My husband and I call those kinds of abodes “houses for rich people who don’t like each other.”
WTH would we do with 8500 sq ft of space?
Hide from the rest of the family.
I used to live in the Houston area. One day we happened to be driving through a neighborhood with enormous homes, and saw that one of them (
this one) was holding an open house. We jumped at the chance to see what people do with more than 8,000 square feet.
A few things I remember:
1) a cobblestone floor in the kitchen. As in, the nasty, shake-your-fillings-loose type of cobblestone you'd expect to see in a Sherlock Holmes movie.
2) a massive, T-shaped island in the kitchen which looked like it had never been used. Work triangle? What's that?
3) a powder room with three(!) different kinds of wallpaper, including leopard print
4) a bonus/media/whatever room upstairs with matching Route 66-themed upholstery and wallpaper
5) three different types of hardwood floors visible from the front door
6) a gaudy master en-suite with gold(?) plated fixtures
7) five or six separate A/C condensers outside, and single-paned windows. In Houston. I can't imagine how higher their electricity bill was, even without the pool
8) each bedroom had its own private bathroom
9) oh, and the pool was dirty, the grout in the marble tile floor was chipped and cracked, and you could tell the walls had received many coats of paint
When we walked out, I remarked to my wife "It feels like a house built for six people to lead separate lives." It felt like a house not to be lived in. It originally was listed for $1.3 million in 2008 (not a great time to try to sell a big house), and dropped as far as $745k. The county tax records don't seem to indicate the selling price, unfortunately.