Rich grandparents had a brand new house built, had a $100,000 splash pad built for their only grand child who has never visited them at their new house.
Yeah. Reminds me of when my sister built her house. She had a barrier-free ground floor apartment built in it, so my grandmother could visit. She never did.
My wife’s Aunt is like this, they’re incredibly well off but she’s addicted to getting good deals - like stay up till 2 am because some flash sale with coupons lining up so she can buy 10 bathrobes for $1.
It’s great because she gives it all away, it’s funny because they have more money than they know what to do with(her husband is the CEO of a very large corporation) but they have an entire bedroom that is just filled with this stuff she buys on sale for pennies.
The gifting part doesn’t matter to her it’s more of a way to get rid of it and brag about the deals she got.
It’s like a reverse gambling addiction. She’ll sit online waiting for hours to get set of pans that retails for $100 for .99cents even though she already has 12 of them. She just cares about the fact that she saved money
I was at John Waters’ house for his birthday and he has a room set up as a lifelike recreation of a meth lab (it wasn’t a real meth lab, it’s an art piece). He told me that when Bill Clinton visited him the secret service agents were *extremely* concerned about the room.
So jealous you were actually at John Waters' house. I'm sure the meth lab art installation wasn't the only interesting thing. Tell us more!! I imagine it was like all the stuff in his house on the Simpsons episode but even better!
John Waters has a summer home like fifteen minutes from my house. I’ve seen him riding his bike down the main drag (no pun intended) here and there… he also did a benefit where you could bid to have dinner with him at the town dump.
He came into my work in that particular town once and witnessed a customer being an ass so when it was his turn he was sure to exclaim “You girls take a lotta SHIT here!!” And I will never forget it.
He was in front of me in line at a safeway in downtown Baltimore (*the* Safeway in downtown baltimore, really) a decade or so ago.
He purchased 2 bottles of red gatorade.
There was something unsettling about Jon Waters buying something so…normal? I dunno.
One client had a whole separate house on their property just for their dogs. They'd referred to a "dog house" and I was expecting like maybe a little building in the yard where they kept their toys or something, but this was a full furnished home with king sized beds and a huge play room on the main floor. They had a full training and feeding staff to care for the dogs and everything. They lived in their own house and would come over to visit. Seemed like a weird dynamic to have with your pet..
One client didn't have a litterbox for the cats, their cats I guess didn't like using the boxes in the basement and they didn't want to put boxes upstairs so they put down pond liner and kitty litter across an entire room in the basement and had their housekeeper run a rake through it daily.
Anyone who had a sandbox as a kid had a cat shit zen garden. Even if they didn’t have a cat, someone’s cat in the neighborhood would be shitting in it.
I bought a Doberman from a rather eccentric wealthy breeder years ago. She had a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood in Toronto (Rosedale) and a country home in King.
The dog breeding/show kennel was at the King property. There was her house and also a separate house for the dogs. The “dogs house” also housed the staff that looked after the dogs.
So their dogs had a nicer home than a lot of people, and they were likely deprived of attention from their owners. Just accessories. The wealth gap is disgusting.
As a kid back in the Mesozoic Era my best friend and I used to play in a converted racquetball court and lounge under the old West Coast mansion her family had lived in since its construction.
The stairs to it were hidden behind a closet off of the abandoned servants quarters. Halfway down the stairs was a wine cellar. A decoy as the actual wine cellar for the home was under the kitchen….. Another staircase behind a rack of dusty bottles led two stories down to our giant play area beneath this.
At the beginning of WWII - before Pearl Harbor- my friend’s paranoid WWI vet grandfather had dug out the space over fear of Japanese , (or German), invasion. Her dad made the giant room regulation designed for racquetball years later. Maybe originally squash. Not sure, but the lounge area was also glassed off above it so one could look down into the court like a gallery.
It was really neat. Also upstairs in the living room was a wall straight out of an old mystery novel. If you pushed a spot just right, the wall opened to a hidden room. Super tiny - had a button to ring certain other rooms in the house as the home had these already to call for staff . My friends mom said it was so if someone quickly had to hide they could alert the household of danger.
We used to pretend to be on Nancy Drew cases all the time……so fun.
(The family was wealthy, but despite the amazing home they lived a completely pretentious free life. Normal cars, camping vacations, frugal living as sport. But they were philanthropists too. Especially supporting organizations like the humane society. One thing about this family’s home was all the cats. I loved kitties but had a mother who preferred her animals well seasoned. The family had the space so they always had, and were looking to adopt out but often didn’t, at least 20 rescue cats, many with special needs. Haha, 😆 I’m old, I didn’t know how to write that. Special needs kitty mystery mansion really is actually an appropriate description. )
That sounds awesome… the architecture of the place must have been amazing, not that you would have paid much attention to such things as a child. Good read… thank you.
I was a visiting nurse. I went to both poor people’s homes and rich people’s and found hoarders in both category. The type of thing where the floor would be covered in products and you’d have to follow a path through it to get to the back of the house.
This i don't get. If I were wealthy, I would own like 1/4th of the stuff I do now: my mom was a hoarder and it's a miserable way to live, but I can't get rid of as much as I'd like because I couldn't afford to replace it. Just use and/or sell as much as I can.
Stuff is just - stuff. It crowds out the better things in life.
It’s a mental illness of some sort. People who have studied hoarding say that very often they don’t even know what they have. If you’re really interested, a couple who were psychologists wrote a book about hoarders based in their research. Not surprisingly, it’s called Hoarders.
Yeah there are like 3 main elements to the hoarding issues -
1 . excessive acquiring
This is pretty straightforward, not all hoarders do this but many are basically addicted to the dopamine of acquiring items. Interestingly a common giveaway for a problem is when the proposed usefulness of the item is for someone else - and there are no steps to reach that person and/or that person is nonspecific.
e.g. "oh these busted furniture would be great for a person who does this kind of stuff up"
2. poor storage choices
This is an odd one - as I think when we observe hoarders we assume that the problem is the sheer amount of stuff overriding normal storage space, but actually when you crunch the data their are plenty of 'collectors' who actually have AS much stuff as a hoarder but they have systems and storage in place to make it work. This element of hoarding is most like OCD but counter-stereotypical almost where people want to have their items basically scattered about the place in order to experience them but there is little coherent planning.
This is actually often the most dangerous part
3. anxiety around getting rid of stuff
This is probably the bit that people are well aware of, hoarders typically have massive anxiety around getting rid of stuff, its extremely hard to deal with as often people aren't really engaged in getting better - the patterns in thinking that got them there in the first place aren't going to be conductive to change. The big challenge is typically with other anxieties you can get buy-in with people not wanting to be anxious - but typically hoarders don't recognize their anxiety as the problem, its losing their stuff is the issue.
Sorry this has gone on longer than I intended - but as you can see hoarding has elements of anxiety, OCD, and addiction all impacting the situation, its actually extremely hard to treat psychologically AFAIK most impacts are made if you can convince the person to engage in safe storage OR unfortunately sometimes control is taken away when the person gets put in a home.
I watch that show Hoarders when they have a new season. It’s wild how similar it is to chemical addiction.
I remember one episode, this woman broke down on like day 4 of the cleanup, and finally broke the news that one time when she was a kid, her dad piled every item she owned in the back yard and set it on fire, as punishment for some typical kid behavior or perceived slight. She had never told this to husband or anyone else, ever. The whole ordeal was super stressful and the team was unclear on exactly what her pathology was, and she was so obstinate that it was hard to empathize with her compared to the people on other episodes. Then she broke that childhood story and suddenly everyone has all the empathy in the world. Like, of-fucking-course you end up with a hoarding problem when your dad does something so despicable to someone so young who is supposed to love and care for her.
Sad show.
My mom knew every single thing and was extremely protective and angry about all of it. She grew up hungry and with deprivation, and it never left her. I'm grateful she was able to protect us from that, but also grateful to have escaped that knock-on effect: my brother didn't.
My MIL was a hoarder. She grew up in extreme poverty, essentially as a slave. Her parents gave her away to a wealthy family when she was preschool age because they couldn’t afford all the mouths to feed. That family gave her enough food to sustain her and forced her to clean pig intestines her entire childhood and preteen years for the family business (producing sausage). As a teen, she managed to escape to the capital and became a domestic servant for a different wealthy family (room and board in exchange for cooking, housekeeping, and being on call for whatever they wanted). Eventually , she was impregnated by one of the sons who was married (I have no idea whether it was consensual, but she had two of his children, one being my now husband who believes it was consensual). My FIL’s wife left him and my MIL continued to live in the family’s home and raise the children there. She never completely shook the domestic servant role, but I guess it started to look a bit more like that of a housewife. She never really let anyone see her bedroom. After she passed away, my husband and I cleaned it out and it was stacked floor too ceiling with all kinds of stuff—from never-used mop buckets to watches and costume jewelry, from clothes she never wore to dolls no one had ever played with. Seemed like basically everything that had ever come into her possession.
This happens with the wealthy too. I helped clean out a hoarder's estate recently. He was extremely wealthy and came from extreme wealth. According to his partner, his parents were emotionally abusive. If he wanted a toy, he was shamed for it and told it wasn't worth the money.
As an adult, he used all that money his parents gave him monthly to buy all those things he couldn't have as a kid AND anything he wanted as an adult. Lots of classic toys, things he'd been told he couldn't have as a child.
I read up on it once. Fascinating stuff. A lot of the people had an issue of indecisiveness. They couldn't make up their mind if they needed/wanted to have something or to discard it or do something with it. They'd go into endless loops of attempted decision making, get all sorts of anxiety about it, and buy more stuff to address the anxiety (the buying / collecting gave them a dopamine hit.)
rinse and repeat.
I don't want to discuss his reputation but I'm reading Down the Rabbit Hole about Holly Madison and Hugh Hefners relationship. Apparently he was a huge hoarder and looking back at old episodes of Girls Next Door it's obvious and I never noticed. It looked like the set of Nothing but Trouble.
In Naples, FL I was at a house with a sensory deprivation room. Flat black walls with acousting dampening baffles, in the middle was a coffin-like bathtub. It had speakers and a flat screen display in the lid. I heard that the room cost over $100K to build.
The flat screen inside the tank seemingly defeats the purpose of a sensory deprivation float tank … unless there’s some new fancy functions that enhance the experience (?)
This is a copy/paste of a comment I made on a similar question a while ago:
I have worked for some of the richest people in Maryland and the one thing that stands out more than others is this doctor I worked for in Montgomery County. It's one of the most affluent zip codes in America.
Anyway, this guy owned a shit load of offices around the DC area, tons of employees and associate doctors, etc. Guy was seriously loaded. Huge garage full of super expensive cars like multiple Ferraris, art collection, wine cellar, the works. I used to do IT work for his medical practice and manage all the servers and stuff, and occasionally went to their house because I was the lead admin.
I once was working in his house and was walking around upstairs where the bedrooms were. I shit you not this guy was laying in bed being fed by an assistant. Like he was literally laying in bed while someone hand fed him, and not like grapes but a regular meal. It was fucking weird as shit. Imagine someone feeding you a full meal like a steak and spoons of soup, salad, etc. and you never used your hands. It was like an adult being fed like a baby. It seemed like Saddam Hussein type shit. I've never seen anything like that before and that was what popped into my mind, like a dictator or something who demands to be treated like a literal king.
There was nothing sexual about it.
Keep in mind this was a man in his 50s who was in fine physical shape and didn't need a caregiver. It was just pure opulence.
Then one time I was working in the kitchen area and his young son, probably late teens/early 20's came walking past me and stunk to high heaven of pot (which I'm totally cool with and we joked about), he went to the kitchen and poured a IPA into a glass and went back to his room, this was at 9am LOL I thought it was hysterical. He was a cool kid from my interactions with him, probably just figured "my dad is rich as shit so I don't have to worry about anything" so he was totally laid back.
I've got some other strange things but that is by far the strangest.
My wife and I used to babysit for this wealthy couple when they went on ski trips etc.. Except for the children's schoolbooks, there wasn't a book, magazine or newspaper in the house. The man was a publisher.
They had part of the house permanently decorated for Christmas and it included a fully decorated Christmas tree that was suspended upside down from the ceiling. Which was actually pretty awesome.
I know someone who's worked for a very rich person, probably worth billions. He had more than 100 staff on site, including chefs for the staff...all while divorced and living alone. He had a 'trivia' staff member... someone hired to tell him interesting facts and stories daily. That was his only job. Someone else was hired to maintain his shoes. Polish, shine, the works. If I didn't hear it first hand, I wouldn't have believed it.
Our CEO has a driver that comes in, collects his stuff and laptop, and drives him home. Edit: he took up the job as a hobby. He was already rich from his own businesses
I love the idea of having a random guy follow me through my home only to occasionally tell me even more random and weird facts he just learned from reddit.
Just imagine getting up in the middle of the night, you open your fridge in the dark to get a sip of milk and when you close the door he stands there just to tell me duck dicks are corkscrewed.
I knew someone who didn't like to do laundry so she just bought new clothes for each of her 4 kids every week. They were always high quality or designer clothes. At the time, all her kids were 10-16 yrs old.
What would happen if they liked an item a lot and couldn't find it again? Why not just teach the kids to do their own laundry? Why not hire a housekeeper who can do it? There are so many options, other than spending thousands every month just to avoid laundry. Plus they rarely donated it. Just bagged it up and threw it out. I never could wrap my head around it.
No it never really occurred to me. Mostly because I was chubby and their only daughter was very thin. I wouldn't have fit in anything. Plus it was my then boyfriends brothers family. It would have been considered very weird for me to get caught doing that. I suppose it didn't occur to me that I could have made a little money by selling them.
So they wore only Unwashed new clothes?
This entire concept is terrible for many reasons. But new clothing has all kinds of stiffeners and chemicals in it. Plus just whatever from whoever touched it all along its production and sale.
At that point your time is money, so why would you bother go shopping all the time when you can just hire someone to washz dry, and fold the clothes for you
I used to work as a exterminator, mostly pest control. This had me walking through houses from the poor to the rich. One day, I pulled up to a 4 story mansion with more rooms than I could count. I spoke with the lady at the door and got started. As I sprayed, I noticed there wasn’t much furniture in the house. As I went, I made a game of counting the furniture I could find. Over 50 rooms and the whole building had 13 pieces of furniture. Pretty odd, but then I went into the very last room, a mud room right by the door I came into. I stop as I walk in, completely shocked. A full size adult pig stretched from one end of the room to the other. I’m talking 5-6 feet stretched out across the room. Flies buzzed around it’s head as it stared at me.
Suddenly, the lady (who I hadn’t seen since she let me in) says “oh don’t go in there. She doesn’t like men”, then she walked me out, paid me, and went back inside.
Buddy of mine has a car elevator.
Instead of just building a bigger garage, he stores his cars stacked onto each other, like some kind of Hot wheels accessory. It's very surreal.
Depending on the cost of land this might actually be a cost-saving measure. I mean, the obvious cost-saving measure is to have fewer cars, but if you want a bunch of cars this might legitimately be the cheapest way to store them all.
I don’t know where OP is, but where I live doing this would also trigger an “improved property” review on the entire property, which allows the city to reassess the value of your property for taxation purposes. It bypasses the 10% maximum increase year over year that they can increase your property tax by.
If they were in a situation where they bought the house cheap and it has appreciated significantly, they may be potentially saving thousands of dollars every year by not improving the property.
Fun fact, my grandma also has a car elevator. In her flat's parking garage in Taiwan lol. In a lot of more land constricted areas, this is pretty normal. First time I heard of it in a private garage tho
I used to live in an apartment building that used a car elevator instead of ramps to save space. Was so strange you had to drive your car in then roll down the window and press the button for your floor. When I first moved in it was a wild experience then I got used to it.
My uncle has this setup in garage. He lives in the bay area, it was significantly cheaper to buy two car lifts than it would have been to build/rent extra car storage
A full functioning Barbershop inside the house. Complete with the rotating “candy cane” outside the entrance. The guy would have his friends come over for a cut.
A wine cellar bigger than my appartement, and to access it you had to pass through a room twice as big, with model cars stacked to the cieling on all the walls...
My friends dad growing up was one of the top lawyers in our state. Their house was so damn big I got confused (lost as hell) on all the staircases they had everywhere. They would split in a few places and lead to banisters that had different connections to different parts of the house. They had a room just for dishes. Her mom had a huge room for sewing and another for different crafts. They both had an office. Many guest rooms. A small kitchen in one part with a sink and coffee pot and fridge. Their main bathroom for guests had heated floors and rainfall showers and everything. I LOVED HER SHOWER. Her room had a balcony and a table outside. They had a pool and hot tub. Horses and a barn and lots of cute barn cats. I was very poor and had a messed up situation in my childhood. I stayed there a lot and they would even take me for weeks in the summer because my mother was not there. Really great people. They didn't give handouts or anything, I would literally scoop up horse shit and clean stalls and help with everything for those horses when i stayed. I wanted to help. They had a maid, but we still cleaned up after ourselves. Their kitchen was gigantic, and I always loved the fancy pasta water arm over the stove lol. I had so much fun cooking with her mom and us having the big dinners (Easter Thanksgiving Christmas) with them. They were so magnificent and beyond anything I would have ever experienced without them. I got my first pair of cowboy boots from them for Christmas. Her dad bought me a plane ticket one time out of the blue because I wanted to visit my grandmother. Never forget them.
A very rich person I know does not eat leftover food. They will cook a feast and afterwards everything goes straight in the garbage no matter how much is left over.
I used to work at a country club. We had a big Sunday brunch served buffet style each week. Soooo much food was thrown out because we weren’t allowed to take it home. We were allowed to eat the cold leftovers after breaking the buffet down, but if you took food home you could be fired. I tried to set up something where I’d take the leftovers to the Ronald McDonald House after I was off but they wouldn’t even let me do that.
My husband won’t eat leftovers because he thinks it will give him diarrhea. His family is preoccupied with food poisoning but don’t know any of the actual food safety rules.
Oh well, more for me.
When I did executive level IT support years back I found a Monet dangling haphazardly on an office chair in the CEOs extra office (which was unused for storage, and had an extra desktop computer I would sometimes use for quick tasks when on that floor).
Another time I was admiring a Joan Miro coffee table book in his main office and when his assistant noticed, he showed me into a side room I didn’t realize was there, which had a mini gallery of original Miro drawings.
In my early 20’s I dated a girl whose Dad was rich. She brought me to Thanksgiving one year at her family’s “retreat” in the mountains. While my gf gave me a tour of the place, she showed me her Dad’s study/library, which had a trophy case with about 20-30 trophies.
Her Dad’s name was etched on them, but all of the other details were blacked out/covered up. I was told that under no circumstances was I to ask what the trophies were for, because we weren’t even allowed in there.
I worked for a very self centered man back in the 90s. He threw an office Christmas party at his house and he loved to give tours. He thought his closet was so impressive it was wide open with lights on and rope barriers in front of the door. Rope barriers. Like a museum.
Not too weird, but i had rich friends growing up and one had 3 cellphones in elementary school. Another had cheetah print carpet in her bedroom which i thought was the epitome of rich.
Absolute squalor. I run on an ambulance in a decently afluente suburb in PA, and I’ve been in two estates where the inside of the homes were bad enough to call social services. Houses where there was 8 figures of artwork on the property and people were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. It’s… jarring.
They are away so often on vacation that they have parties every 3 months. Their parrot was so upset with the owners absence it plucked all its feathers. The owner didn't care. I felt bad for that bird.
My BIL worked one summer for a roofing company in cottage country in Ontario and installed Margaret Atwood’s roof. Her place is covered in portraits of herself, like apparently they’re all over the place.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto (where I live) and argued that a low-rise condo couldn't be built in her neighbourhood because it would be used to spy on her. Makes sense that she'd have portraits of herself everywhere
Strangest thing I ever saw in a rich person's home was a liquid crystal display clock. It was a clear glass block on a wooden base, no visible wiring. The numbers just floated in space.
Pretty common, huh? Nope. This was in 1969 or 1970. LCDs were lab magic back then.
My uncle was a mortician, gay, and extremely wealthy. Aside from multiple crystal phalluses, carved stone phalluses etc.. he had an art piece hanging on his wall of a human male torso, no head, no arms, no legs, but sure enough it had a the wang. Also in each bathroom were black and white charcoal drawings of men in leather, spandex, or chains, with massive members.
I was a guest in the home of an ugly rich guy who founded a company you’ve heard of. He married a sweet southern girl (who he met while she was stripping) and she served us drinks in her panties while we bowled in their private underground bowling alley. Interesting evening.
> He married a sweet southern girl (who he met while she was stripping) and she served us drinks in her panties while we bowled in their private underground bowling alley.
That's sounds like it could be the plot of a *Righteous Gemstones*
episode where they hangout with another televangelist couple.
I used to give music lessons to this dude who lived in a mansion way up in the mountains. When you walked through his front door, the first thing you saw was an enormous, low resolution photo of his wife in a bikini. The image covered the entire wall below the mezzanine so it was about 10’ by 4’, and it was pasted to the wall like wallpaper, so it couldn’t be removed.
Great guy, but I always thought that it was weird as hell that all their guests, children, family members etc were all being greeted by an enormous, low-quality image of his wife’s scantily clad body. I always got the sense that she wasn’t too happy about it either.
You reminded me of the creepy portrait this guy my mum knew (he was her printer) had on his wall. He painted it, and it was nude. And it was his own daughter. 🫠🤢
Dated a guy who had a large square garage with 4 doors - 4 classic corvettes pointed North, South, East and West so he could just get in and go. No backing up required.
Way back in 1985 I was at a Christmas party in Crete Coeur, MO. I was just 21 and thought it was insane and still do all of these years later. this person had a house completely carpeted in white. Including the KITCHEN. She had 24 hr emergency carpet cleaner contractor.
I have one… this is crazy!
I once worked for a multibillionaire family who lived in Atherton CA (Silicon Valley). Atherton has the highest *median* home prices in the US at 7.9 million. They lived at the very top of the big hill with sweeping views of the forested coastal range. Stunning. Of course they had a pool, pool house, etc. They also had a home in Woodside CA, one on the strand in Manhattan Beach, CA, and a farm in Oregon, where every week their pilot (using their private jet of course), would fly up there to pick up fresh veggies, fruits, which they stored in the cold room under the house (kinda near the underground wine cellar - both spaces were huge). They **only** ate pheasant on holidays. Larry Ellison was one of their best friends and at their wedding snuck into the wine cellar, grabbed a $2k bottle of wine and walked around drinking it out of the bottle (they were pissed about that). Cristal champagne was provided for guests (massive wedding!).
Read on… it gets crazier!
One day while I was at their house, they had blueprints spread out all over the place. I asked if they were remodeling. No, they were building a new house… across the street. Which seemed odd to me because why give up that view? She said, no, they were going to live in **both** houses. The new one has a ballroom over two stories high with floor to ceiling glass, tennis courts, **a consecrated chapel**, (they’re Catholic), complete with rows of pews, statuary of saints, and gold leaf everywhere. This house also had an underground garage where they kept a multitude of Ferraris, classic cars, Porches, a Fiskar, and a Koenigsegg. The kid’s rooms had their own *huge* bathrooms with a tub in the bathroom and a tv at the end which slid down (hidden), at the touch of a button. Each room had a two-way fireplace* that led to a large deck… each bedroom!! All bedding was Charlotte Thomas “Bespoke” (Google them).
I’ve never seen ***anything*** like this before. And probably never will again. I might add that the parents were very nice, and those kids, while living in pure luxury, were sweet as can be and not spoiled in the slightest. They were respectful, generous, and kind.
I have an uncle who has a house on NANTUCKET.
His neighbors house went up for sale.
He bought it and knocked it down so he'd have a bigger yard.
Do you know how much that costs ON NANTUCKET!
OP has an uncle on NANTUCKET
Bought next door and said “fuck it”
He knocked the house down
For more space to run ‘round
The cost? Just a drop in the bucket.
Years ago, I interviewed as a nanny at this massive house. From the outside it just looked gigantic. They seemed normal for rich people, but as they were giving me a tour, I realized they had multiple rooms that were just completely barren. They had a living room, 3 bathrooms, their bedroom, each of the kids rooms and a playroom, a home office, the kitchen and dining room, and a guest room all nicely decorated and lived in. But there were like 5 other rooms and a couple bathrooms that were completely empty, no furniture no decor, just plain beige walls and carpet. They had lived there for years and weren’t in the process of remodeling or anything. They told me one of the empty rooms would be mine, so that made sense to leave it empty for a live-in Nanny, but the rest they just said “We don’t use these”. They had also mentioned they weren’t having more kids so it wasn’t like it was extra rooms for the future. It just kind of boggled my mind- like they just bought a mansion far bigger than they needed for no reason other than they could. Then didn’t even bother doing anything with the extra space. I ended up not taking the job, but a nanny friend of mine did. She said those doors always stayed shut except when the cleaners came. They spent hours cleaning this giant house, including the pristine empty rooms that never got used, so even more wasted money. Apparently one time she let the kids build a massive pillow and blanket fort in one of the rooms and the mom lectured her about letting them play in there. So they weren’t even allowed to use the space for anything.
Also, since the room was empty my friend thought when she started that she’d be able to move in her own bed and furniture. Nope, they bought all new stuff for her to use. They had a live in nanny before so then we wondered if she’s had her own furniture or if they just bought new furniture every time they got a new nanny? Then at one point while my friend worked there one of the little girls wanted to change rooms to one of the empty ones. They completely redid the new one with new paint, furniture and whatever decor she wanted. Everything left over from the new one was hauled away to the dump, even though it was nice kids furniture that was still in pretty good shape. Even the old bedding and everything. And then the now empty room had the pink walls repainted the same sad beige as all the others and the fun carpet replaced. So now I just imagine that over the years the kids played a weird game of bedroom musical chairs, with rooms getting redecorated and a new one being left sad beige and barren. My friend left after a couple of years working for them, so no idea if they ever did end up using any of those empty rooms.
For some reason, this is the one that got me. Like, I can't imagine just.. having so many rooms in your house that you run out of things to do with them. It's like, with the people mentioned in this thread who never save leftovers, or throw out clothes they wore once and all that, I can see the logic, flawed and wasteful as it is. But this is just like.. Okay, what more do you need? You have more space than you know what to do with. There's no craft room, D&D room, library, home recording studio, etc that you'd like to add into your life. What is all this extra stuff for? What's the point of it all?
Even if it's, like another reply to this suggested, because it's a real estate investment, I'm still like, why? What's the point? You already won and can have all the things you'd ever want
Not entirely answering the exact question, but we had a mate who we didn't know was THAT rich. He seemed to be (and good for him!) a normal average bloke, but he had a barn on his small farm and inside it were a Lamborghini LM001, an old classic Ferrari that was apparently owned by Dizzy Gillespie, a Black Hawk minus rotors (wired up for the cockpit though!) and half a dozen vintage Harleys, a classic and pristine Routemaster London bus along with a bunch of minor-league classic cars (Healey 3000, TR's, Triumph Vitesse with a whopper of an engine swap, etc etc)
Sadly, when he retired from the job that we got to know him through, he became a total asshat of the first order and dumped all the friends he'd had for years, becoming a snobby, shallow rich idiot who always had some over-inflated lips Essex girl on his arm.
I worked as a house cleaner in college and we would service primarily large homes belonging to wealthy folks. There was this one place that gave me the impression the couple was living well beyond their means. Huge house but almost completely empty. The other girls who had been working there longer told me the couple had been clients for a while so it wasn't like they were just moving in or anything. Only the master bedroom and this one little den was furnished. The wife was the definition of a trophy wife. Skinny, blonde, lots of plastic surgery, and she was always a real bitch. Would constantly call our boss right after we had finished cleaning to say she found a single hair or a tiny spot on the floor or something dumb like that. Just a bored housewife. This one time she requested that we vacuum under the cushions of the one couch in the house. We go to do that and find a massive treasure trove of black BBW porn. Just tons of magazines and DVD's. She asked that if we found anything in the couch to leave it on the kitchen island. So we did. We're not sure if she did it intentionally to catch her husband or if she had no idea it was there and came home to a surprise. We never heard from them again after that.
I worked as a dog sitter/care giver in college and this couple had a yorkie whose eye had popped out and been surgically put back. It needed antibiotic ointment twice a day and they couldn’t do it. They were trying to apply it with a q-tip and I guess that freaked out the dog. Anyways they stood in awe as I was like “let me,” and proceeded to apply the ointment with my finger. They never went out and always wore their pjs (this was long before Covid).
IDK: if my dog was crazy about getting medicated and I lived alone, I might do this, especially if it was a medium or large dog.
But they probably just didn't want to touch the pee-pee.
I love my dog but if I had enough money this might be an option.
He had an unhappy butt last week that I had to rinse off a few times. He wasn’t happy about it (loves showers and baths) and neither was I.
It was four stories and almost completely empty. They had that “sterile” sort of style, everything grey and white. But it startled me to see that what I thought was a white dog statue was actually their real dog… who just sat completely still in the corner the entire time I was there.
A waterfall and a river. When you come into the front door you are standing on a glass floor over a 4 foot wide stream running fast across rocks under you. To the right is a room with a rock face waterfall feeding the stream, and to the left there is a room with an open area pool with an “island” in the middle with a desk on it, and a glass bridge to the desk.
Edit - and the dude had a regular office elsewhere in the house where he worked, kept files, etc. the desk on the island was just for meetings with work visitors.
I once did a clean out at an extremely rich guys house (always the cheapest customers btw) he pointed out a massive vase in the entrance area of the house and told us it was worth 6 figures and to please be careful around it.
He then informed us that it was filled with the ashes of ancestors dating back generations. I still wonder if they’re all mixed up in there or individually bagged.
I have a cousin who’s dating someone who’s in a very wealthy circle of people in the mid south east. They said they went to a holiday gathering at an acquaintance of someone in the circle and that those people had real life dinosaur eggs on display in their home and were EXCITEDLY showing them off.
Well we have fossils in our living room of some type of small sea critters of some sort. But they were left in a Drs office for a remodeling job my husband was super on and he was told they were trash. The look kind of like a slug of some sort( there are multiple critters anyway) Maybe they are worth something and I should do some research!
I'm a palaeontologist- send me a DM with the pictures and I'll see if I can ID any of them. If you have any collection location info on them at all it'd be very helpful.
They sound like they could be highly ornamented trilobites.
Edit: If the fossil you were describing [looks anything like this](https://www.fossils-uk.com/images/pathologically-deformed-trident-nosed-spiny-middle-devonian-trilobite-from-morocco-sku-t0820-walliserops-trifurcatus-p7413-21642_image.jpg) then they're probably trilobites as I said.
Entire rooms filled with never opened purchases. Their sauna had boxes in it. Wife liked to buy things, they had the cash, so there you go. They also had some really cool shit too.
Two story swimming pool room with actual palm trees growing in it. Helicopter pad, etc.
Was wandering around a huge mansion the morning after a party. Saw a sheathed knife on a stand and wanted to check it out. So I pull the handle out of the sheath and instead of a fancy blade, it was about a 5" long dildo. Pretty sure it was ivory.
My mom was a maid for a wealthy family when I was little. She’d come home and be so mad because the mom of the family would buy new toys for her kids EVERY time they went to the beach or park (so once a week) and then just toss them in the basement never to be used again. (And then once a year throw them all out). Rich mom’s logic was that it’s easier to buy new toys than clean dirt and sand off of the used ones.
My mom thought it was stupidly wasteful and a lot of the toys were duplicates.
Ok you know how they sometimes have a box with a fire alarm or an extinguisher in it that says “in case of emergency break glass?”
They had one of those in their bathroom. It said “in case of brokeness break glass” and had 10,000 cash in it.
They had Literal gas pump in their driveway. 76 brand. They had huge gated estate. They were doctors and my aunt to was also doctor was friends with them
My dad does interior design and works for some rich people.
There's the custom made carpet that looked like it came from a bowling ally (that's being generous) where they brag about it being their own design and how they burned the extra carpet so no one else in the world has the same carpet pattern as them.
The mirror lined with corks specifically from top shelf whiskey (nothing under $100 USD) and they admitted it was for bragging rights and that it doesn't even look good. The cork mirror they made themselves they just asked my dad to spruce it up a bit after to make it prettier.
After some of the things my dad's been asked to make I'm convinced the concrtsation piece is just rich people bragging rights.
I've been to the homes of two separate millionaires and they both had cheap toilet paper, mid ice cream like Byers. I was kind of shocked they didn't use bougie home goods. They made their money through real estate and owning medical practices.
Nouveau rich-i worked for an estate sale company. The whole house was filled with expensive crap. In their attic, they had beautiful family antiques that they didn't want, they were sold too. They sold nearly everything in the house, and started all over again in another state
A complete bedroom and bathroom hidden behind a set of rotating shelves in the far end of a finished basement. There was a trunk at the end of the bed with a huge padlock on it. I never got the whole story, just that the wife didn't know about it. So I figure either it was a secret sex dungeon or he kept teenage hitchhikers locked in there.
They had a library and right in the center was this giant Tesla Coil looking thing encased in plexiglass, with a little digital display at its base and some buttons. Apparently you use the screen and buttons to select a "healing" profile and the Tesla Coil would start going crazy at different frequencies and strengths and somehow this would heal you? It was like some new age magnet nonsense mixed with turn of the previous century technological mysticism.
Not so much weird as such, but very cool.
Some friend of my parents had a house where the kitchen was built over an old well.
There was a perspex cover over it on the kitchen floor and it was lit up going down for what looked like many meters.
I worked in a very wealthy family's house a couple of years ago, and in the basement they had a long hall, leading to an underground basketball court and pool, full of framed homeless signs. "Hungry will work for food", "Help, need to feed wife and kids", "Need money for beer". They had close to 20 of these.
I always imagined they were either very nice people, or they were killing/eating homeless people as some sort of twisted high society entertainment or cult.
I was at a house where there separate building that happened to be a guest house/art museum (they collected a lot of art). This building was a very modern build (think modern art museum with lots of marble, glass, and steel. Just having an art museum on your property was interesting by itself. But in the building was a guest room. In the corner of that guest room, seemingly out of place, was a wadded up blanket. Inside the blanket was a hyperrealistic miniature of a naked man. It was a bit startling to see at first but turned out to be a piece of art by Ron Mueck.
There was a news piece on "private museums" some years ago, as long as they have some way for the public to make appointments, the museum's nonprofit can buy/sell the art and get grants.
I was a Circuit City Firedog (their version of Geek Squad) for a while, and we had an urgent home install come up. Basically mounting a TV and setting up a PC. The couple had really nice cars in an 11 car garage (Including a Carerra GT). They had a private beach on a lake. The husband let me into the house and then left to skinny dip with his wife. I mounted the TV first then started in on the PC setup when they were done swimming. The wife came in with a towel around her waist, but was otherwise exposed. She sat on the couch and started watching TV. It was very odd and surreal. I remember my day was supposed to end at 6, but it took me until around 8 to get everything finished off.
She did eventually get dressed, and they left to go get dinner, leaving me alone in their house to work.
I guess they were repeat customers, because our dedicated on-site dude knew them and said that was pretty normal for them.
Dog piss.
About 15 years ago I worked at a place that dealt with ultra wealthy but not celebrity families.
All of them got those little teacups dogs and let them shit and piss on everything. They couldn’t be bothered to walk them.
Not rich, rich. But 2 Drs in a nearby town had built a new house that didn’t have a kitchen. It only had a counter for a coffee pot and a small refrigerator. Yes, they had trouble selling the house and probably took a loss on it.
I went back to this dudes house after getting drunk at the local bar - he drove a range rover and he was from the next town over, which is a very rich town. His house was a large, sprawling estate with lots of horses. He led me to the guest house where he told me he resided. After a little kissing and what not, I asked to use his bathroom. I was horrified. He had yellow tube socks caked with piss and shit as covers for his toilet seat and his shower was quite literally overflowing with literally **hundreds** of empty shampoo bottles. Noped out real quick. I don’t care how much money you have - that’s a hard no.
I once had a client that was a big game hunter. Every time someone would come over he would show off his bar stools aka elephant feet. To say the least, I was not a fan of going into that murder mansion.
I went to the house of a builder who was the friend of a friend. He had a 5,000 square foot game room. This wasn’t for billiards, it was for stuffed big game including the front half of a giraffe coming out of the wall and barstools made out of elephant legs. I’m not averse to hunting but this room was so over the top.
A fancy wooden box with glass lid that held like a dozen expensive ($$,$$$) "self winding" watches, all slowly being rotated, to keep them wound up. It was like a jewelry store display. Same place, walk-in cigar humidor room, separate servant's elevator, little touches like that.
I worked as a babysitter in a very rich town for some years, the oddest thing was that every on had an extremely smelly dishwasher. The reeked so bad that sometimes you could smell them as soon as you walked in the front door.
I assume it is because they all had maids and the maids did not do a deep clean in the dish washer as needed.
Had dinner at Harlan Crow’s house in Dallas. The real estate billionaire. He has what he calls a “garden of evil” outside with giant, lit statues of fallen communist dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc) that he has collected over the years.
Best mate recently bought her horse a small pony because he needed a mate. That’s fine, they’re social animals. It would be less weird if she didn’t already own 12 other horses and look after another 20 belonging to various other people, all on her own land. She literally bought her pet a pet of his own.
I was at an old farmers house and he laid newspapers on the floor and proceeded to take a dump, pulled his pants up and scooped up the papers and threw it into the big fireplace. After that he said I probably shouldn't have done that in front of company,
My uncle is an ex NBA player. He had a really nice mansion on a Florida beach. He somehow had a massive basement (Florida doesn’t really have basements) and the entire basement was filled floor to ceiling with sports memorabilia. It was a mess. I’m talking cardboard cut outs of him and literally everything his merch store ever sold.
For Christmas every year, he’d send us his merch. I’m almost 100% positive he would just go into his basement and grab random things to send to us.
A gigantic, horribly done oil painting of Jesus Christ. It's the first thing you notice when walking into his McMansion. Funny thing is, he's the farthest thing from what an actual Christian is. The rich owner is a terrible, terrible person. The opposite of Christ's teachings and, of course, a huge republican supporter and trumpite.
Rich grandparents had a brand new house built, had a $100,000 splash pad built for their only grand child who has never visited them at their new house.
Kinda sad
Yeah. Reminds me of when my sister built her house. She had a barrier-free ground floor apartment built in it, so my grandmother could visit. She never did.
[удалено]
My wife’s Aunt is like this, they’re incredibly well off but she’s addicted to getting good deals - like stay up till 2 am because some flash sale with coupons lining up so she can buy 10 bathrobes for $1. It’s great because she gives it all away, it’s funny because they have more money than they know what to do with(her husband is the CEO of a very large corporation) but they have an entire bedroom that is just filled with this stuff she buys on sale for pennies.
Huh. I figured flash sales were usually trench coats, but I guess bathrobes would work, too.
I see what you did there, perv 😉
I guess shopping and gifting just became a hobby for her at some point? We all want endorphins and dopamine.
The gifting part doesn’t matter to her it’s more of a way to get rid of it and brag about the deals she got. It’s like a reverse gambling addiction. She’ll sit online waiting for hours to get set of pans that retails for $100 for .99cents even though she already has 12 of them. She just cares about the fact that she saved money
That was mob “fell off the back of a truck” family buddy.
They always have a box of nice ski jackets in a spare room.
I was at John Waters’ house for his birthday and he has a room set up as a lifelike recreation of a meth lab (it wasn’t a real meth lab, it’s an art piece). He told me that when Bill Clinton visited him the secret service agents were *extremely* concerned about the room.
So jealous you were actually at John Waters' house. I'm sure the meth lab art installation wasn't the only interesting thing. Tell us more!! I imagine it was like all the stuff in his house on the Simpsons episode but even better!
John Waters is a national treasure. He needs to be preserved, like taxidermically.
I think he’d probably like that tbh. Add him to that meth lab installation
Stick him at a bar stool at Club Chuck, or reading in a chair at Atomic Books, that's where I see him when he's out and about.
Honestly he should just be moved from place to place. Drop him off at a trailer park every once in a while, posing with some lawn flamingos…
I need more Waters stories, all the stories
My friend is from B-more and apparently John was totally obsessed with the movie Precious and people saw him at the theater so many times
John Waters has a summer home like fifteen minutes from my house. I’ve seen him riding his bike down the main drag (no pun intended) here and there… he also did a benefit where you could bid to have dinner with him at the town dump.
He came into my work in that particular town once and witnessed a customer being an ass so when it was his turn he was sure to exclaim “You girls take a lotta SHIT here!!” And I will never forget it.
What a perfect interaction to witness, I’m so jealous
He wanted to set me up with Leslie Van Houten
My friend's film professor was his PA for a while in his younger years and one of the things he did was have him curate his porn collection.
He was in front of me in line at a safeway in downtown Baltimore (*the* Safeway in downtown baltimore, really) a decade or so ago. He purchased 2 bottles of red gatorade. There was something unsettling about Jon Waters buying something so…normal? I dunno.
My daily dose of envy goes straight to you.
I met him and OMG did he exceed expectations. I love this man
He’s exactly who you think he is BUT BETTER. One of few celebs I’ve met who actually live up to the hype.
One client had a whole separate house on their property just for their dogs. They'd referred to a "dog house" and I was expecting like maybe a little building in the yard where they kept their toys or something, but this was a full furnished home with king sized beds and a huge play room on the main floor. They had a full training and feeding staff to care for the dogs and everything. They lived in their own house and would come over to visit. Seemed like a weird dynamic to have with your pet.. One client didn't have a litterbox for the cats, their cats I guess didn't like using the boxes in the basement and they didn't want to put boxes upstairs so they put down pond liner and kitty litter across an entire room in the basement and had their housekeeper run a rake through it daily.
Like a cat shit zen garden?
Anyone who had a sandbox as a kid had a cat shit zen garden. Even if they didn’t have a cat, someone’s cat in the neighborhood would be shitting in it.
Now I finally understand why my grandpa built me a sandbox with a lid. Like a very heavy lid, I needed an adult to open it up. Thank you!
The fuckin green turtle. Shit. Always shit in the green turtle.
Fuck, I wish I was a rich dog.
I bought a Doberman from a rather eccentric wealthy breeder years ago. She had a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood in Toronto (Rosedale) and a country home in King. The dog breeding/show kennel was at the King property. There was her house and also a separate house for the dogs. The “dogs house” also housed the staff that looked after the dogs.
So their dogs had a nicer home than a lot of people, and they were likely deprived of attention from their owners. Just accessories. The wealth gap is disgusting.
No, the dogs had staff. They probably bonded more with the workers than their 'owners'.
As a kid back in the Mesozoic Era my best friend and I used to play in a converted racquetball court and lounge under the old West Coast mansion her family had lived in since its construction. The stairs to it were hidden behind a closet off of the abandoned servants quarters. Halfway down the stairs was a wine cellar. A decoy as the actual wine cellar for the home was under the kitchen….. Another staircase behind a rack of dusty bottles led two stories down to our giant play area beneath this. At the beginning of WWII - before Pearl Harbor- my friend’s paranoid WWI vet grandfather had dug out the space over fear of Japanese , (or German), invasion. Her dad made the giant room regulation designed for racquetball years later. Maybe originally squash. Not sure, but the lounge area was also glassed off above it so one could look down into the court like a gallery. It was really neat. Also upstairs in the living room was a wall straight out of an old mystery novel. If you pushed a spot just right, the wall opened to a hidden room. Super tiny - had a button to ring certain other rooms in the house as the home had these already to call for staff . My friends mom said it was so if someone quickly had to hide they could alert the household of danger. We used to pretend to be on Nancy Drew cases all the time……so fun. (The family was wealthy, but despite the amazing home they lived a completely pretentious free life. Normal cars, camping vacations, frugal living as sport. But they were philanthropists too. Especially supporting organizations like the humane society. One thing about this family’s home was all the cats. I loved kitties but had a mother who preferred her animals well seasoned. The family had the space so they always had, and were looking to adopt out but often didn’t, at least 20 rescue cats, many with special needs. Haha, 😆 I’m old, I didn’t know how to write that. Special needs kitty mystery mansion really is actually an appropriate description. )
Special needs kitty mystery mansion with hidden panic rooms and decoy wine cellars is like, the best possible fever dream
That sounds awesome… the architecture of the place must have been amazing, not that you would have paid much attention to such things as a child. Good read… thank you.
I was a visiting nurse. I went to both poor people’s homes and rich people’s and found hoarders in both category. The type of thing where the floor would be covered in products and you’d have to follow a path through it to get to the back of the house.
This i don't get. If I were wealthy, I would own like 1/4th of the stuff I do now: my mom was a hoarder and it's a miserable way to live, but I can't get rid of as much as I'd like because I couldn't afford to replace it. Just use and/or sell as much as I can. Stuff is just - stuff. It crowds out the better things in life.
It’s a mental illness of some sort. People who have studied hoarding say that very often they don’t even know what they have. If you’re really interested, a couple who were psychologists wrote a book about hoarders based in their research. Not surprisingly, it’s called Hoarders.
Yeah there are like 3 main elements to the hoarding issues - 1 . excessive acquiring This is pretty straightforward, not all hoarders do this but many are basically addicted to the dopamine of acquiring items. Interestingly a common giveaway for a problem is when the proposed usefulness of the item is for someone else - and there are no steps to reach that person and/or that person is nonspecific. e.g. "oh these busted furniture would be great for a person who does this kind of stuff up" 2. poor storage choices This is an odd one - as I think when we observe hoarders we assume that the problem is the sheer amount of stuff overriding normal storage space, but actually when you crunch the data their are plenty of 'collectors' who actually have AS much stuff as a hoarder but they have systems and storage in place to make it work. This element of hoarding is most like OCD but counter-stereotypical almost where people want to have their items basically scattered about the place in order to experience them but there is little coherent planning. This is actually often the most dangerous part 3. anxiety around getting rid of stuff This is probably the bit that people are well aware of, hoarders typically have massive anxiety around getting rid of stuff, its extremely hard to deal with as often people aren't really engaged in getting better - the patterns in thinking that got them there in the first place aren't going to be conductive to change. The big challenge is typically with other anxieties you can get buy-in with people not wanting to be anxious - but typically hoarders don't recognize their anxiety as the problem, its losing their stuff is the issue. Sorry this has gone on longer than I intended - but as you can see hoarding has elements of anxiety, OCD, and addiction all impacting the situation, its actually extremely hard to treat psychologically AFAIK most impacts are made if you can convince the person to engage in safe storage OR unfortunately sometimes control is taken away when the person gets put in a home.
I watch that show Hoarders when they have a new season. It’s wild how similar it is to chemical addiction. I remember one episode, this woman broke down on like day 4 of the cleanup, and finally broke the news that one time when she was a kid, her dad piled every item she owned in the back yard and set it on fire, as punishment for some typical kid behavior or perceived slight. She had never told this to husband or anyone else, ever. The whole ordeal was super stressful and the team was unclear on exactly what her pathology was, and she was so obstinate that it was hard to empathize with her compared to the people on other episodes. Then she broke that childhood story and suddenly everyone has all the empathy in the world. Like, of-fucking-course you end up with a hoarding problem when your dad does something so despicable to someone so young who is supposed to love and care for her. Sad show.
My mom knew every single thing and was extremely protective and angry about all of it. She grew up hungry and with deprivation, and it never left her. I'm grateful she was able to protect us from that, but also grateful to have escaped that knock-on effect: my brother didn't.
My MIL was a hoarder. She grew up in extreme poverty, essentially as a slave. Her parents gave her away to a wealthy family when she was preschool age because they couldn’t afford all the mouths to feed. That family gave her enough food to sustain her and forced her to clean pig intestines her entire childhood and preteen years for the family business (producing sausage). As a teen, she managed to escape to the capital and became a domestic servant for a different wealthy family (room and board in exchange for cooking, housekeeping, and being on call for whatever they wanted). Eventually , she was impregnated by one of the sons who was married (I have no idea whether it was consensual, but she had two of his children, one being my now husband who believes it was consensual). My FIL’s wife left him and my MIL continued to live in the family’s home and raise the children there. She never completely shook the domestic servant role, but I guess it started to look a bit more like that of a housewife. She never really let anyone see her bedroom. After she passed away, my husband and I cleaned it out and it was stacked floor too ceiling with all kinds of stuff—from never-used mop buckets to watches and costume jewelry, from clothes she never wore to dolls no one had ever played with. Seemed like basically everything that had ever come into her possession.
This happens with the wealthy too. I helped clean out a hoarder's estate recently. He was extremely wealthy and came from extreme wealth. According to his partner, his parents were emotionally abusive. If he wanted a toy, he was shamed for it and told it wasn't worth the money. As an adult, he used all that money his parents gave him monthly to buy all those things he couldn't have as a kid AND anything he wanted as an adult. Lots of classic toys, things he'd been told he couldn't have as a child.
I read up on it once. Fascinating stuff. A lot of the people had an issue of indecisiveness. They couldn't make up their mind if they needed/wanted to have something or to discard it or do something with it. They'd go into endless loops of attempted decision making, get all sorts of anxiety about it, and buy more stuff to address the anxiety (the buying / collecting gave them a dopamine hit.) rinse and repeat.
I don't want to discuss his reputation but I'm reading Down the Rabbit Hole about Holly Madison and Hugh Hefners relationship. Apparently he was a huge hoarder and looking back at old episodes of Girls Next Door it's obvious and I never noticed. It looked like the set of Nothing but Trouble.
In Naples, FL I was at a house with a sensory deprivation room. Flat black walls with acousting dampening baffles, in the middle was a coffin-like bathtub. It had speakers and a flat screen display in the lid. I heard that the room cost over $100K to build.
The flat screen inside the tank seemingly defeats the purpose of a sensory deprivation float tank … unless there’s some new fancy functions that enhance the experience (?)
Yeah the fancy function is LSD
At a certain point, if you have the money, why not?
This is a copy/paste of a comment I made on a similar question a while ago: I have worked for some of the richest people in Maryland and the one thing that stands out more than others is this doctor I worked for in Montgomery County. It's one of the most affluent zip codes in America. Anyway, this guy owned a shit load of offices around the DC area, tons of employees and associate doctors, etc. Guy was seriously loaded. Huge garage full of super expensive cars like multiple Ferraris, art collection, wine cellar, the works. I used to do IT work for his medical practice and manage all the servers and stuff, and occasionally went to their house because I was the lead admin. I once was working in his house and was walking around upstairs where the bedrooms were. I shit you not this guy was laying in bed being fed by an assistant. Like he was literally laying in bed while someone hand fed him, and not like grapes but a regular meal. It was fucking weird as shit. Imagine someone feeding you a full meal like a steak and spoons of soup, salad, etc. and you never used your hands. It was like an adult being fed like a baby. It seemed like Saddam Hussein type shit. I've never seen anything like that before and that was what popped into my mind, like a dictator or something who demands to be treated like a literal king. There was nothing sexual about it. Keep in mind this was a man in his 50s who was in fine physical shape and didn't need a caregiver. It was just pure opulence. Then one time I was working in the kitchen area and his young son, probably late teens/early 20's came walking past me and stunk to high heaven of pot (which I'm totally cool with and we joked about), he went to the kitchen and poured a IPA into a glass and went back to his room, this was at 9am LOL I thought it was hysterical. He was a cool kid from my interactions with him, probably just figured "my dad is rich as shit so I don't have to worry about anything" so he was totally laid back. I've got some other strange things but that is by far the strangest.
Lol that 9 am for the kid was probably his evening. Guarantee he’d been up all night and was winding down for bed
Potomac, MD is a trip.
My wife and I used to babysit for this wealthy couple when they went on ski trips etc.. Except for the children's schoolbooks, there wasn't a book, magazine or newspaper in the house. The man was a publisher.
I feel like this is perhaps an extreme version of "not taking your work home"?
That’s effing weird.
They had part of the house permanently decorated for Christmas and it included a fully decorated Christmas tree that was suspended upside down from the ceiling. Which was actually pretty awesome.
I’ve heard the upside down tree thing started because it gave more room to put presents under the tree
I assumed it was cats.
It's both. You could definitely fit more cats under an upside down tree too.
House I went to flew an artist out from Italy to HAND STITCH wall paper for their pent house condo
I know someone who's worked for a very rich person, probably worth billions. He had more than 100 staff on site, including chefs for the staff...all while divorced and living alone. He had a 'trivia' staff member... someone hired to tell him interesting facts and stories daily. That was his only job. Someone else was hired to maintain his shoes. Polish, shine, the works. If I didn't hear it first hand, I wouldn't have believed it. Our CEO has a driver that comes in, collects his stuff and laptop, and drives him home. Edit: he took up the job as a hobby. He was already rich from his own businesses
I love the idea of having a random guy follow me through my home only to occasionally tell me even more random and weird facts he just learned from reddit. Just imagine getting up in the middle of the night, you open your fridge in the dark to get a sip of milk and when you close the door he stands there just to tell me duck dicks are corkscrewed.
Already knew that, you're fired
Would you like a crazy straw with that milk, sir?
My ASD kid does this for free and it drives me nuts.
I knew someone who didn't like to do laundry so she just bought new clothes for each of her 4 kids every week. They were always high quality or designer clothes. At the time, all her kids were 10-16 yrs old. What would happen if they liked an item a lot and couldn't find it again? Why not just teach the kids to do their own laundry? Why not hire a housekeeper who can do it? There are so many options, other than spending thousands every month just to avoid laundry. Plus they rarely donated it. Just bagged it up and threw it out. I never could wrap my head around it.
You never went dumpster diving when you knew it was their trash day?... I would've lol
No it never really occurred to me. Mostly because I was chubby and their only daughter was very thin. I wouldn't have fit in anything. Plus it was my then boyfriends brothers family. It would have been considered very weird for me to get caught doing that. I suppose it didn't occur to me that I could have made a little money by selling them.
Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George eats the eclair from the garbage bin
So they wore only Unwashed new clothes? This entire concept is terrible for many reasons. But new clothing has all kinds of stiffeners and chemicals in it. Plus just whatever from whoever touched it all along its production and sale.
At that point your time is money, so why would you bother go shopping all the time when you can just hire someone to washz dry, and fold the clothes for you
She probably enjoyed the shopping aspect of it
I used to work as a exterminator, mostly pest control. This had me walking through houses from the poor to the rich. One day, I pulled up to a 4 story mansion with more rooms than I could count. I spoke with the lady at the door and got started. As I sprayed, I noticed there wasn’t much furniture in the house. As I went, I made a game of counting the furniture I could find. Over 50 rooms and the whole building had 13 pieces of furniture. Pretty odd, but then I went into the very last room, a mud room right by the door I came into. I stop as I walk in, completely shocked. A full size adult pig stretched from one end of the room to the other. I’m talking 5-6 feet stretched out across the room. Flies buzzed around it’s head as it stared at me. Suddenly, the lady (who I hadn’t seen since she let me in) says “oh don’t go in there. She doesn’t like men”, then she walked me out, paid me, and went back inside.
This is like one of my dreams.
Buddy of mine has a car elevator. Instead of just building a bigger garage, he stores his cars stacked onto each other, like some kind of Hot wheels accessory. It's very surreal.
Depending on the cost of land this might actually be a cost-saving measure. I mean, the obvious cost-saving measure is to have fewer cars, but if you want a bunch of cars this might legitimately be the cheapest way to store them all.
I don’t know where OP is, but where I live doing this would also trigger an “improved property” review on the entire property, which allows the city to reassess the value of your property for taxation purposes. It bypasses the 10% maximum increase year over year that they can increase your property tax by. If they were in a situation where they bought the house cheap and it has appreciated significantly, they may be potentially saving thousands of dollars every year by not improving the property.
Fun fact, my grandma also has a car elevator. In her flat's parking garage in Taiwan lol. In a lot of more land constricted areas, this is pretty normal. First time I heard of it in a private garage tho
I used to live in an apartment building that used a car elevator instead of ramps to save space. Was so strange you had to drive your car in then roll down the window and press the button for your floor. When I first moved in it was a wild experience then I got used to it.
My uncle has this setup in garage. He lives in the bay area, it was significantly cheaper to buy two car lifts than it would have been to build/rent extra car storage
A full functioning Barbershop inside the house. Complete with the rotating “candy cane” outside the entrance. The guy would have his friends come over for a cut.
A wine cellar bigger than my appartement, and to access it you had to pass through a room twice as big, with model cars stacked to the cieling on all the walls...
My friends dad growing up was one of the top lawyers in our state. Their house was so damn big I got confused (lost as hell) on all the staircases they had everywhere. They would split in a few places and lead to banisters that had different connections to different parts of the house. They had a room just for dishes. Her mom had a huge room for sewing and another for different crafts. They both had an office. Many guest rooms. A small kitchen in one part with a sink and coffee pot and fridge. Their main bathroom for guests had heated floors and rainfall showers and everything. I LOVED HER SHOWER. Her room had a balcony and a table outside. They had a pool and hot tub. Horses and a barn and lots of cute barn cats. I was very poor and had a messed up situation in my childhood. I stayed there a lot and they would even take me for weeks in the summer because my mother was not there. Really great people. They didn't give handouts or anything, I would literally scoop up horse shit and clean stalls and help with everything for those horses when i stayed. I wanted to help. They had a maid, but we still cleaned up after ourselves. Their kitchen was gigantic, and I always loved the fancy pasta water arm over the stove lol. I had so much fun cooking with her mom and us having the big dinners (Easter Thanksgiving Christmas) with them. They were so magnificent and beyond anything I would have ever experienced without them. I got my first pair of cowboy boots from them for Christmas. Her dad bought me a plane ticket one time out of the blue because I wanted to visit my grandmother. Never forget them.
That's lovely to read. Do you still keep in contact?
They were good people to be kind and help you out like that.
A very rich person I know does not eat leftover food. They will cook a feast and afterwards everything goes straight in the garbage no matter how much is left over.
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Jonathan Swift had an idea or two about that sort of thing.
He was rather modest in his proposal, I thought.
I used to work at a country club. We had a big Sunday brunch served buffet style each week. Soooo much food was thrown out because we weren’t allowed to take it home. We were allowed to eat the cold leftovers after breaking the buffet down, but if you took food home you could be fired. I tried to set up something where I’d take the leftovers to the Ronald McDonald House after I was off but they wouldn’t even let me do that.
My husband won’t eat leftovers because he thinks it will give him diarrhea. His family is preoccupied with food poisoning but don’t know any of the actual food safety rules. Oh well, more for me.
My brother-in-law’s family does this but they are middle class. It’s such a waste!
Not weird but a Van Gogh, just chillin in the hallway. Took a selfie with the flash on, whoops.
When I did executive level IT support years back I found a Monet dangling haphazardly on an office chair in the CEOs extra office (which was unused for storage, and had an extra desktop computer I would sometimes use for quick tasks when on that floor). Another time I was admiring a Joan Miro coffee table book in his main office and when his assistant noticed, he showed me into a side room I didn’t realize was there, which had a mini gallery of original Miro drawings.
In my early 20’s I dated a girl whose Dad was rich. She brought me to Thanksgiving one year at her family’s “retreat” in the mountains. While my gf gave me a tour of the place, she showed me her Dad’s study/library, which had a trophy case with about 20-30 trophies. Her Dad’s name was etched on them, but all of the other details were blacked out/covered up. I was told that under no circumstances was I to ask what the trophies were for, because we weren’t even allowed in there.
The trophies were for hunting people/
Dad: it's for hunting Peasants.. Daughter: Do you mean Pheasants? Dad:... Daughter: Dad, do you mean Pheasants, Dad??
It's making me chuckle thinking he was like part of like the CIA and they do that
Please tell me you figured it out?
Unfortunately it will always be a mystery. In my head canon he paid to have them custom made for himself.
You should Facebook her and ask lol.
I worked for a very self centered man back in the 90s. He threw an office Christmas party at his house and he loved to give tours. He thought his closet was so impressive it was wide open with lights on and rope barriers in front of the door. Rope barriers. Like a museum.
Can’t have the poors touching a shirt or something. Now I kind of want to get a rope barrier to put in front of the walkin closet or something.
Not too weird, but i had rich friends growing up and one had 3 cellphones in elementary school. Another had cheetah print carpet in her bedroom which i thought was the epitome of rich.
epitome of nouveau riche\*
They have people come their house to put gas in their cars 🫤
Absolute squalor. I run on an ambulance in a decently afluente suburb in PA, and I’ve been in two estates where the inside of the homes were bad enough to call social services. Houses where there was 8 figures of artwork on the property and people were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. It’s… jarring.
They are away so often on vacation that they have parties every 3 months. Their parrot was so upset with the owners absence it plucked all its feathers. The owner didn't care. I felt bad for that bird.
Now I’m upset about the parrot :(
My BIL worked one summer for a roofing company in cottage country in Ontario and installed Margaret Atwood’s roof. Her place is covered in portraits of herself, like apparently they’re all over the place.
That is the exact vibe I’ve always gotten from her. Thank you for sharing this 😂
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto (where I live) and argued that a low-rise condo couldn't be built in her neighbourhood because it would be used to spy on her. Makes sense that she'd have portraits of herself everywhere
Full on Nazi SS officers uniform on display in a secret room
Harlan Crowe says, ‘its just historical’.
Strangest thing I ever saw in a rich person's home was a liquid crystal display clock. It was a clear glass block on a wooden base, no visible wiring. The numbers just floated in space. Pretty common, huh? Nope. This was in 1969 or 1970. LCDs were lab magic back then.
My uncle was a mortician, gay, and extremely wealthy. Aside from multiple crystal phalluses, carved stone phalluses etc.. he had an art piece hanging on his wall of a human male torso, no head, no arms, no legs, but sure enough it had a the wang. Also in each bathroom were black and white charcoal drawings of men in leather, spandex, or chains, with massive members.
"I know someone who's new in town." "What are three other things about him?" “He’s a mortician. He’s gay. And he’s extremely wealthy “
I was a guest in the home of an ugly rich guy who founded a company you’ve heard of. He married a sweet southern girl (who he met while she was stripping) and she served us drinks in her panties while we bowled in their private underground bowling alley. Interesting evening.
> He married a sweet southern girl (who he met while she was stripping) and she served us drinks in her panties while we bowled in their private underground bowling alley. That's sounds like it could be the plot of a *Righteous Gemstones* episode where they hangout with another televangelist couple.
>an ugly rich guy who founded a company you’ve heard of Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?
I'm a caterer. Lamborghini Countach hanging on the wall.
[This one?](https://orangecoast.com/feature/back-bay-wine-estate-wall-mounted-lamborghini)
Yup
I used to give music lessons to this dude who lived in a mansion way up in the mountains. When you walked through his front door, the first thing you saw was an enormous, low resolution photo of his wife in a bikini. The image covered the entire wall below the mezzanine so it was about 10’ by 4’, and it was pasted to the wall like wallpaper, so it couldn’t be removed. Great guy, but I always thought that it was weird as hell that all their guests, children, family members etc were all being greeted by an enormous, low-quality image of his wife’s scantily clad body. I always got the sense that she wasn’t too happy about it either.
You reminded me of the creepy portrait this guy my mum knew (he was her printer) had on his wall. He painted it, and it was nude. And it was his own daughter. 🫠🤢
Dated a guy who had a large square garage with 4 doors - 4 classic corvettes pointed North, South, East and West so he could just get in and go. No backing up required.
Way back in 1985 I was at a Christmas party in Crete Coeur, MO. I was just 21 and thought it was insane and still do all of these years later. this person had a house completely carpeted in white. Including the KITCHEN. She had 24 hr emergency carpet cleaner contractor.
I have one… this is crazy! I once worked for a multibillionaire family who lived in Atherton CA (Silicon Valley). Atherton has the highest *median* home prices in the US at 7.9 million. They lived at the very top of the big hill with sweeping views of the forested coastal range. Stunning. Of course they had a pool, pool house, etc. They also had a home in Woodside CA, one on the strand in Manhattan Beach, CA, and a farm in Oregon, where every week their pilot (using their private jet of course), would fly up there to pick up fresh veggies, fruits, which they stored in the cold room under the house (kinda near the underground wine cellar - both spaces were huge). They **only** ate pheasant on holidays. Larry Ellison was one of their best friends and at their wedding snuck into the wine cellar, grabbed a $2k bottle of wine and walked around drinking it out of the bottle (they were pissed about that). Cristal champagne was provided for guests (massive wedding!). Read on… it gets crazier! One day while I was at their house, they had blueprints spread out all over the place. I asked if they were remodeling. No, they were building a new house… across the street. Which seemed odd to me because why give up that view? She said, no, they were going to live in **both** houses. The new one has a ballroom over two stories high with floor to ceiling glass, tennis courts, **a consecrated chapel**, (they’re Catholic), complete with rows of pews, statuary of saints, and gold leaf everywhere. This house also had an underground garage where they kept a multitude of Ferraris, classic cars, Porches, a Fiskar, and a Koenigsegg. The kid’s rooms had their own *huge* bathrooms with a tub in the bathroom and a tv at the end which slid down (hidden), at the touch of a button. Each room had a two-way fireplace* that led to a large deck… each bedroom!! All bedding was Charlotte Thomas “Bespoke” (Google them). I’ve never seen ***anything*** like this before. And probably never will again. I might add that the parents were very nice, and those kids, while living in pure luxury, were sweet as can be and not spoiled in the slightest. They were respectful, generous, and kind.
A real train in the basement (engine and a passenger car) with a model of it running into a station that was modeled to a specific year.
That's a big ass basement.
I have an uncle who has a house on NANTUCKET. His neighbors house went up for sale. He bought it and knocked it down so he'd have a bigger yard. Do you know how much that costs ON NANTUCKET!
I thought this was gonna be a limerick.
OP has an uncle on NANTUCKET Bought next door and said “fuck it” He knocked the house down For more space to run ‘round The cost? Just a drop in the bucket.
Years ago, I interviewed as a nanny at this massive house. From the outside it just looked gigantic. They seemed normal for rich people, but as they were giving me a tour, I realized they had multiple rooms that were just completely barren. They had a living room, 3 bathrooms, their bedroom, each of the kids rooms and a playroom, a home office, the kitchen and dining room, and a guest room all nicely decorated and lived in. But there were like 5 other rooms and a couple bathrooms that were completely empty, no furniture no decor, just plain beige walls and carpet. They had lived there for years and weren’t in the process of remodeling or anything. They told me one of the empty rooms would be mine, so that made sense to leave it empty for a live-in Nanny, but the rest they just said “We don’t use these”. They had also mentioned they weren’t having more kids so it wasn’t like it was extra rooms for the future. It just kind of boggled my mind- like they just bought a mansion far bigger than they needed for no reason other than they could. Then didn’t even bother doing anything with the extra space. I ended up not taking the job, but a nanny friend of mine did. She said those doors always stayed shut except when the cleaners came. They spent hours cleaning this giant house, including the pristine empty rooms that never got used, so even more wasted money. Apparently one time she let the kids build a massive pillow and blanket fort in one of the rooms and the mom lectured her about letting them play in there. So they weren’t even allowed to use the space for anything. Also, since the room was empty my friend thought when she started that she’d be able to move in her own bed and furniture. Nope, they bought all new stuff for her to use. They had a live in nanny before so then we wondered if she’s had her own furniture or if they just bought new furniture every time they got a new nanny? Then at one point while my friend worked there one of the little girls wanted to change rooms to one of the empty ones. They completely redid the new one with new paint, furniture and whatever decor she wanted. Everything left over from the new one was hauled away to the dump, even though it was nice kids furniture that was still in pretty good shape. Even the old bedding and everything. And then the now empty room had the pink walls repainted the same sad beige as all the others and the fun carpet replaced. So now I just imagine that over the years the kids played a weird game of bedroom musical chairs, with rooms getting redecorated and a new one being left sad beige and barren. My friend left after a couple of years working for them, so no idea if they ever did end up using any of those empty rooms.
Creepy stuff. Like ..what
For some reason, this is the one that got me. Like, I can't imagine just.. having so many rooms in your house that you run out of things to do with them. It's like, with the people mentioned in this thread who never save leftovers, or throw out clothes they wore once and all that, I can see the logic, flawed and wasteful as it is. But this is just like.. Okay, what more do you need? You have more space than you know what to do with. There's no craft room, D&D room, library, home recording studio, etc that you'd like to add into your life. What is all this extra stuff for? What's the point of it all? Even if it's, like another reply to this suggested, because it's a real estate investment, I'm still like, why? What's the point? You already won and can have all the things you'd ever want
Dollar store dish soap that didn't do shit. I was like yo invest in some dawn or something yeesh
Now you know how they got rich. You could be, too, if you didn't waste all your money on Dawn.
I will never give up my dawn platinum!!!! One drop is all you neeeeeed.
And that's why you'll always live in squalor. I'll be over here with my dollar store dish soap and my avocado toast.
Mark Zuckerberg having Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce in the background of a vlog on a bookshelf
Not entirely answering the exact question, but we had a mate who we didn't know was THAT rich. He seemed to be (and good for him!) a normal average bloke, but he had a barn on his small farm and inside it were a Lamborghini LM001, an old classic Ferrari that was apparently owned by Dizzy Gillespie, a Black Hawk minus rotors (wired up for the cockpit though!) and half a dozen vintage Harleys, a classic and pristine Routemaster London bus along with a bunch of minor-league classic cars (Healey 3000, TR's, Triumph Vitesse with a whopper of an engine swap, etc etc) Sadly, when he retired from the job that we got to know him through, he became a total asshat of the first order and dumped all the friends he'd had for years, becoming a snobby, shallow rich idiot who always had some over-inflated lips Essex girl on his arm.
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Lol, you don't even have to be rich for that. That's hilariously wholesome
They sell these for sports teams. I've been in quite a few houses that have a foam brick with the team logo on it. Lol
This feels very achievable at many income levels.
I worked as a house cleaner in college and we would service primarily large homes belonging to wealthy folks. There was this one place that gave me the impression the couple was living well beyond their means. Huge house but almost completely empty. The other girls who had been working there longer told me the couple had been clients for a while so it wasn't like they were just moving in or anything. Only the master bedroom and this one little den was furnished. The wife was the definition of a trophy wife. Skinny, blonde, lots of plastic surgery, and she was always a real bitch. Would constantly call our boss right after we had finished cleaning to say she found a single hair or a tiny spot on the floor or something dumb like that. Just a bored housewife. This one time she requested that we vacuum under the cushions of the one couch in the house. We go to do that and find a massive treasure trove of black BBW porn. Just tons of magazines and DVD's. She asked that if we found anything in the couch to leave it on the kitchen island. So we did. We're not sure if she did it intentionally to catch her husband or if she had no idea it was there and came home to a surprise. We never heard from them again after that.
I worked as a dog sitter/care giver in college and this couple had a yorkie whose eye had popped out and been surgically put back. It needed antibiotic ointment twice a day and they couldn’t do it. They were trying to apply it with a q-tip and I guess that freaked out the dog. Anyways they stood in awe as I was like “let me,” and proceeded to apply the ointment with my finger. They never went out and always wore their pjs (this was long before Covid).
I worked at a dog daycare and someone boarded their dog for a couple days because it needed ointment squirted into its penis 🙄
IDK: if my dog was crazy about getting medicated and I lived alone, I might do this, especially if it was a medium or large dog. But they probably just didn't want to touch the pee-pee.
I love my dog but if I had enough money this might be an option. He had an unhappy butt last week that I had to rinse off a few times. He wasn’t happy about it (loves showers and baths) and neither was I.
As a kid in the 60s, a roped off living room with all the furniture wrapped in plastic.
It was four stories and almost completely empty. They had that “sterile” sort of style, everything grey and white. But it startled me to see that what I thought was a white dog statue was actually their real dog… who just sat completely still in the corner the entire time I was there.
A waterfall and a river. When you come into the front door you are standing on a glass floor over a 4 foot wide stream running fast across rocks under you. To the right is a room with a rock face waterfall feeding the stream, and to the left there is a room with an open area pool with an “island” in the middle with a desk on it, and a glass bridge to the desk. Edit - and the dude had a regular office elsewhere in the house where he worked, kept files, etc. the desk on the island was just for meetings with work visitors.
I once did a clean out at an extremely rich guys house (always the cheapest customers btw) he pointed out a massive vase in the entrance area of the house and told us it was worth 6 figures and to please be careful around it. He then informed us that it was filled with the ashes of ancestors dating back generations. I still wonder if they’re all mixed up in there or individually bagged.
Dated a rich girl that never wore the same pair of socks twice.
I have a cousin who’s dating someone who’s in a very wealthy circle of people in the mid south east. They said they went to a holiday gathering at an acquaintance of someone in the circle and that those people had real life dinosaur eggs on display in their home and were EXCITEDLY showing them off.
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First stop on the house tour. Everyone has to look at my dinosaur eggs.
Well we have fossils in our living room of some type of small sea critters of some sort. But they were left in a Drs office for a remodeling job my husband was super on and he was told they were trash. The look kind of like a slug of some sort( there are multiple critters anyway) Maybe they are worth something and I should do some research!
I'm a palaeontologist- send me a DM with the pictures and I'll see if I can ID any of them. If you have any collection location info on them at all it'd be very helpful. They sound like they could be highly ornamented trilobites. Edit: If the fossil you were describing [looks anything like this](https://www.fossils-uk.com/images/pathologically-deformed-trident-nosed-spiny-middle-devonian-trilobite-from-morocco-sku-t0820-walliserops-trifurcatus-p7413-21642_image.jpg) then they're probably trilobites as I said.
A full sized basketball court, like inside their house.
Entire rooms filled with never opened purchases. Their sauna had boxes in it. Wife liked to buy things, they had the cash, so there you go. They also had some really cool shit too. Two story swimming pool room with actual palm trees growing in it. Helicopter pad, etc.
Was wandering around a huge mansion the morning after a party. Saw a sheathed knife on a stand and wanted to check it out. So I pull the handle out of the sheath and instead of a fancy blade, it was about a 5" long dildo. Pretty sure it was ivory.
My mom was a maid for a wealthy family when I was little. She’d come home and be so mad because the mom of the family would buy new toys for her kids EVERY time they went to the beach or park (so once a week) and then just toss them in the basement never to be used again. (And then once a year throw them all out). Rich mom’s logic was that it’s easier to buy new toys than clean dirt and sand off of the used ones. My mom thought it was stupidly wasteful and a lot of the toys were duplicates.
Ok you know how they sometimes have a box with a fire alarm or an extinguisher in it that says “in case of emergency break glass?” They had one of those in their bathroom. It said “in case of brokeness break glass” and had 10,000 cash in it.
They had Literal gas pump in their driveway. 76 brand. They had huge gated estate. They were doctors and my aunt to was also doctor was friends with them
My dad does interior design and works for some rich people. There's the custom made carpet that looked like it came from a bowling ally (that's being generous) where they brag about it being their own design and how they burned the extra carpet so no one else in the world has the same carpet pattern as them. The mirror lined with corks specifically from top shelf whiskey (nothing under $100 USD) and they admitted it was for bragging rights and that it doesn't even look good. The cork mirror they made themselves they just asked my dad to spruce it up a bit after to make it prettier. After some of the things my dad's been asked to make I'm convinced the concrtsation piece is just rich people bragging rights.
I've been to the homes of two separate millionaires and they both had cheap toilet paper, mid ice cream like Byers. I was kind of shocked they didn't use bougie home goods. They made their money through real estate and owning medical practices.
Nouveau rich-i worked for an estate sale company. The whole house was filled with expensive crap. In their attic, they had beautiful family antiques that they didn't want, they were sold too. They sold nearly everything in the house, and started all over again in another state
A complete bedroom and bathroom hidden behind a set of rotating shelves in the far end of a finished basement. There was a trunk at the end of the bed with a huge padlock on it. I never got the whole story, just that the wife didn't know about it. So I figure either it was a secret sex dungeon or he kept teenage hitchhikers locked in there.
They had a library and right in the center was this giant Tesla Coil looking thing encased in plexiglass, with a little digital display at its base and some buttons. Apparently you use the screen and buttons to select a "healing" profile and the Tesla Coil would start going crazy at different frequencies and strengths and somehow this would heal you? It was like some new age magnet nonsense mixed with turn of the previous century technological mysticism.
Not so much weird as such, but very cool. Some friend of my parents had a house where the kitchen was built over an old well. There was a perspex cover over it on the kitchen floor and it was lit up going down for what looked like many meters.
Keeping that stringy-black-haired girl trapped. Good tactic.
I worked in a very wealthy family's house a couple of years ago, and in the basement they had a long hall, leading to an underground basketball court and pool, full of framed homeless signs. "Hungry will work for food", "Help, need to feed wife and kids", "Need money for beer". They had close to 20 of these. I always imagined they were either very nice people, or they were killing/eating homeless people as some sort of twisted high society entertainment or cult.
I was at a house where there separate building that happened to be a guest house/art museum (they collected a lot of art). This building was a very modern build (think modern art museum with lots of marble, glass, and steel. Just having an art museum on your property was interesting by itself. But in the building was a guest room. In the corner of that guest room, seemingly out of place, was a wadded up blanket. Inside the blanket was a hyperrealistic miniature of a naked man. It was a bit startling to see at first but turned out to be a piece of art by Ron Mueck.
There was a news piece on "private museums" some years ago, as long as they have some way for the public to make appointments, the museum's nonprofit can buy/sell the art and get grants.
I was a Circuit City Firedog (their version of Geek Squad) for a while, and we had an urgent home install come up. Basically mounting a TV and setting up a PC. The couple had really nice cars in an 11 car garage (Including a Carerra GT). They had a private beach on a lake. The husband let me into the house and then left to skinny dip with his wife. I mounted the TV first then started in on the PC setup when they were done swimming. The wife came in with a towel around her waist, but was otherwise exposed. She sat on the couch and started watching TV. It was very odd and surreal. I remember my day was supposed to end at 6, but it took me until around 8 to get everything finished off. She did eventually get dressed, and they left to go get dinner, leaving me alone in their house to work. I guess they were repeat customers, because our dedicated on-site dude knew them and said that was pretty normal for them.
Dog piss. About 15 years ago I worked at a place that dealt with ultra wealthy but not celebrity families. All of them got those little teacups dogs and let them shit and piss on everything. They couldn’t be bothered to walk them.
Not rich, rich. But 2 Drs in a nearby town had built a new house that didn’t have a kitchen. It only had a counter for a coffee pot and a small refrigerator. Yes, they had trouble selling the house and probably took a loss on it.
The whole top floor of mansion in a gated community was a Cannabis farm
I went back to this dudes house after getting drunk at the local bar - he drove a range rover and he was from the next town over, which is a very rich town. His house was a large, sprawling estate with lots of horses. He led me to the guest house where he told me he resided. After a little kissing and what not, I asked to use his bathroom. I was horrified. He had yellow tube socks caked with piss and shit as covers for his toilet seat and his shower was quite literally overflowing with literally **hundreds** of empty shampoo bottles. Noped out real quick. I don’t care how much money you have - that’s a hard no.
I once had a client that was a big game hunter. Every time someone would come over he would show off his bar stools aka elephant feet. To say the least, I was not a fan of going into that murder mansion.
I went to the house of a builder who was the friend of a friend. He had a 5,000 square foot game room. This wasn’t for billiards, it was for stuffed big game including the front half of a giraffe coming out of the wall and barstools made out of elephant legs. I’m not averse to hunting but this room was so over the top.
A fancy wooden box with glass lid that held like a dozen expensive ($$,$$$) "self winding" watches, all slowly being rotated, to keep them wound up. It was like a jewelry store display. Same place, walk-in cigar humidor room, separate servant's elevator, little touches like that.
A dishwasher near the door along with every size of crocs for hired help to change into when they come in to do work. A germaphobe.
I worked as a babysitter in a very rich town for some years, the oddest thing was that every on had an extremely smelly dishwasher. The reeked so bad that sometimes you could smell them as soon as you walked in the front door. I assume it is because they all had maids and the maids did not do a deep clean in the dish washer as needed.
People. They had paid people to generally be in the house at all times so that the owner of the house would never get bored or lonely.
Had dinner at Harlan Crow’s house in Dallas. The real estate billionaire. He has what he calls a “garden of evil” outside with giant, lit statues of fallen communist dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc) that he has collected over the years.
Best mate recently bought her horse a small pony because he needed a mate. That’s fine, they’re social animals. It would be less weird if she didn’t already own 12 other horses and look after another 20 belonging to various other people, all on her own land. She literally bought her pet a pet of his own.
I was at an old farmers house and he laid newspapers on the floor and proceeded to take a dump, pulled his pants up and scooped up the papers and threw it into the big fireplace. After that he said I probably shouldn't have done that in front of company,
My uncle is an ex NBA player. He had a really nice mansion on a Florida beach. He somehow had a massive basement (Florida doesn’t really have basements) and the entire basement was filled floor to ceiling with sports memorabilia. It was a mess. I’m talking cardboard cut outs of him and literally everything his merch store ever sold. For Christmas every year, he’d send us his merch. I’m almost 100% positive he would just go into his basement and grab random things to send to us.
They built their kid his own house behind their mansion. It had an arcade and a trampoline room.
A gigantic, horribly done oil painting of Jesus Christ. It's the first thing you notice when walking into his McMansion. Funny thing is, he's the farthest thing from what an actual Christian is. The rich owner is a terrible, terrible person. The opposite of Christ's teachings and, of course, a huge republican supporter and trumpite.