Building a tunnel to connect your two houses. What I don't understand is why you would want two houses that close to each other. If I were super-rich, sure, I'd like to own several houses, but I'd want them in diverse locations to assist vacationing and so forth. One house per city seems like plenty.
« Two Ways on Health Care | Main | If Wishes Were Ponies... »
The Latest Microtrend
01 Oct 2007 10:16 am
Comments (19)
20 years ago, REM wrote a song about this: "Life And How To Live It"
I thought all bloggers were super-rich.
matt, it is two houses on one small lot seperated by a patio area. The houses will be connected through the basements. This makes perfect sense unless one is renting out one or both of the houses, then it would be better to keep them seperate.
When buying real estate if you can swing a deal with two on a lot for the same or little more than you would pay for a single then you have one of the best deals in the world.
For the ultra-rich, the reason for the other house on the same lot is for your spouse.
Also, this shows how deprived you were as a Harvard student-- while most of the campus is connected by underground tunnels (from the Harvard yard down to the river houses), access to them is restricted, and no one is allowed to use them outside of maintenance staff. Otherwise, you'd appreciate being able to move from building to building without having to step out into the cold.
Well, it's quite simple: one house for yourself and one for the servants. You don't want the servants running around in your garden, thus the tunnel.
I've actually been in a house in Ireland with such a servant tunnel; the owners didn't have servants anymore but the tunnel was still there and it had been built for that very reason.
It is very bad form for the man of the house to schtup the maid while his wife sleeps in the next bedroom. Hence the tunnel.
I dunno that it applies in this case, but I know a lot of rich people are from other countries where people still live in extended families.
E.g., where my fiancee lives, whenever two adjacent lots go for sale, some rich family from Iran or someplace in the former Soviet Union buys both, tears the homes down and builds a big, huge mansion so that way the whole extended family can live together like they did in the old country.
I imagine that if the young-uns wanted to live in a more American, "nuclear family" style, that having a tunnel between two homes (one home for one side of the family and another home for another side of the family) would be a good compromise between single (nuclear) family housing and having one house for the whole (extended) family.
Apparently, "tunnel" is the newest euphemism for bomb shelter.
Penn appears to be hedging against his most famous client's wacky foreign policy ideas.
I think it's great that rich people are living out a fantasy I had when I was around 6. Maybe they'll start building tree houses, too. I really liked the kind of mud-and-stick things that beavers built, but even then I couldn't imagine the whole family going in for having to hold your breath and swim underwater to get into the house. And Grandma would have had some problems.
But, anyway, it's great that the rich are so childlike.
Maybe the hidden story is that the really rich *do* have tunnels connecting their homes in disparate cities, and this is just sort of the McMansioning of that. Maybe these tunneling super-rich also have secret highspeed rail systems! Down with secret high-speed global rail systems for the few! Up with the midwest high-speed rail system for the many!
I blame the Arcade Fire.
Seems like MY has taken a lot of bashing lately, but I think that he's done a valuable service by highlighting the presence of a guy like Penn in HRC's inner circle.
Clearly Mark Penn is a Morlock.
But I'm waiting for Tom Friedman's secret Mustache of Power cave....
Attention, fellow tunnel-digging underground-railway-riding super-rich MacMansioners: Greg Claxton is on to us and must be destroyed! (P.S. Eat this message after reading ....)
If I were super rich I'd have two houses near by each other entirely for the sake of the awesome tunnel.
I have no desire for a tunnel, but I do have two houses next door to each other. (Each cost less than $150,000 being in the not-the-best section of the best neighborhood in Klamath Falls, Oregon.) One is nicer and has its own geothermal well for heating water and the house; the other has an extra lot -- we 'live' in the nicer one, use the other for our offices, my wife's soap and candle making, storage, and a big vegetable garden. It's great!
Per witless chum's reference:
And if the snow buries my,
my neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying
then I'll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my window to yours.
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) - Arcade Fire
Comments closed October 15, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Probably just wants more living space in a neighborhood with moderately-sized houses.
Posted by right | October 1, 2007 10:20 AM