The beauty in a house lies in it’s practicality. A square house maximizes the internal volume as houses are in part are priced by the linear foot of the exterior walls. Adding insulation above and beyound codes is preferable in any climate as is insulating interior walls and optimizing the placement of windows. Exposed ceilings are cool looking but not efficient to heat. There are lots of other things you can do when you look at practicality first and House design for the magazines second. Every one who has looked at our house we built 20 years ago has left with a new perspective on building theor house and most have encouraged many of the features to a “T” . Nothing is exotic but it is planned for peformamce ( ions fuel fill up per year for all heat and hot water in central Maine). Everything is available with a little reaserch if the research is done wih efficiency in mind and not magazine covers. It’s the sme as with automobiles.
Gee, yeah, that one was built in 2014 and it’s just, like, hideous, man.
-eyeroll-
As far as the multi-gabled roof thing goes, some people have a hell of a lot of money, and dropping 50+ grand on a roof doesn’t faze them any more than dropping $15 at Chipotle fazes you.
This is a car forum. Carolyn will surely ask us to get back to cars.
People with a hell of a lot of money often get sumptuous cars too. People with real money have fleets of vehicles. Many have collections of rare cars as investments. Many never even drive the cars.
That’s what I like about Jay Leno. He drives his cars, he works on his cars, he’s a true car person. Some celebrities pretend to be car people, but don’t know a box end from an open end. Some even pay pros to build a hot rod for them, then they drive it occasionally never touching a single bolt. They’re pretend hot rodders.
Then there’s Donald Trump type of money. A car is simply a conveyance to him. And since he unabashedly loves luxury, he has someone responsible for ensuring that he has the most luxurious fleet of limos available. Yup, I’m jealous.
“Yup, I’m jealous.”
Hopefully you aren’t jealous of either his hair or his personality…
;-))
Nope. Of course, I seriously doubt if he’d be jealous of mine either. {
That house looks pretty nice @shadowfax, but I’d only really like it if I could drive right through the garage and into the middle of the living room where there would be a 6 ton lift waiting.
No more handling those cold wrenches…a bathroom within 30 feet…and lunch is just around the counter.
I’d even leave my wife have the upstairs. I can hear her now in the middle of the night, "@$%#* put a lift up thru the floor for me to stub my toes on.
Yosemite
@Yosemite oftentimes houses in that price range have fully finished climate controlled garages complete with kitchenette and a lounge area. They are sadly often empty of anything resembling a working garage. I know one guy who has 10 grand in high end garage cabinets. They’re all empty. It’s just for show, as is the professionally installed epoxy floor that’s designed to be beaten on by rolling heavy equipment across it while working on cars. But the 60 inch plasma in front of the black leather sofa is used often!
Yes, I have a few clients that have all the cabinets in a nice spotless shop.
I was curious once when a client invited me up to his shop for a soda/beer after I did the horses. He had to run inside for the checkbook and I peeked. Out of all the cabinets there were hardly and tools though he did have a 26 inch wide upper and bottom tool box.
The cabinets had little in them and not much it the way of items to fix anything. A whole cabinet holding…one small box of trash bags, and another with a few rolls of duct tape.
I’d have them filled in no time and I’d be looking for more storage space.
I was watching a show once on where people actually have an elevator for the cars and you just went to the level that held the car you wanted to drive today. I guess if you life in the city and can only go up with a building…that would be the way to go.
Yosemite
Check this out:
I first saw this guy on some TV show. They did this long buildup, showing the RV parked on the driveway, then showing it going up and down on the elevator that uses $25 in electricity every time it’s activated before finally showing the rest of the garage.
And I looked at the other cars. And exclaimed aloud “That’s it?!” The coolest car there is the Land Rover. He’s got a squillion dollars and an aircraft carrier elevator into his 40 car garage, and the first car in the row is a Chevy Malibu?!
It looks like he is into motorcycles.
On houses such as @shadowfax’s link I often wonder what kind of car the owner’s undocumented housekeepers and grounds keepers drive to work.
They don’t drive to work. The hired help lives on site so that the homeowner can have service any time they need it.
There are always some kinds of help that don’t live on site. Danielle Steele has one of the biggest, grandest mansions in San Francisco that has a lot that takes up most of a city block. It’s a proper old mansion built over a hundred years ago by Spreckels sugar money, so she actually lives in a fancier house than the people in her books. Hard to imagine, but she really is that rich. It must be like living in Versailles.
She got in trouble a few years back when it was revealed that she had several dozen street parking permits in her name. For the staff, you know, because otherwise they couldn’t park near her house. Personally it didn’t bother me because she could probably park fifty cars just on the streets around the perimeter of her lot, but people in San Francisco had a fit. They then passed a law limiting the number of permits per residence to something like three. She probably just buses them in from Oakland, or buys extra houses to have addresses to put on the permits. She has a lower level garage that must be pretty big, but there are always a couple of nice cars on the drive right outside her front door. I suspect it would take annoyingly long for her driver to bring a car up from downstairs. No Malibus allowed in her garage, I bet.
She is a very odd person. She mainly lives at her Paris home now because California women didn’t dress well enough for her. That is, on the streets, the ordinary people, not her friends, who probably dress quite well. Why she cares so much I can’t imagine. It’s not as if she ever rubs shoulders with them. She also has this huge hedge around her mansion that is about twenty feet tall so tourists can’t see in her windows. It looks absurd. The house is perfectly gorgeous, what little you can see of it.
I was joking, @MarkM. On a more serious note, it seems to me that Ms Steele is responsible for providing parking for her employees. If that means clearing a few spaces in her underground lot, she should do it. Employers have responsibilities to their employees, including providing a way for them to get to work in a reasonable amount of time. She could also provide remote parking and a commuter bus, but it seems to me that using her parking lot is probably a more reasonable alternative for her. If the garage is a lot smaller than I envision (remember the two story 40 car underground garage in another post?), they could carpool from a remote lot. Hopefully, they worked it out in a way that is fair to al parties.
I doubt she had enough spare parking spaces for all her staff down there. At the time that house was built people didn’t need very much parking. Also, as far as I know the only drive to the garage passes right by her front door. I doubt she wants her servants’ beaters driving down her very visible drive. The rich have so many problems. By now I’m sure she has figured out something. Most of the time she isn’t even here, but she has kids and grandkids who still live here.
On the combined topic of cars and houses, I recently learned from watching Turkish tv shows with English subtitles that there’s such a thing as having a garage door that opens directly from the street into your living room. You literally park right in the house. Who knew? I guess that’ll motivate you to keep your car clean. You don’t want to be looking at a dirty car parked by the couch.