Billion dollar home?

Would you spend more than a billion dollars to build a home? Nita Ambani and her multi-billionaire husband did.

And if you did, would you put it in the middle of Mumbai, India, home of some of the worst slums in the world? This was a couple years ago. I wonder if the value has appreciated or depreciated.

Reports are that this is the world's most expensive home. I question this assertion, as Buckingham Palace has to be worth something on the open market.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Would you spend more than a billion dollars to build a home?

Probably not, but If I did, it surely wouldn't look as ugly as that!

Quote: Ayecarumba

And if you did, would you put it in the middle of Mumbai, India, home of some of the worst slums in the world?

Hell no!...LOL

I'm going to assume those are rhetorical, as everyone here is a little more sane and logical than to spend that amount of money on a home. That thing is quite the eyesore, by the way...looks like Sim City gone bad.

BTW, anyone who would spend that amount of money (or anything close to it) on a "home" that isn't on the beach or in some other prime location is nuts

Quote: Ayecarumba

Reports are that this is the world's most expensive home. I question this assertion, as Buckingham Palace has to be worth something on the open market.

Windsor Castle does have an assessed value of £186m or $280 million . As private homes Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House have similar assessed values of several hundred million dollars apiece, but that is because they come with tens of thousands of acres of land and out buildings (some of which would be great mansions in their own right).

I don't think you can compare any private building to public buildings like Buckingham Palace, the White House, and Versailles.

This home in Mumbai (which some people estimate at costing $2 billion) has no significant amount of land. It should be pointed out that a normal skyscraper would cost.

In 2004 MetLife sold the Willis Tower in Chicago (formerly Sears Tower) to a group of investors, including New York-based Joseph Chetrit, Joseph Moinian, Lloyd Goldman, Joseph Cayre and Jeffrey Feil, and Skokie-based American Landmark Properties. The quoted price was $840 million, with $825 million held in a mortgage.

Mukesh Ambani (who is a few months older than me) intends to be the richest man in the world in 3 years. The entire point of the skyscraper was to build it in Mumbai. They could have easily built anywhere in the world.

Now where have I seen that before?

Looks like an office building in Turkey. Yuk.

Maybe the original picture put it in a bad light. Here is another one from the Telegraph:



Is that better?

.....

That looks like some kid was playing with lego blocks, misaligned a level or two, but didn't want to bother taking it down to restack properly

Quote: gog

That looks like some kid was playing with lego blocks, misaligned a level or two, but didn't want to bother taking it down to restack properly

Or a game of Jenga in progress...

Quote: Ayecarumba

Maybe the original picture put it in a bad light. Is that better?

The 27-storey palace, which has three helipads, 50 person movie theater, health club, several large swimming pools, a ballroom, parking for over 160 vehicles taking up 6 floors, hanging gardens with extra tall ceilings for trees to grow.

Staff of 600, and almost 9 acres of floor space.



I am not sure what I would do with 600 household servants.

How sad, they don't have a yard. Just a some terraces with a few trees & bushes. Nowhere to play wiffleball or run through the sprinkler.

Must get old, taking the stairs or elevator all the time.

House design: FAIL.

Quote: MathExtremist

Or a game of Jenga in progress...

There used to be an "apartment complex" by the state university in my home town. 10ish stories of alternately facing mobile homes stacked on each other, with exterior scaffolds providing access to the upper levels. Maybe not surprisingly, it was badly damaged in a storm in the '90s.

To me, this looks like that. Modular home Jenga.

As of the time I'm writing this, there are approximately 2950 members of this board. So, if we each contribute "only" $675,000, we might be able to buy this home.

Ambani someday hopes to be as rich as the man who lives in this home in Omaha.

Here is an example of a double condo tower in a suburb of Toronto. They are selling like hot cakes and the whole complex cost less to build than Ambani's house.

In all, the five-tower Absolute World project cost 450 million Canadian dollars (about $470 million), and more than half of that went into constructing the two curvy towers, said Sergio Vacilotto, the director of site operations with Dominus Construction.

Quote: pacomartin

I am not sure what I would do with 600 household servants.

For me, they would all be gorgeous Indian women from 18 to 25.
I can think of many things they would be useful for.

Quote: EvenBob

For me, they would all be gorgeous Indian women from 18 to 25.
I can think of many things they would be useful for.

I doubt that Mrs. Ambani tolerates hundreds of gorgeous women working in her house.

It is still kind of hard to imagine 9 acres of square footage for a house. The largest house, by far in the USA is Biltmore, which has roughly 4 acres of square footage. Even in it's heyday, I understand they had about 40 servants who were all required to be unmarried. I imagine more people were brought in for functions, and probably hundreds worked the grounds of the estate.



Besides the White House, there were only 10 homes in America constructed before WWII that were over an acre in square footage. There have been a few built since then. Some are for sale.