If you don’t know what Parade of Homes is, here is a link.
You buy a ticket ($25 on line, or $20 if you go to your local Lazy Boy Furniture store) and then go tour new, furnished homes from about $2 million up to $12 million.
We go every year, and it is always fun to see what you can buy for that money. So far, we have only seen houses #7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. (See pictures on link.)
We liked house #7 the best, even though it is one of the “cheapest” at “only” $2,700,000.
House #9 at $10 million was not so great…one full wing of guest bedrooms, but not a single room had a view other than a wall. The rest of the house was so-so.
House #10 at $12 million was huge, very contemporary (which we normally like) but rather impersonal and nowhere near worth the price.
We hope to see house #12 tomorrow - totally “green”, with solar panels that create enough electricity to keep the house going, plus great insulation, etc. Press reports have been very positive about that house.
Will try to see the first six houses (on the other side of Las Vegas from where we live) next week.
There were far better homes that had guest rooms with fantastic view of The Strip, instead of a wall five feet from your window. And for 10 million bucks, I would think the guest rooms should be decent…don’t want my VegasDopeFest crashers having to stare just at their computer screens for hours on end and…oh…hmmm…nevermind.
We’re off to see the “green” house (number 12 on the link above) in about an hour. Will get back to you on how that is.
BTW, should anyone be coming to Vegas in the next two weeks, you can go view the homes as well!
And the “green” house is the winner!
Check out the photos and short video in the GALLERY section of their website!
We have been going to Parade of Homes and Street of Dreams for years, and have never been so blown away with design, functionality and price. Yes, $4.5 million is a tad rich for our blood, but compared to other homes going for more than twice that amount, this is a deal.
Basically, produces all the electricity you need for the house from solar panels.
They have special roof top water gathering system, with 1,500 gallon tank, to save the little rainwater we get and use for watering the desert friendly landscaping.
They have natural gas heating and natural gas air conditioning!
Walls make of concrete to hold in heat and cooling.
Roof top solar tubing to keep pool warm year round.
A pool that raises to patio level exactly, but when you want to swim, press a button and the entire pool level lowers several inches to allow splashing not to overflow.
A new style of bathtub (Kohler’s VibrAcustic) with sound vibration and supposedly gives you the same feeling of sleeping 8 hours in just 20 minutes.
So many other features - simply quite amazing.
Now, if I can get 4,500 Dopers to each send me $1,000…
I go to model homes to scope out decorating ideas. I’ve never been to one as grand as those on your link. Sheesh…I have a hard enough time wrapping my brain around the posh homes show on TV. I’d prolly faint dead away if I were to actually enter one of those mega homes.
FYI, there is a trend in model homes that carries a theme throughout each room. Do people actually do that? I’m talking the same color scheme or the same striped walls or whatever. I don’t get that.
My favorite part is always how the tables are done up. I just adore a done-up table!
Well, considering you will be one of 4,500 and there are three guest bedrooms…[DMark grabs a pencil and does a little math…]…so, I have you down for one night in 2016…how does Tuesday night work for you?
I will be waiting for your check - make it out to “CASH”.
No themes really, other than most homes are either somewhat stuffy with “old lady” foo-foo furniture (which obviously I don’t like) or contemporary (more modern which I do like). One thing I hate, and maybe it is just here, is the overuse of brown…seems like 95% of all homes have beige carpets, brown furniture and wood, dark brown curtains, light brown tables, brown, brown, brown…looks like you are living inside of a tree. I know they are going for the “earth tones”, but it gets very boring very quickly. What have people got against color? Even the “green” house above - granted, all brown on the outside, still had lots of nice greens and whites and splashes of color throughout the house.
Sometimes they will have specialty rooms - a kid’s room with sports or fantasy theme. Other homes will at least do the den/family room with something fun - the $12 million home had a room with 5 pinball machines, three video game machines, a motorcycle video ride and a full sized juke box. That was next to the home theater with seating for about 20 people. The “green” house has several features like that - at the press of a button, curtains close in one room and a huge screen comes down from the ceiling and voila! Instant home theater. Also had several flat screen televisions for designed for outdoor use (they make them special) placed in several locations by the pool and by the waterfalls.
Yes, they almost always put stuff on the formal dining table - full set of plates and silverware, along with interesting centerpieces - flowers/sculptures/glass objects.
My guess is that they don’t want us peons peein’ on the new toilets. They frown on doing anything in the bathrooms other than looking at them.
Maybe they figure if someone sees toilet paper, they might be inclined to go in and have a seat.
And yeah, they have had Street of Dreams here too, but not recently…Parade of Homes is the regular event now.
We competed the tour yesterday and thought I would mention a few cool features of houses 1 - 6.
House number one is most certainly the “house of glass”…curtain-free, floor to ceiling glass walls throughout - even in the bathrooms. They also used glass floors…under the kitchen table was a plexi-glass floor exposing a section of the swimming pool underneath. The coolest use of the feature was the master bedroom…the bed “floated” (two huge girders, about 3 feet off the ground and firmly embedded through the glass wall behind it, held the bed up.) Under the bed was a plexi-glass floor, and under the floor was a jungle of low light plants, just like the large palms and plants behind the bedroom glass wall. Thus the effect was a “floating bed” with a mini jungle below and behind it in solid wall of glass. It was almost intimidating to get close to the bed. In the main living room, overlooking the waterfall, pool and golf course, you simply pressed a button and up from the floor came a very large, flat panel television. The biggest problem with the house was, in keeping with the contemporary theme, the furniture was designed for gymnasts. All the sofas and chairs were about 8 inches off the floor - easy to fall in and sit, but almost impossible to get out and stand.
House number two costs $18 million - unfurnished. With a 17 car garage, a separate doggie room (to give Fido a bath and clip his nails) and a small barber shop/hair salon for humans next door, this house was quite spectacular from the minute you stepped through the door and got a load of the view…huge covered pool, invisible walls (press buttons and they all disappear by sliding into other walls) it was like living outside. A very nice home theater with a screen that is probably the size of the smallest screen in your local multi-plex movie theater, the seats all had sound coming from the seats.
The other homes were OK, but none surpassed houses number 12, 2, and 7.
It was fun to see what new multi-million dollar homes look like, and interesting to note that the “green house” at “only” $4.5 million was still better than homes that cost more than triple that amount.
Let me tell ya, if you ever do win that huge lottery jackpot and go house hunting, it might take a little longer than you thought to pick out the one you like.
