I go to quite a few estate sales in expensive neighborhoods and have seen a few with elevators but they are not really common even with the rich. Mostly only really needed for people with elderly family or a handicapped child. Even then its more common to see the chair the goes up the stairs or dumbwaiters to carry heavy items between floors.
When I was looking with my ex-girlfriend to buy a rental property there was a development with new construction that had elevators in each unit. It was a cool feature but all we could think of is the added maintenance cost in the future. For us and probably many an elevator is a negative for that reason.
Remembered this news: Home elevator becomes death trap for elderly Georgia couple stuck inside | Fox News
Stuck home elevator, it had a phone jack but no phone plugged in, no mandatory regular inspections
Tangent:
There’s no such thing as a ridiculously robust elevator that you can install and forget about for 20 years? Say, as a thought exercise, Bill Gates decided it was worth depleting his fortune to develop just such an elevator. Overengineered, overbuilt, quintuply redundant, etc. Is it possible to make a virtually maintenance-free elevator from an engineering standpoint?
I understand we’re going to blow way past the $20,000 price tag here.
There are vacuum elevators that use air pressure to move the cab. They don’t require a machine room or a pit below the elevator and are supposed to need much less maintenance.
My wife and I looked at a house that had an elevator last year. The elevator was very slow. She made it up the staircase in the time that it took the elevator to make it up. It wasn’t as large as the elevator in an apartment building would be either.
We passed on the house, as the layout was incredibly bizarre and the house had a lot of wasted space.
Even if you could theoretically forget about it for 20 years, would you really want to ride on an elevator that hadn’t been inspected for 10 or even 5 years?
Designing-in space for a future elevator seems like the best course. Future owners might run into snags from neighborhood associations or historical regulators about bumping a new shaft outside the original design. In my city, a restaurateur planned to put a new eatery into a landmark house. He was stopped in mid-project when a new ADA-required elevator’s add-on shaft was too modern for the Historical Landmarks Board.
Besides, think of all the things that were prohibitively expensive 20 years ago that any homeowner can make a part of her life today.
The ones I’ve seen advertised on TV in the U.S. also have a battery backup.
You aren’t going to fit much furniture into the residential elevators I’ve seen, and as others have mentioned, people rich enough to have an elevator will have movers/delivery people take care of that sort of heavy lifting. IMO once your are rich enough to contemplate putting in an elevator for the mere possibility of needing it 20-30 years down the road, you might just as easily plan on moving into a cushy retirement community at that point.
That was what first came to mind for me too.
Oh my God. I think their son is my dentist. The name is the same, and somewhat unusual, and he could easily live in Blue Bell.
Never getting into an elevator again.
Designing it into your house is as easy as making sure you have two largish closets one above the other. As mentioned, no wiring or venting running through. Then, when you need it, there’s room!
I think the reason is, people who have faced such a decline in their health, can easily imagine things progressing to a next phase of decline. If that’s your concern, moving to single floor living allows much more accommodation room for any future developments.
$20,000 for an elevator looks like money wasted if a year later you need to move due to more decline.
Wouldn’t it also require room for the machinery, either above or below the closets?
Reading further, it mentions their son’s wife and her name is the same as my dentist’s wife. It must be them. I had no idea that they had experienced such a tragedy.
You know, someone mentioned convention, and I think that probably has as much to do with it as anything, but it goes a little deeper than mere convention. The things that rich people do spend money on to show off, like Jaguars, or a certain difficult-to-maintain grass in their lawn, are first of all, obvious, and second of all indicate that they are fun and adventurous people. Since people who do put in elevators do it because of failing health or the sudden need for a wheelchair, and since elevators aren’t obvious from the outside, they’re not an attractive thing to spend money on, for people who want to show off their wealth. And of course, nothing shows off wealth like the self-conscious unwillingness to use it when it isn’t necessary (at least among the inner circle of the super-wealthy), so you have that, too. In other words, people aren’t going to whisper about how rich you are, you bought an elevator, but whisper about maybe what’s wrong with you that you need an elevator.
Maybe 
If the engineering has totally triumphed over All-That-Can-Go-Wrong (and if I were totally convinced of same). But then, that may be an impossible standard for a real-life human-built machine.
The super-rich laugh at their poorer neighbors with their “elevators” and enjoy their in-home escalators.
The super-super-rich have servants to carry them up and down the stairs.