Monday, May 9, 2011

A Little Linkage

1.
The Robb Report oohs and awes over a 40,000 square foot newly completed mega-mansion in the Bel Air area of Los Angeles with 28 bedrooms. The very contemporary college campus-like compound has a massive main house plus separate guest, staff and entertainment quarters all squeezed onto 1.5 hillside acres with a wide and glittery city view.

Your Mama is both fascinated, incredulous and revolted all at the same time. What do the children think?

2.
Trophy property collector Edgar Bronfman Jr. recently acquired a New York City triplex penthouse on Park Avenue. The booze and entertainment heir and executive paid $15,900,000 for the 15-room building topper that includes 5 bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms (plus a staff room with private pooper), five fireplaces, 2 kitchens and one 1,000 square foot terrace that wraps around three sides of the third floor.

The approximately 6,500 square foot triplex, which has shock and awe producing maintenance of $12,251 per month, was sold by financier Gordon Pattee and his missus Dailey Jones Pattee who first hoisted the penthouse pad on the market in late 2007 with an apparently ludicrously high asking price of $36,500,000.

Did Mister Bronfman snag a deal–if a sixteen million dollar apartment can ever really be considered a deal–or did the Pattees just have Real Estate Pie in the Sky Syndrome?

3.
Your Mama saw this morning on Curbed (via The Independent via Boing Boing) the floor plans for the Abbottabad, Pakistan "mansion" where Osama bin Laden was located and terminated last week.

According to the plans for the three story house, there are 8 bedrooms, at least 7 bathrooms and a third floor terrace with a 7-foot high privacy wall.

No matter how many times Your Mama reads that this bin Laden fellow was living in lavish circumstances it never actually jives with the images of the chunky concrete structure that looks, quite frankly, like a damn prison. The gruesome images of the bloody interiors don't look like they'd be anything but dingy, rudimentary and depressingly utilitarian even with all the blood cleaned up.

In other quasi-related bin Laden real estate news, a lakefront mansion in Oakland, FL, about 20 miles outside of Orlando, formerly owned by one of Osama bin Laden's 54 siblings–this one a brother named Khalil–was recently put on the market for $1,999,000.

Oh dear. Good luck with that.

The property was owned by the Khalil bin Ladens from 1980 when they bought it for $1,600,000 until the po-po escorted them out of the mansion and out of the United States after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

27 comments:

Brandon @ Southgate said...

Mama, I have wrung my hands trying to figure out why the media insists on dubbing that hovel where Bin laden was gunned down anything other than the concrete bunker it is. Mansion? Puh-leeze. Compound. Well, maybe. I suppose its luxury compared to the cave we pulled Hussein out of, but I'd take a room at the Motel Six over one in that hideous shack.

Anonymous said...

It's a Landry. By definition it's hideous. And voila' - it is! I wonder if those other houses in the proximity have been built. Like the one near the crescent-shaped Sol Wurtzel estate or the one on Bel Air Road close to Elizabeth Taylor's house.

Anonymous said...

1 - Oh Landry Design.... you are definately the king of steroidal LA homes. This house is pretty incredible... but ther eis no yard to speak of, just house and terraces... needed a bigger lot, but the sacrifices the rich make to have the size house they want on the prestigeous street in Bel Air they demand to be on.

2 - I'm sure it was more the Pattee's just hoped for a pie in thesky price bc $16.5 doesn't sound like an outrageous deal for 6,500 s/f even in Manhattan

3 - He paid $1.6m for it in 1980 and its only worth $1.999m now? Sounds fishy...was it more land that's been divided off or something? While the market sucks... we have not seen that big of depretiation most places, maybe in Orlando? I dunno.

angie said...

"What do the children think?"

Building a 40K sq.ft. house on 1.5 sloping acres is just all kinds of bad judgment and poor taste rolled into one.

Anonymous said...

That home in Robb Report is over the top, seriously huge, and design-crazy BUT...knowing a number of very high profile, super wealthy people has taught me a few things. Most importantly, they don't really have a life outside of home and work which means it needs to be very large, have many entertainment elements and spaces. It should also be impressive for entertaining.

People think it is excess but for them it means they really don't have to leave home to have a good time and as long as they can afford I say carry on. I hope more wealthy people decide to build and staff these homes because puts 100s of people to work.

Joey Brill said...

It's just nice to see all that espresso furniture from my local GoodWill getting some use in the Robb Report spread.

Steve Mawson said...

Mumsey. So finally a house that doesn't offend (me at least) in any way. Nothing over the top (apart from the size perchance), nothing too out there in design, just f.off nice. I'd gladly have it, but perhaps not in La-La land. That's the only drawback. Oh and as was said above, maybe on 150 acres rather than 1.5 !? Thanks for that great piece of R-E porn.

Steve Mawson said...

and oh oh, that Huffington Post video inside bin Laden's "Mansion"...was he a bit of a perv ? In the background, twice a sheep bleats, and then there's the vacuum cleanerr beside the bed in a room that otherwise looks like it hasn't seen a cleaner since, well, day one. Kinky Osama...perhaps !

JacquiBee said...

How bizarre! That house mentioned at the end is one I've been looking at for a while (not that I can afford it or anything)...it is a very interesting estate. Just weird that I was interested in it and then it shows up here!

Anonymous said...

1. I'm with you Mama - fascinated, incredulous (why so many bedrooms? Are they allergic to grass?) & revolted.

2. Pie in the sky syndrome.

3. With you on that as well - it did look like a prison. 54 siblings...only in the patriarchy, aka Planet Earth.

Lady J

Anonymous said...

Clearly the reason the OBL house was called a mansion at first was a despicable US attempt to smear him with his followers. When the video evidence made fools of the Obama administration they flip flopped and changed their tune now calling it a shabby dump or something like that. The persistent intent to smear is all to clear. I doubt it will work. He is a hero to Muslim liberation.

Anonymous said...

The 40,000 sq ft thingy doesn't look like any kind of home to me; it looks like a boutique hotel. I gather some people want to live (rattle around?) in a hotel built just for them. If so, so be it.

dolly said...

The exterior or #1 sort of reminds me of a branch of Chipotle in a newly-constructed strip mall. I absolutely love that round reading room with the tiny tiles and the wooden walls, however, and would happily spend hours in there finishing The Pale King.

Anonymous said...

From what I understand, the mansion in Florida had previously been owned by a Bin Laden, was sold by said Bin Laden family member before the real estate bust, and was subsequently repo'd by the new owner's bank which is now attempting to sell it. I think.

So I guess there is supposed to be some kind of media-induced "stigma" attached, although any faux "stigma" will certainly dissolve the moment there is a deal to be had.

Anonymous said...

Seems to me the commonality of #1 and #3 is "compound". The difference lies in level of luxury, but they are both prisons and I wonder if they both house/d villains. Chez bin Laden may have been luxurious by local standards. I recently read that the wealth divide in the USA today is comparable to Iraq, and assume Pakistan isn't much better.

Anonymous said...

At first glance, I assumed that was a photo of the Getty Center by mistake.

Anonymous said...

10:08 Oh, I see. You say something intelligent about Muslim liberation and you are a "suspect" what? Most Americans have no understanding of US imperialism, of its war on Islam, or much of anything else. Ignorant Americans simply buy into the line fed them by the government, unable to see through the rubbish. As for terrorism. what about the more than 100,000 killed by the stupid US war in Iraq and our failing war in Afghanistan? Ever thought about that? Most Americans may be happy he is dead; countless millions of Muslims probably are not. But you are welcome to your boogymen. I suspect your mental health requires them.

Anonymous said...

6:58. There are no recent data for the wealth distribution in Iraq due most likely to the war and upheaval there. Pakistan however has a Gini index (the best way to understand income inequality; the higher the number, the more unequal the distribution) of 30.6 while the US (2007 latest data) had an index of 45. Thus the inequality of income in the US is very much greater than in Pakistan. Nothing to crow about.

Anonymous said...

I think it's funny that the library in the mammoth compound in LA has almost no shelves for books.

Anonymous said...

10:08 Not to prolong the controversy but as a friendly piece of advice, I would suggest you pay regular visits to the blog of Stephen Walt, Harvard U professor of politics. I think it would do wonders to increase the sophistication of your thinking about world affairs.

Anonymous said...

Dear Homeland Security,

Please don't lump all of Mama's children in with 7:03.

Lady J

lil' gay boy said...

1) "The Ultimate House of 2011" as they refer to it is irony at its best; in this economy, the crate the SubZero fridge arrived in is, sadly, more along the lines of housing for many Americans today. That being said, and taking much of what Anon 2:50 pointed out, it is an extraordinary execution in sybaritic accommodation given the clients' requirements of location & site.

I think I could happily live there in comfort with BGD, but I'd always have a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that one morning I would find an astronomical checkout statement had been discreetly slipped under the front door overnight.

2) Great floor plan porn on the link; at any price, it's still pie in the sky lovely for this poor lil' gay boy.

;-(

3) Location, location, location; ain't that what they always say? Not knowing that particular corner of Pakistan, this bunker-like concrete "compound" could very well qualify as a mansion in that sense, even if it appears to be as shabby & squalid as its recent occupant. As for the Florida residence, well, you just gotta know there's more than one rich wingnut who's more than twelve kinds of crazy who would jump at the chance to buy it for its provenance if only to tear it down, blow it up, whatever...

Hmmm; I wonder if Minister Terry Jones is passing 'round the collection plate as we speak...

Anonymous said...

"6:58. There are no recent data for the wealth distribution in Iraq due most likely to the war and upheaval there. Pakistan however has a Gini index (the best way to understand income inequality; the higher the number, the more unequal the distribution) of 30.6 while the US (2007 latest data) had an index of 45. Thus the inequality of income in the US is very much greater than in Pakistan. Nothing to crow about."

It's easy to have a low gini index if there's no wealth...

That said, I live in Dubai and have traveled through Pakistan. It's an extremely.....extremely poor country. 95% of the population are peasants living in dipshit villages or urban slums. 4.99% are some type of middle class people. .001% are very, very rich. Which is typical for third world countries.

There's absolutely no comparing Pakistan or Iraq to the United States or any western country. On the bright side, a middle class family in Pakistan can easily afford to have five or six servants because the houseboys and maids make the equivalent of, oh, say, $100 USD a month. And that's a good salary for most people in Pakistan.

Frank Zweegers said...

Great post!

Anonymous said...

The deceased Osama bin Laden may be a martyr to some followers of Islam; however, he was also a racist, anti-Jewish, ethno-centrist, declaring that all Jewish persons, simply because of their religion, including all Jewish Israelis, and all Americans, probably all U.S. non-Muslim citizens, should be killed. Despite questionable cliams of American and Jewish imperialism, Osama's philosophy constituted religious, cultural, and ethnic elimination, and must not be tolerated in civil society. Bin Laden declared war upon these groups and was eliminated via the international rules of war.

Cliff Stevenson said...

28 bedrooms? C'mon. You better be entertaining a ton in that place....or have 27 kids. Talk about excess

SusieQ said...

That first house would make a swell museum--for a small collection, of course!