re closely related — grandchild and grandmother, with the elder an inspiration to the younger.
But 34-year-old Ferreira has been blazing a path all her own. For instance, Ferreira recently was named Realtor of the Year at Brown Harris Stevens Palm Beach. A year after she joined the firm in 2020, she was named Rookie of the Year and orchestrated the firm’s then-top land sale.
Seven questions with Philippe Delgrange, owner of Palm Beach's hip, and hot, Le Bilboquet restaurant
Its A-list devotees call it Bilbo while others know it as Le Bilboquet, but either way, it’s one of the hottest places to see and be seen in Palm Beach — and at the center of it all is Philippe Delgrange.
The sartorially elegant France-born bon vivant is one of the beautiful people who flock to the indoor-outdoor French bistro in Worth Avenue’s Via Encantada, but his calling card is special: Delgrange is the founder-owner of Le Bilboquet, which has grown to include several locations — from Atlanta to Denver — since the first one debuted on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1986.
What’s Delgrange’s secret to success?
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Island Life: Profiles of folks who celebrate Palm Beach living
