An $80,000,000 Glass Mansion with Everything Left Inside

March 19, 2021 8:19 PM

An $80,000,000 Glass Mansion with Everything Left Inside. That is all.
posted by slater (102 comments total)

It's like they took a generic 90s era office park building and made it into a residence.

...why?
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:21 PM on March 19, 2021 [59 favorites]

Yes.
posted by slater at 8:30 PM on March 19, 2021

Maybe they hired an architect who specialized in hotels?
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:36 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I would be constantly worried that Guy Pierce and Ben Kingsley were gonna send a helicopter to blow me up.
posted by straight at 8:44 PM on March 19, 2021 [28 favorites]

The hyper rich should hire me to vet all of their design decisions — I’m not great, but apparently I’m a shit-ton better than they are when it comes to home design and decor. This house is simply embarrassing.

Rich folks, gimme a call, I swear I’ll tell it to you straight.
posted by aramaic at 8:45 PM on March 19, 2021 [35 favorites]

There is no way on earth that a shoddy office building on a lake in Missouri is worth $80M. You can get a mansion on the ocean in Malibu for a fraction of that price.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:48 PM on March 19, 2021 [24 favorites]

Love the bathrooms though, gotta give em' that.
posted by oceanjesse at 8:49 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Setting for a first-person vaporwave horror game
posted by Countess Elena at 8:50 PM on March 19, 2021 [24 favorites]

Going through it and starting a list:

- God, that music is irritating.

- Gospel quote? Seriously?

- This is the first time I've heard of BigBankz, and I'm not sure what he adds to the experience of wandering around big, unoccupied/"abandoned" places. "This is insane, dude" seems to be about as deep as he gets.

- The general ambiance seems to be "Cyberdyne before it gets blown up."

- mr_roboto is probably right. There are probably entire counties in Missouri that you could buy for that kind of money.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:56 PM on March 19, 2021 [25 favorites]

certainly zombie proof
posted by clavdivs at 8:58 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

proving once again that rich ≠ good taste
posted by djseafood at 9:01 PM on March 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

When did they take the "Trump" sign off of it?

It's an embarrassing building, yerck.
posted by maxwelton at 9:10 PM on March 19, 2021 [16 favorites]

if you skip through randomly and without context it's just "why is this guy so impressed with this apparently empty hotel"
posted by glonous keming at 9:11 PM on March 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

Love the bathrooms though, gotta give em' that.

They all have two toilets, apparently.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:12 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Someone in the comments says this was actually used by the previous owner for corporate retreats, which makes a lot more sense.

For $80 mil I'd rather buy a private island.
posted by airmail at 9:19 PM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

But if you're actually rich, is it possible to have a residence that feels like a home? It seems like the sumptuary presentation of a mansion is basically going to always make it feel like a hotel--like a place that someone might eat and sleep and shit, but fundamentally belongs to the staff who actually clean and maintain it, while the owners are these weird transients who pay for it all.

Still, that thing is shit-ass ugly, even without the 90s teal marble.
posted by fatbird at 9:33 PM on March 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

I don't know exactly what it is about this place but, especially around the bar area, it just screams Cheesecake Factory.
posted by NormieP at 9:44 PM on March 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

The thing it was missing was a pair of escalators.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:08 PM on March 19, 2021 [36 favorites]

Mcmansionhell to the power of Holiday Inn
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 10:32 PM on March 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

Wow, what a turkey of a property. The very idea of blowing that much on someone's eccentricities in Missouri where $80mil will buy you riverfront property if not entire blocks of St. Louis is just nuts. The only thing it's missing is a collection of Patrick Nagel paintings.

The family business should just accept the loss and turn it into a corporate retreat. No one is ever going to buy this except as a tax shelter.
posted by offalark at 10:33 PM on March 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

I would be constantly worried that Guy Pierce and Ben Kingsley were gonna send a helicopter to blow me up.

But on the bright side, some nights, Christopher Walken might show up and start flying around dancing.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:57 PM on March 19, 2021 [31 favorites]

I guess you’d have to tell pizza delivery guys to look for the Best Western Plus Executive Conference Centre.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:58 PM on March 19, 2021 [21 favorites]

Serious Overlook Hotel vibes from the intro. I had to stop watching because it's the middle of the night and I started getting freaked out.

Also pretty sure there's something shady hidden on the property to make it worth 80M. Dead bodies? Cocaine hoard? A certain someone's tax returns?
posted by basalganglia at 11:00 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Serious Overlook Hotel vibes from the intro. I had to stop watching because it's the middle of the night and I started getting freaked out.

I turned it off, too. My impression was that the building is so soulless it was reaching out to consume mine.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:14 PM on March 19, 2021 [31 favorites]

I don't know exactly what it is about this place but, especially around the bar area, it just screams Cheesecake Factory.

Give the upper-middle class millions of dollars and this is what these chumps will build. Every single time. It's like that Nazi who made Minecraft. No taste, no imagination, no aspiration for anything better or even different. Just mediocrity by the metric fuckton.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:15 PM on March 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

This article I found is just as meandering and WTF as the house. I am not even sure what the point of it is? Rich dude does several fucked up things, seems to sort of get away with them, tries to build big dumb boondoggles.

In 1999, Robert Plaster asked the Stone County Planning and Zoning Board to rezone the Evergreen National Corporation properties to allow construction of a convention center complex, with plans to apply for Native American Reservation status for the property. The request was denied.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:35 PM on March 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

A 1991 article in the Springfield News-Leader says the Springfield-based architect who designed the 'mansion' had been previously known for this bank building. So he's nothing if not consistent.

It should be obvious even to this breathless dude who makes real estate videos and yet doesn't know what a bidet is that $80 million is merely a delusional asking price and when it eventually sells it'll be for far, far less.
posted by theory at 11:55 PM on March 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

Setting for a first-person vaporwave horror game

Seen HoloVista?
posted by juv3nal at 12:06 AM on March 20, 2021

I had to shut the volume off 3 minutes in, and I sped it up, too. If I heard that kid say, "This is crazy!" and "Insane!" one more time...

As for the place, $80 extra, extra large and it still looks cheap. The only thing I found vaguely home-y was the ladder in the kitchen at ~10 minutes in. My 5' self in a flat with 9' ceilings wishes I had one of those in my kitchen.
posted by droplet at 12:29 AM on March 20, 2021 [9 favorites]

From what oneirodynia found, surely this wasn’t at all built as a home - it was built in the expectation that he could get several giant zoning giveaways after the fact and use it as a commercial property. FIRE Festival, as it were.

He should be on the hook to restore the site to original quality, dammit.
posted by clew at 12:49 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's a strange place, but Table Rock Lake seems strange generally, with fractal land formations both bare and covered with development. The crazy part to me is how cheap this must be to the richest people. If you're worth a billion, this is 8% of your portfolio, so what you could gain in a year doing nothing. Really rich people are 100x that.
posted by netowl at 2:08 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

The only sizable buildings I could find in the area are hotels and convention centers in Branson. I don’t get a hotel vibe off this building. You could redo the interior to be more suitable to a hotel but you’d still have to heat the building which would be very expensive. People go to Branson to vacation. They go to the lake to imagine themselves in a natural environment. They’re not going to pay to be in a building that looks just like their office back home. Perhaps the thought was that you could drum up a bunch of conference bookings but I can’t see getting the volume of conferences you’d need to support a building this large. Plaster had a way around any local control. In 2007 Missouri passed a law that would have allowed Plaster to incorporate his own village. Even without any zoning this building this didn’t make sense. The only explanation I buy is that until 2008 there was too much cheap money floating around.
posted by rdr at 2:25 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

This was very clearly meant to be a hotel, it even has a check-in desk. The main floor is also very clearly set up as a lobby meant for groups of people who don't know each other to congregate, with lots of small table and groups of seating. There are also brass labels on the doors that you absolutely would not have in a house.
posted by cilantro at 3:05 AM on March 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's like they took a generic 90s era office park building and made it into a residence.

Going to be plenty of that now that companies realise they can just let everyone work from home and save money on that office lease. My company just made work from home permanent globally...
posted by xdvesper at 3:26 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

I had to shut the volume off 3 minutes in, and I sped it up, too. If I heard that kid say, "This is crazy!" and "Insane!" one more time...

Gamify it. Have a drink every time he says, "crazy", "incredible", or "statues".
posted by otherchaz at 4:21 AM on March 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

The good news is, it shouldn't be hard to demolish.
posted by saturday_morning at 4:27 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

A veritable panopticon of bedrooms!
posted by pipeski at 4:57 AM on March 20, 2021

Yeah, the bedrooms, lol! Great expanses of mirrors on the walls. "This is the Ram bedroom... rams everywhere." Subtle as a crutch!
posted by Sublimity at 5:01 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

My comment was going to be something like: When you're a CEO and spend all your time in office buildings, airports, and hotels, then this must feel like home. But it seems to have been essentially a private hotel. But that begs the question -- if privately owned only for the use of your own employees or whatever, why not do something different than a generic business building?
posted by thefool at 5:09 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

There is no way on earth that a shoddy office building on a lake in Missouri is worth $80M.

How much land is the building sitting on? That's the bulk of the cost of any real estate. 40-50 acres? Lakefront? Plus the mansion? Yeah...$80MM easy. Even in Missouri.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:15 AM on March 20, 2021

From that article oneiordynia found:

"In 1991, Plaster and Evergreen National Corporation built Evergreen Crystal Palace, a 28,000-square-foot green-glass and marble structure on a bluff over Table Rock Lake. The Stone County Assessor said in 1991 that construction cost for the building was $6 million and the value of the approximately 400 acres of Plaster's land nearby was $750,000.

Although sources originally reported the mansion would be used as Plaster's home and Evergreen corporate retreat, an attorney for Evergreen issued a press release stating the building was a corporate facility."

(It's not clear from the article but Evergreen National was apparently another of Plaster's companies. Hard to say what they did, I'm assuming it was a shell company to protect assets or a development company.)

So, yeah, I think this is way less "insanely rich person builds insanely tacky private residence" and more "insanely rich person was trying to pull some zoning, tax, and financing shenanigans by building a thing that could semi-plausibly be claimed to be a private residence, a private corporate facility, or a commercial space, depending on which would be more advantageous at the moment."
posted by soundguy99 at 6:17 AM on March 20, 2021 [19 favorites]

Looks like the kind of office building - I don’t know - maybe the grandiose HQ of a large regional logging company - that has incredibly shit coffee for a building that size, but is *way* too far away from a real coffee place to go get your own. But you’re just there consulting / training for the week so no fucking point bringing your own - the crap hotel (basically a logging camp with a neon vacancy sign) you are staying at 15 miles away has even worse. So I was you are just grumpy permanently the whole week.

This whole video should be like a warning that if you don’t push your boss to keep work from home standard, you are going to be forced to work in this hellhole. Minus the lake - obviously that’s pretty / though in my scenario is probably just the tailings pond from the conglomerate’s local mining operation, and would eat the rubber off the bottom of your shoe if the stench ever subsided enough to fool you into getting to the water’s edge.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 6:50 AM on March 20, 2021 [18 favorites]

I could see myself in it.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 7:44 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

So corporate
posted by metamonday at 8:25 AM on March 20, 2021

What a horribly ugly property. Count me among those that found this video almost unwatchable because of the inane commentary and videographer self-insertions.
posted by moonbiter at 8:40 AM on March 20, 2021

How much land is the building sitting on? That's the bulk of the cost of any real estate. 40-50 acres? Lakefront? Plus the mansion? Yeah...$80MM easy.

No way. Here’s a nearby 166 acre parcel listed at $2.2M.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:45 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, If I owned this place, I’d try to sell it, too.
posted by The Potate at 8:48 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I dispute the characterization of this as a 'glass mansion'. It's a curtain wall façade mansion.
These are all closer to what I think of as a glass house.
posted by signal at 8:54 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

I looked it up on a county parcel map here:

https://www.acrevalue.com/plat-map/MO/Stone/?lat=36.615215&lng=-93.381788&zoom=15

It’s on 11.1 acres, none of which is lakefront property.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:59 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Funny thing is: I don't think it's ugly. I mean, it's completely corporate, cold, and museum-house dated, but it's not ugly. It's wrong in time, is what it is. Every corner of the video is full of dread. It seems compellingly scary to me, as much or more as your traditional abandoned Second Empire house. I may feel that way because it looks like the style I liked as a girl, and it especially reminds me of the Oak Court Mall in Memphis in the early '90s, which I thought was very cool back in my brace-wearing days.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:35 AM on March 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

Incomes, population from Wikipedia.

$80,000,000/$719 (Haiti per capita income)=111,265
111,265/11439646(Haiti population)=0.009726263

$63,051(USA per capita income)*0.009726263=$613

I can think of more productive things to do with eighty million dollars. With that much money, you could give every person in Haiti 1% of the Haitian per capita annual income. That would be like sending everyone in the US a $600 check.
posted by aniola at 9:37 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wow. There are plenty of aesthetic choices to criticize. But, the thing I really can't comprehend, even accounting for very different taste and world view, is the kitchen. You're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a kitchen from the ground up. . . and you decided to go out of your way to avoid building a real industrial kitchen? Even if you don't give a damn about cooking, it isn't hard to recognize that your favorite restaurant doesn't have six consumer dishwashers and two poorly ventilated ranges in the middle of the room. (The ladder is its own category of silliness.) What on earth were you thinking?

I'd love to hear the conversation among the chefs who had to actually work there back in the day.
posted by eotvos at 9:39 AM on March 20, 2021 [10 favorites]

mmmm sterile-y
posted by supermedusa at 9:42 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can't even begin to imagine how shitty the acoustics are in that piano atrium.
posted by saladin at 9:50 AM on March 20, 2021 [9 favorites]

It's built like an institution, wide ADA-compliant corridors and doors, sprinkler-heads in the ceiling, commercial finishes. For all its apparent opulence, it is apparently built using very conventional commercial construction techniques. There's almost nothing really bespoke in terms of art pieces or design. A lot of money on materials and stone, but much less effort in design and interesting engineering. Even the plaques on the rooms are simple melamine tags done on the same kind of commercial sign maker used in hospitals or public schools. It's the design language we recognize from hotels, malls, airports, not houses.

It's got to be deliberate that there's no personality present, no sense of the owner whatsoever. The furnishings are even aggressively inoffensive 90's decorations. The gun range is the only thing that tells us anything about the owner and what they were like.
posted by bonehead at 9:53 AM on March 20, 2021 [9 favorites]

...why?

My best guess is cocaine. A lot of cocaine.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:12 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

It’s got a 80s tv superhero headquarters vibe. Maybe Kitt is in the garage!

The biblical quote at the start makes me want to see some superhero/Christian mashup where Jesus freaks out and “blows it up real good.”
posted by warriorqueen at 10:27 AM on March 20, 2021

Yet another demonstration of why we must tax the rich more strenuously, clearly they have no idea what to do with their money
posted by emjaybee at 10:34 AM on March 20, 2021 [17 favorites]

Finally found a spot for a massive paintball game/escape room complex.
posted by drezdn at 10:53 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I really want to watch this video but the narration is killing me.
CraZy!
Insane!
posted by SLC Mom at 11:09 AM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

If I heard that kid say, "This is crazy!" and "Insane!" one more time...

One reason I'm trying to remove this sort of casually ableist language from my vocabulary is that it's just so weak, as Fred Durst's son so neatly illustrates in this video. That house could easily and accurately be described as lots of things, for example grotesque, pathetic, embarrassing, ugly, boring, impractical, wasteful, selfish and wrong. But no, Freddie Vedder is going to fall back on "insane" and "crazy". Look, I get maybe you don't want to say those actual descriptive words because the people who own the building have paid you money and let you make your excessively long YouTube video on their property, but what you need to remember is that those people are terrible human beings whose trust you should betray on principle, especially if the alternative is slurring an entire class of people that never did you any harm, unlike those who have apparently already removed vandalism amounting to millions of dollars of worth of improvements, in order to sell this goddawful piece of shit to another bunch of rich pricks.

The other reason I'm trying to eliminate this kind of language entirely is that it's offensive as fuck. This is not just regardless of its endemic nature, but also because of it. We live in a culture that habitually uses ill-conceived caricatures of disability as lazy shorthand for almost anything negative, and thinks it can skate by on the "but I don't mean it to be offensive" defence which has been valid on precisely no occasions in the past.

In a decade I suspect Metafilter will be embarrassed by our current tolerance of systemic ableism in a way similar to our current embarrassment about our history of tolerating other forms of oppression.
posted by howfar at 11:36 AM on March 20, 2021 [18 favorites]

I’m fully on Team First Person Vaporwave Horror here, this is the perfect place to put a few fog machines and lasers, play some minor key synthwave and send a slow moving robot out there to hunt people.

But I have to admit I sort of love it, if only for its total over the top commitment to a very specific, dated and mediocre aesthetic. It sort of reminds me of a cheapened, dollar store version of the sprawling architecture in the game Echo; an architecture of as a pure expression of power completely divorced from any sort of human constraint and yet somehow also tacky and cheap looking.

It’s kind of amazing how badly Mr. BigBankz needs to level up his adjective game though. There’s so much to be said about all of this but our guy only knows maybe six words?
posted by mhoye at 11:48 AM on March 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

It would be fairly easy to put some alternate narration over this.
posted by emjaybee at 11:56 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

This video made me realize how much I appreciate Kirsten Dirksen's house tour videos. The houses she visits are genuinely "cool, amazing, beautiful, dope" but she manages to not only film them thoroughly but provide insightful narration beyond these four adjectives and conducts interesting interviews with the owners about the houses and their lifestyles.
posted by unid41 at 12:48 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have watched some of "The Night Manager" and Bertie Wooster's lair seems like the definition of RICH in architectural language. Seeing this glass shitbox makes me think maybe Richard Roper isn't the worst man in the world. At least he had a modicum of taste.
posted by Pembquist at 12:53 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

It would be fairly easy to put some alternate narration over this.

Extremely David Attenborough Voice: “Taken out of his natural element, and placed in a kind of captivity meant for much more prosperous, besuited members of the species, the bro can only warble in dismay while exploring the boundaries of his confines.”

Bro: “Crazy! Crazy!
posted by mhoye at 12:54 PM on March 20, 2021 [24 favorites]

This is further evidence of my theory that wealth should be classified as a disease, and that taxing the wealthy at truly exorbitant rates is actually for their own mental and physical well-being.
posted by Corduroy at 12:56 PM on March 20, 2021 [8 favorites]

That house could easily and accurately be described as lots of things, for example grotesque, pathetic, embarrassing, ugly, boring, impractical, wasteful, selfish and wrong.

Heartbreaking. Lonely. Empty. Unfulfilling.
posted by aniola at 1:02 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Heartbreaking. Lonely. Empty. Unfulfilling.

"Like a set from a version of There Will Be Blood with Harrison Ford as Daniel Plainview."
posted by howfar at 1:25 PM on March 20, 2021

incredibly shit coffee for a building that size, but is *way* too far away from a real coffee place to go get your own

*quietly weeps in cubicle*

Been there.

But I have to admit I sort of love it, if only for its total over the top commitment to a very specific, dated and mediocre aesthetic.

Yeah, after watching I was thinking "I guess the key to a mirror-heavy design aesthetic is to commit to those mirrors. Put 'em everywhere, even places where they end up being plain startling rather than functional."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:52 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

But I have to admit I sort of love it, if only for its total over the top commitment to a very specific, dated and mediocre aesthetic. It sort of reminds me of a cheapened, dollar store version of the sprawling architecture in the game Echo; an architecture of as a pure expression of power completely divorced from any sort of human constraint and yet somehow also tacky and cheap looking.

Yeah, I will give it that. The only thing similar in my experience is a mall in Montreal, the Faubourg Ste. Catherine: a mall converted to retail from its past as an industrial building in 1986. I probably first set foot in it circa 1990 and it has seemingly been in a sort of Zeno's Renovation since then, being perpetually upgraded without ever actually being improved or made usable in any way. Tellingly the only interior photos I can easily locate online show renovations in progress. To judge from the dates, these are from fifteen or twenty years ago, but this is exactly what it has looked like for the last thirty years. Cramped, gloomy, underused, more vacant storefronts than is reassuring.

A Montreal-based friend of mine says she cannot go in without bursting into tears. Not due to the terrible "improvements" or any personal tragedy, mind you, just the deep and seemingly ineradicable devotion to a design scheme that was popular for about three weeks during the third season or so of Miami Vice. It's the structural equivalent of a guy wearing Wayfarers and loafers without socks. The renovations mean he has flirted with the idea of rolling down the sleeves of his jacket but, y'know, cannot quite commit to it.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:01 PM on March 20, 2021 [5 favorites]

Who on earth wants to live in Macy’s? No wonder it’s for sale. I bet that atrium makes the piano utterly inaudible.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:05 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's built like an institution, wide ADA-compliant corridors and doors,

Did anyone else notice the 2 steps up from the car drop-off to the house? ADA-compliant my ass.
posted by mikelieman at 3:08 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

It definitely feels like a corporate facility - the only thing it needed were relights next to the doorways for that extra-conference-room feeling. I skimmed the video, but saw no obvious way to open the windows, either, which is ... a bold choice for a residence.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:18 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I visited a buddy in Capetown that was housesitting in a much smaller place (only 5 car garage) that was similarly interior decorated, down to green marble and octagonal everything. It was also a slowly decaying relic of the 90's . There were giant tv's, in every bedroom, only they were giant crt tv's. None of us tried them. It had 2 waterfalls, one inside and one out, with a koi pond, and a grand piano at the base of the inner. It was being bought by a saudi prince and they were in the middle of the deal, and my friend got to be the lucky housesitter while the deal slowly wended it's way to completion. Both crazily opulent and tacky as shit. I had a great time staying there. It's been renovated and now available to rent for vacations, if you've got the cash of course.
posted by evilDoug at 5:15 PM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Maybe they could use the house for the sequel to this
https://www.alternateending.com/2021/03/me-you-madness-2021.html
Linton wrote the movie around the location, which she saw elsewhere and loved
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 6:33 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’m confused by its cleanliness and the pristine condition of the furnishings. The guy giving us the tour seemed to present it as a long-abandoned property that had only recently had graffiti and debris removed. But the place is full of mirror-shiny surfaces and fresh linens and verdant plants (presumably artificial?). It doesn’t look like a place that had fallen into ruin and then been cleaned up and staged, it looks like a place that has been taken care of although never updated. Anyone know more?
posted by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED at 8:10 PM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Two other nearby ginormous houses: Pensmore (~72K sq feet) and Primatara (~70K sq feet).
posted by jabah at 8:25 PM on March 20, 2021

The fake plants really clinched this for me. Even more than the statuary or the gross at the time period furniture. Ghastly.

I am not at all sure I would have gotten into an elevator that might not have had inspections or maintenance for decades.
posted by janell at 8:40 PM on March 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

I guess the key to a mirror-heavy design aesthetic is to commit to those mirrors.

Going all in is key. A friend of my family has a washroom in their house, in which the floor is black marble with quartz crystals, the sink, toilet and countertop are black, and every other surface is a mirror.

Including the ceiling.

Sit down on the can and there you are, sitting at the center of a limitless fractal reflection of you, all taking one great synchronized dump there in the infinite void. There is nowhere to look away to, it is no use, you are there as well, an endless presence staring back from every direction, pants around your ankles each and every time into the greatest distance. Try to escape your own horrible infinite pooping gaze by looking up at the ceiling, and there you are, suspended upside down, still pooping into the crystal abyss.

It's a uniquely distressing experience.
posted by mhoye at 6:55 AM on March 21, 2021 [39 favorites]

Our house came with SO MANY weird mirrors. Like on one wall there are two double door closets covered in mirrors dance studio style. Which is nothing compared to the kitchen (mirrors fucking everywhere from countertops up, including between the top cabinets and the ceiling). I have no explanation, and feel compelled to note that there were also a pair of massive wrought-iron gates suspended like a saloon door in between the front hall and living room.

The first time my mother came to see the house, she was clearly grasping for something to say and ended up with "gee, these people must have sure loved looking at themselves."
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 8:16 AM on March 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

Derail, I know, but Pensmore, which is a forty minute drive from Evergreen Crystal Palace, is also bizarre. It's the 13th largest house in the U.S. It's walls are 12" thick, which the owner boasts should allow the house to last "2000 years." If you zoom in on the wikipedia image, you'll see a repeated design element that's a tree with the Hebrew letter Het, although it looks a little like a Tav? I wonder if that stands for Huff, the guy who built it? Or the word Hai, like Tree of Life? Or maybe it is a Tav, as in outlasting everything (Aleph-Tav, like Alpha-Omega)? I liked the comment of this person in a NYT article: “If there was a nuclear thing they could hide a bunch of important people there.”
posted by jabah at 9:21 AM on March 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: Suspended upside down, still pooping into the crystal abyss
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 10:07 AM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Try to escape your own horrible infinite pooping gaze by looking up at the ceiling, and there you are, suspended upside down, still pooping into the crystal abyss.

I once stayed in a fancy hotel where the conference room bathrooms were fully mirrored. Including the men's room urinal surroundings. Choosing a non-confrontational direction to stare when it was crowded was genuinely challenging. "I guess I'll pretend to examine the threads in my coat lining again while I wait for you to finish peeing" was my weird, instinctive approach. I still can't decide whether it was industrial sabotage or the designers genuinely thought it was a good idea. It certainly was more interesting than most bathroom experiences.
posted by eotvos at 10:16 AM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Makes you wonder what would happen if you aimed a laser in there. How far would it bounce?
posted by emjaybee at 10:36 AM on March 21, 2021

Makes you wonder what would happen if you aimed a laser in there. How far would it bounce?

It would bounce long enough to eventually blind you. There is no surface that would not be actively hunting your corneas. Not a friendly home.
posted by Cris E at 1:55 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

The rooms could all have rational ratio sides! Especially if that reduced cost somehow.
posted by clew at 3:19 PM on March 21, 2021

I like it but only because I really want a greenhouse.

There were giant tv's, in every bedroom, only they were giant crt tv's. None of us tried them.

Remember how some big CRT TVs used to pop when they turned on? It would probably give me a heart attack now.
posted by srboisvert at 5:03 PM on March 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

A lot of old CRTs monitors had a “degauss” button that I never understood, but that I assume meant “if someone nearby has a pacemaker or a hearing aid, press this button to murder them”.
posted by mhoye at 5:36 PM on March 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

With only ("only") eleven bedrooms, it wouldn't make much of a hotel, would it? Are there hotels that small?
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:40 PM on March 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Lots of "boutique" hotels/guest houses are under a dozen rooms. They tend to be a lot less impersonal though.

Part of it is the scale of the furnishings; they look like a child's toys scattered about in the spaces they're staged in. Nothing looks like it belongs in any of those rooms.
posted by bonehead at 7:25 AM on March 22, 2021

To paraphrase Not A Wolf: we will never know what it's like to be the kind of rich person who could build a home like that. But depending on how the next few decades go, we may yet get a chance to find out what they taste like.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:35 AM on March 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

This seems like an ideal place to get your exec team drunk at a corp retreat and film some really interesting blackmail material.

Agree that the best uses would be:

- horror movie/game setting
- platinum-price escape room
- Winter Soldier-style psyops retreat
- setting for a Knives Out-style live action murder mystery theatre
- a game show where contestants race to see who can clean up the most dust/fingerprints/glass smears in 30-second intervals
- the world's least challenging Easter egg hunt
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 9:52 AM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Home is where you're trapped in endless 1980s Burdines. With a gun range.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:19 AM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

God, grant me the confidence of whoever made the decision that allowing these dudes to tour this building so they could make this video would somehow increase the possibility of a sale.
posted by box at 10:57 AM on March 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

God, grant me the confidence of whoever made the decision that allowing these dudes to tour this building so they could make this video would somehow increase the possibility of a sale.

To be fair, the Venn diagram of "people who might choose to live in an $80,000,000 emerald glass house in Missouri" and "people who watch YouTube videos about weird houses" is quite possibly a pair of circles that do not touch at all.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:14 AM on March 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Looking through BigBankz videos, it seems he was into generalized vlogging up until about a year ago, he went all in on wandering around locations that are almost always "ABANDONED" and sometimes have "EVERYTHING left behind."

The actual wandering around doesn't seem that hard, but he somehow keeps finding new locations about once a week? At least 13 of which are various "mansions?"
posted by RobotHero at 11:20 AM on March 22, 2021

He says in the intro that he was hired by the Emerald Glass House people to make a real estate marketing video and that he got permission to also do one of his YouTube videos.

That seems to explain both how he finds the buildings and why mansion owners are allowing him in.

Property owners are hiring him to do the swooping drone shots of the exteriors and the professionally shot tour videos of the interiors.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:26 AM on March 22, 2021

Wait a second, someone built this enormous glass house in Stone County??

A county that is, presumably, full of throwable stones?
posted by evidenceofabsence at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2021 [10 favorites]

As far as I can tell, the $80M figure doesn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. As the listing says, this place has never been listed before so we have no sales history. I'd also note that the listing doesn't have an asking price but a "call for more details" instead. The property tax assessment is, of course, pretty far away from $80M but that's not unusual, I think. The building itself is pretty much sui generis so I dunno what kind of comparable sales you can pull for it. At just under 25K sq. ft., $80M would put it at $3,200 per sq. ft.; I have no idea if that's even close to realistic. Also, given its rather... err... idiosyncratic design, I'd imagine that would knock a point or two off of asking.
posted by mhum at 3:33 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Cost $6M to build from what I read.

Quite a large appreciation for such a trash building.
posted by Windopaene at 5:17 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

That building looks like Cyberdine Systems from Terminator 2 and I hope it ends up the same way.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:07 PM on March 22, 2021 [1 favorite]