A famous company gives you an unusual prize as part of a contest. You can have any existing house in the world to live in full-time and it is leased for you and your immediate family for the rest of your life. The lease expires when you die. You can choose any existing house and it will be taken care of in its present condition including the grounds if any by professional staff. However, that is all you get. You still have to pay for your own food, entertainment, and everything else that didn’t come with the house proper. If you choose Buckinghmam Palace, you just get the palace, you don’t get to be the Queen of England for example. You also can’t make a cent from living there. The place you choose is just where you live and that’s it.
I think I would go for The Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. That is one beautiful house and it isn’t so big that I wouldn’t be able to afford to support the lifestyle it deserves. I would have to buy some new clothes to hang out there but that should be doable. I would also want a dog named Belvedere.
Oh goodness. I can’t think of one off the top of my head that I can point to, but I read the Seattle paper <online> and they tend to feature real estate that is fairly expensive, with lots of pictures. There was one that was on Vashon Island that was just so perfect.
But anything with lots of wood, some wild landscape <as in more natural, not as in mohawked topiary> plenty of room for me to build a ridiculous library and a bathroom with sauna/bathing pool <japanese style> and maybe a steamroom that would make Caligula envious…oh and wraparound porches, skylights and lots of windows, with enough waterfront for a private small dock and a tiny beach…ok. I’m there! Also, a kitchen with room for me to build customized shelving and lots of counterspace to play with.
A bedroom with french doors that looks out into a stand of weeping willows on the other side of that wraparound porch…
Yeah, if anyone sees that house, let me know so I can squat?
It’s two fisherman’s cottages, back-to-back, knocked into one. Out back it has a courtyard with outhouses and a little vegetable garden; out front it has a Victorian rose garden in a lawn, which leads to a wall, on the other side of which is the sea.
The new owners got an archaeological surveyor in, and while we had thought it was 18thC, it turns out that the original dwelling was a 14thC animal barn, that had had a stone fireplace put in in the 15thC so that humans could dwell in it; a second fireplace was added in the 16thC, and these two stone constructions held up the whole of the back of the house. The house to the rear was comleted in the same century, using a huge beam dug up from a Viking longship burial. The house to the front was added in the 17thC using beams from a contemporaneous ship (wreck, I presume) and was restyled with bay windows overlooking the roses and the sea.
False walls had been added in the 19thC, and when they were excavated they found a bread oven embedded into the thick stone wall, beside the huge second fireplace that the Victorians had bricked up to make more genteel, I guess, and a “salt safe” embedded in the other side of the fireplace to keep the salt - a precious commodity then - dry by the always-burning fire.
Wonderful, wonderful, characterful house, that was a constant in my life for nearly forty years. My family had to sell it in 2005 after my grandfather died, because nobody could afford the inheritance tax. He bought it for £4,000 in 1942 and at the time of his death it was worth more than £1,000,000.
I don’t want a whole house, but I’ll take one of those old flats around Barcelona’s Vía Augusta, the ones with servants’ entrance and a kitchen designed to be used by three people and 6 bedrooms and 4m-high ceilings and a bathtub you can almost swim in…
If you insist that I’ll have to take a whole house, make it la casa de les punxes (the house of sharp pointy ends), also in Barnacity. It’s very close to my grandparents’, so we always drove by when we went there to visit them; I thought it was some princess’s castle.
If I could have it fixed up a bit, I would choose Mark Dyczkowski’s house on Narad Ghat in Varanasi. It’s right by the Ganges in a relatively quiet spot. Simple, comfortable and with a location to die for.
I would choose some nice old apartment or a smallish house in Astorga. I don’t care too much about the apartment or house, but having a free place to live in while I ate white chocolate with almonds would be pretty cool.
Failing that, my old apartment in Paris would be pretty good. I wouldn’t want some massive old historic place.
I don’t think I’d like to live in a house with a temporary kind of ownership like that. Besides, I like my house & land just fine. I would refuse the deal.
Hmm I’d have to think about it a lot - some of those castles in Europe are mighty nice, but I’m assuming I’d still have to work so living in Europe might not be practical or possible.
Granot Loma would be high on the list, though I’d have to see it in person. Some of those rooms look pretty gaudy. Am I allowed any minor redecoration?
The Imperial Palace in Tokyo. As the Wiki article says, “During the height of the 1980s Japanese property bubble, the palace grounds were valued by some as more than the value of all the real estate in the state of California.”
There is this wineshop/housein Germany I found for sale online a month or so ago, with a small plot of grape vines, and some sort of barn set across a road from it. It would be a lovely place to live in. I am not sure how to estimate monthly expenses in a different country, but if it had unlimited high speed internet it would work as mrAru could convince his job to let him go to 100% telecommute so he wouldn’t even need to change jobs. It is even about an hour away from the airbase in Ramstein, so we would have access to military hospital and shopping =)
Technicolor decor, random feline knicknacks, secret passages and walkways, and of course, the cats. I fell in the love with it the first time I read The Cat’s House, and I’ve had a house-crush on it since.
I always liked the Gamble House. A friendly, beautifully-crafted bungalow in a mild climate (Pasadena). It served as Doc Brown’s mansion in Back to the Future part 2.
Now, if you want a more severe climate, like where I live now (Canada), I’d go with a passive-solar mansion like the Weaver House.
With my choice, I’m guessing that the company offering the deal will find how much it’s going to cost them to make a deal with the Japanese Emperor – i.e., a significant fraction of the GDP of Japan – and offer me several billion dollars to accept a less prestigious residence.
There’s a house just down the street from me that’s been for sale for a while now, that reminds me of a southern plantation-style house without the caricature aspect. 1.5 acres, surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. I want it bad - but it’s 980,000 dollars. And I rent.
So, that one. Sorry I can’t give more specifics without outing myself more than I already have on the boards.
