“It took Gates seven years and $63 million to build his Medina, Washington, estate, named “Xanadu 2.0” after the fictional home of Charles Foster Kane, the title character of “Citizen Kane.”At 66,000 square feet, the home is absolutely massive, and it’s loaded to the brim with high-tech details.
The property is worth $124.99 million as of this year. Gates purchased the lot for $2 million in 1988.Per public filings, he paid $1,080,443.17 in property taxes in 2016.
Half a million board-feet of lumber was needed to complete the project.The house was built with 500-year-old Douglas fir trees, and 300 construction workers labored on the home — 100 of whom were electricians.
A high-tech sensor system helps guests monitor a room’s climate and lighting.When guests arrive, they’re given a pin that interacts with sensors located all over the house. Guests enter their temperature and lighting preferences so that the settings change as they move throughout the home. Speakers hidden behind wallpaper allow music to follow you from room to room.
The house uses its natural surroundings to reduce heat loss.You can change the artwork on the walls with just the touch of a button.Situated around the house are $80,000 worth of computer screens. Anyone can make the screens display their favorite paintings or photographs, which are stored on devices worth $150,000.
The pool also has its own underwater music system.The 60-foot pool is in its own separate, 3,900-square-foot building — the large brown building in the photo above. People in the pool could swim underneath a glass wall to come up to a terrace area on the outside.
The 2,100-square-foot library has a dome roof and two secret bookcases, including one that reveals a hidden bar. On the ceiling you’ll find a quote from “The Great Gatsby” that reads: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”
For more on this abode, please check out The Independent article here.
FLW NOT!
Nice & interesting house.
A good movie to watch for those folks that followed the PC and Apple success story first hand is “Pirates of the Valley”. It chronicles in a humerous way the rise of Microsoft and Apple and their “invention” of the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI) with over lapping windows. They ended up suing each other whereas the true inventor was actually the photocopy giant Xerox, via their research facility Xerox Park in Palo Alto, CA. (see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)
Yet Bill Gates tours the world, like many uber-rich like Al Gore, Naomi Klein or Leonardo DeCaprio and teaches the average folks about “sustainability” and a modest life style and reduced carbon footprint.
Ha !
https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=“bill+gates”+sustainability
Thomas,
I am watching you, and you are being envious,
talking nasty and being naughty on the internet.
You need to try harder to be good.
Santa
So he had a successful business then had a big fancy house built with his money. It’s cool.
One of the primary architects of the Gates “compound” is Seattle’s James Cutler. He is a master at using local materials and site conditions as the major design influences. It’s very easy to associate him with Gate’s over-the-top wealth and it’s expression in his complex property, but those familiar with Cutler’s work will note the exemplary site planning and extensive use of timber construction featuring local species like Douglas fir and cedar in his Pacific Northwest projects.
Cutler also produces work at a much more modest scale. Here is one exquisite example.
http://cutler-anderson.com/project/virginia-merrill-bloedel-education-center
Our own historic examples of ostentation are probably not going to get any better than Hatley Castle which was built for the controversial James Dunsmuir, son of Robert. Building a granite castle in the woods of Vancouver Island is arguably a greater imposition of ego on the landscape than the Gate’s private estate. Today it is rated as one of the most historic structures in Western Canada, and its primary function takes the form of Royal Roads University.
You could say Hatley Castle is timeless.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772 – 1834
Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw;
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Mr. and Mrs Gates should be careful what they wish for!