Oh man it wasn’t till high school that we got some window a/c units for the house. Till then it was just fans. Since I never paid the bills I really don’t know. I do miss how toasty steam heat can be in a house sometimes. For the house I grew up in I bet the summer bills were worse than the winter bills. Electricity is so cheap in the PNW.
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I think you’re missing a decimal point there. The 1% can’t afford $2M homes unless they go all-in on their mortgage, and $10M homes are entirely out of reach. It’s the 0.1% who are in the $2-10M range.
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Anybody remember this Memphis-styled masterpiece?
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OMG my dream home! or maybe nightmare home… it could go either way really.
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According to the IRS the top %1 make at least $426k per year. While 10 million would be a stretch at that income, 2 million would be easy. I’d think you’d see a lot in the 2-5 million range depending on area. I mean where I live a million dollar house is rare, but according to HGTV that’s like the standard price for houses in parts of California…
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Is it just my tired head, or are there no pics in the realtor listing apart from the one of the facade? Would love to browse through them all… (and preferably without 80s tv/movie-characters photoshopped in)
It’s an old listing, so the pics are probably long gone from the original site. I’m sure someone archived them somewhere though. They are spectacular.
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Ah, yeah I figured that might be the case. Lovely pics tho, thanks for sharing!
I used to be a snobbery snob until it hit the mainstream.
Now I’m a connoisseur of an infra-sonic band - you probably haven’t heard them.
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I had a neighbor come into some money and knock down their house to build their mansion- 11,000 sq ft, curved tin roofs, ebony inlays in the floors, etc etc etc. 11 AC units (on under the kitchen counter’s marble inlay, to ease making pastry).
Property taxes were coming to $60k/yr (and that was 10 years ago, now).
Blows the mind.
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If you’ve seen the docu – you’d know the answer is “nobody”.
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I remember a concert where the front band was a Led Zep cover band. How loud was it? The infrasonics were so powerful, you could feel your chest going in and out. We had to relocate to the back of the venue. Unwanted (& unneeded) CPR was a little too much.
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And under the fridge!!!
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See, I just find that bizarre. If you can buy a place, you ought to be able to, you know, live in it. You Cousins are weird.
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Crenellate all the things!
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“Rotary Woofer” would be a good band name.
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Well, at least the tiled floors can be reached by a Roomba or two.
Don’t look on top of the curtain valances.
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Aw, I was just teasing because I was curious if there was some nuance I was missing!
The average household income for the top 1%, as of a few years ago was $1.2m. Now that’s skewed by the astronomical wealth of the very top tier. But in that income range you can easily afford a house, mortgaged, that’s well more than a couple million dollars. 1 to 2 million dollar homes are somewhat common where I’m at. They mostly aren’t selling to one percenters (that would be the $5-10m homes in the Hampton’s). They’re going to households with an income in the $250-400k range. Which is just below the usual assumed cut off for the 1% (around 390 something K). And houses here are more typically in the $500–800k range, including the smaller “mcmansions”. Those sell mostly to the $100-250k house holds that are decidedly outside the 1%.
@Chesterfield
Your potentially talking about a different sort of house. There are certainly developments that feature buyers building to order, as designed by architects, sometimes even with their own builders.
But part of what defines McMansion is the ways in which they aren’t that. Developers do work with architects. Often internal ones. But the architect’s job in the model home development is to come up with what are basically modular floor plans and exterior elements that can be endlessly recombined. A person building a home to order in this situation basically selects which elements to combine into a particular floor plan. Sometimes with the possibility of paying more to deviate from the catalog.
Under either model there are often strict HOA, community compact, or developer/management company issued rules about exteriors. Many of the developments I’ve been to bar outside landscaping. No bushes, gardens, hedges. No fencing No changing exterior paint, or the variety of grass in the lawn. One friend’s parents were barred from having yard furniture, bbqs, or more than 10 people over (without express written permission from all neighbors).
So there are things similar to McMansions, and the popularity and ubiquity of that housing model has had Influence on houses that are built independently at the home owners instigation. But those homes are not McMansions. Which is why I’m harping on specificity.
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Behold! Here is a gallery with all the pictures:
http://galleries.buffalonews.com/default.aspx?id=4577
And the accompanying article about the house and its previous owners:
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