I flew over this home today in my gyrocopter and took these pictures. It is the 22000 foot home that I built a freestanding curved stairway in two years ago.
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Looks like a well build McMansion. Ostentatious, profligate and wasteful unless they happen to be housing a battalion of troops. Typically these places are occupied by not more than three people. They tend to rattle around like a dried pea in a tin can.
I sometimes get called to do electrical work on such structures and find that the family actually lives in one corner of a wing or even in the grandmother suit out back. One HO told me he hadn't been in some of the rooms for almost a year. A waste. But a waste that is easy to brag about and impress the neighbors with.
Ah, shoot, give the rich folks a break. They aren't too snooty to have a trampoline in clear view or to park their van in the drive. They can't be all that bad.
(Second glass of wine and feeling fiesty.)"A completed home is a listed home."
4Lorn1: You are exactly right....three people live in this monstrosity. You would not believe the electrical subpanel room in the basement. This guy is one of the top computer guys in the world.
Edited 5/25/2003 7:20:30 AM ET by Stan Foster
Stan
Quit a house, whats that drive-way done in, looks like the roof?
How do you keep from falling out of the gyro while taking the pics!
Doug
Gyrocopter eh? Are you the guy dropping buckets of golf balls on OJ's roof?
Its supposed to sound like world war three!
Turtleneck
The roof, is it slate?
House doesn't look all that big to me but they should learn how to display the American flag.
I am intersted in the roof eave detail. Don't see too many gull wing roof lines.
Excellence is its own reward!
Really! Stars should be on the right side and the flag should not touch the roof, you would at least think they could afford a flagpole ?
Bob
"Rather be a hammer than a nail"
Um... the stars are on the right side, it's right.
Here's a link: http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/flagetiq.html#1
Thanks Mike- I stand correctedBob
"Rather be a hammer than a nail"
I heard recently that the vast majority of US flags are not the right proportions; apparently the official proportions are 10:19, and the closest to this that you can normally find are flags made in Canada, that are 1:2.
I can't speak to the veracity of this comment, but if true, it's funny.
By the way, Dinosaur, where did you get the plans of that chateau, or did you wing it?
Where did you get the plans for that castle, or did you wing it?
No, we didn't wing it. The darned thing's a lot more complicated than it looks. In fact, we probably had more 'design conferences' on that project than I usually do with a client for a complete house.
The tower was the tricky part; the body of the château itself is pretty straightforward. For the tower, I built six 8-sided 'ring trusses' out of KD SPF 2x4's, biscuiting the joints and then plating them as well. There's a central post in the tower made from a 4x4 with the 4 corners mitre-ripped off so that I wound up with an eight-sided post. I bored holes for the rungs of the ladder in the flat faces of the post, spiraling upwards on 1' centers. I think there's 7 or 8 rungs; I don't remember now for sure.
Then I mitre-ripped the corners off one flat side of six 2x4's so that the remaining shape fit the inside angle of each corner on the ring trusses. These became the 'studs' in the tower wall. One ring truss was put in as a sole plate; the rest were nailed at 2' intervals up the 'studs'. Once they were all in place, I cut out the section of trusses # 2,3,4,5 & 6 where the tower joined the rest of the castle, and nailed the ends to the frame of the box. Then I put in the central post with the rungs stuck loosely into the holes, and, using about 4 pairs of hands, lined up the outboard ends of the rungs into holes pre-drilled in the inside faces of the 'studs'. I pinned each rung in place with 18-gauge air nails. Once the roof was on, it stabilized the central post, and everything was nice and tight.
Those '180-foot timbers' are actually green 1x6's, and I've let it weather for a couple of years now. Last time I saw him (just before my wife stole him a month ago), 'Ryan Hood' was talking about wanting to paint it. We were trying to decide what colour.
Dinosaur
I agree with the comments of the house being incredibly 'blah'. But, then again, we american's go for size over substance most of the time.
Now, if I had 22,000...I could finally get my indoor hockey rink!
I agree the outside is kind of blah...except you do not see the serpentine windows that are on the front of the home. It is an awesome view from the top of the curved stairway. It looks exactly like the serpentine "Windows" logo that he invented. He incorporated that theme into his home.
I wish I were allowed to take pictures of the inside except for the ones that I took secretively. The inside is simply stunning. All mahogany trim..gigantic mult stepped curved crown moulding on the walls. Over $1,000,000.00 was spent on interior trim alone. All the corners were also radiused. The kitchen was 3000 square foot with floors made from cobblestone that had been walked on in Jerusalem for centuries.
Each floor was 6 inches of concrete. The home was heated by geothermal that had a huge room that contained huge water tanks. Each room had hidden color tv cams in the crown moulding that got their view through a very small hole that looked like an unputtied nail hole.
This guy is a genius and gets $2500/hour consulting fees to Microsoft for him to debug the Windows program that he invented. It is well known that he purposely wrote in programming errors that only he knew how to get around. He averages ten hours a week on the phone with them. That is some good sidemoney..
This guy is extraordinary and has powerful people in high government places. I personally saw him call in and acquire a live satellite shot of his estate from one of his friends in the government. It was downloaded to him as soon as the satellite went over..and I could make out my truck in the photo proving to me it was live.
The stairs in his home required 404 Enkeboll balusters that cost me $121 each. The 22 newels were $1100.00 each. The total materials for just his stairways was $97000.00 and that was without the labor.
The pictures do not do this place justice. I will never be in a home like that again.
This is one of the pictures of the curved stairway I built. It is obviously a cluttered picture..never did get back to that home for a finished shot. I have posted this one before. It is 153 inches floor to floor..freestanding. The security is so tight,,that the only pictures I can get now is from the air.
I for one think it is cool. I love that kind of stuff.Who Dares Wins.
Those are some beautiful stairs. Very nice work is a huge understatement.
Regards,
Tim Ruttan
I picked up on that too Piffin, Stan needs to take a bullhorn with him so he can point out stuff like that to people as he passes by.
Stan to home owner as he hovers outside their dining room window: "Hey you, yea you' you have the flag improperly displayed." Yes, you, You want to go fix it? I'll wait here and watch. You need to water the lawn to."Who Dares Wins.
Really!
They've got as much class as people who wear underwear on the outside of their clothes..
Excellence is its own reward!
LMAO, After 9-11 one of my nephews who is in R.O.T.C. used to shake his head at all the new flag owners. His delima was finding a way to be polite about walking up to a fourty year old adults house and explaining the proper way to display the flag.Who Dares Wins.
I don't know how to break this to you all but the field of stars is always in the upper left as viewed from the "public", or most observable side. Doesn't matter if the flag is being flown horizontally or vertically. Your right though that it shouldn't rest on the roof. I too often get steamed at people who wish to appear patriotic by flying a flag, and then disrespect it by doing so improperly. I learned my flag etiquette in the boy scouts 35 years ago and I'm continually amazed at the number of people who display our flag incorrectly. BUIC
Edited 5/26/2003 12:00:54 AM ET by BUIC
Thought it was just me that felt that way. But the improtant thing is that they display it.
http://www.reuben.org/makingit/archive/mi010923.asp
do me a favour and look closer. Tell me there isn't something perverse about the way the colours are displayed..
Excellence is its own reward!
Unbelievable, this guy displays an American flag on his property, that probably can only be viewed from the air and something possibly less than 1/100 of one percent of us do,then gets criticized for the way it done.
piffin... looked at your photo, it was too blurry or pixelized to see anything clearly. Went back to the originals in the first post, but couldn't make out anything unusual BUIC
The stripes are horizontal on that flag but the proportions are as tho is is hanging vertical.
So I assumed that they have a larger flag than what we see but folded the left and right halves in under. Why - I can't imagine.
Then I got to counting the stripes because they didn't look normal either. It appears to me that there are 17 stripes running horizontally on that flag but the flag is hanging vertically. Something is wrong..
Excellence is its own reward!
artwickc.jpg has got some sort of optical illusion going on that makes it look like the stripes are horizontal.
artwicka.jpg is much clearer, the flag looks appropriate as far as this Canuck can tell; it seems to have 13 stripes, couldn't count the # of stars. ;-)
Regards,
Tim Ruttan
So it is. I stand corrected!.
Excellence is its own reward!
The field is always to the left when hanging down like that....however i doubt that the flag is lighted at night if it stays out. (flags at night should always be lighted, if they arent they are to be brought down) Most people dont have the Flag ettiquette they should. But the HOs do have some flag violations :)
THe only thing i could say about that house is nice house, but they need to hire a landscaper. That landscaping lacks in ALL areas....i actually think the lack of good landscaping takes away from that house... A house like that should have the landscaping to match the house....
Edited 5/27/2003 8:59:18 AM ET by WmP
Stan, yer such a fibber...eyeballing yer pics shows that that place ain't more than 21950 sq ft. ;-)
Flying in your whirlybird must be a blast! Although I'm surprised that a guy that rich didn't have any guards posted to shoot down low overhead flights...
Regards,
Tim
Okay, I see it. But frankly, your gyrocopter looks like more fun.
I gave up building little places like that years ago. Now, I concentrate on traditional medieval châteaux. Like the one shown here. This photo was taken from my personal space shuttle during the re-entry glide, at an altitude of 85,000 feet, just to give you an idea of the scale. The trees around it are 1400 years old, at least. And--no fooling--there's a spiral staircase in that tower.
Sorry it's black&white; I took the photo for my brochure, and I can't afford to print colour....
dinosaur
Awesome dude...where'd ya find those 180' timbers for the tower walls?
SamT
It's a secret--I've got a special deal with the lumberyard and a loooonnnnggggg-bed pick-up truck. Only thing I'll say is this: You can be sure as heck they're not LSLs.
By the way, I forgot to include a pic of the H.O. on that job. Here it is (I hope!):
Dinosaur
Building yesterday for tomorrow....
Cute kid.Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, Professionals build the Titanic.
Stan,
I"m not an architect, but.. .something seems to be missing, and I don't mean gables. Something about that house just say's "blah." Clearly they had money, but not much else.
Neat pics though. Still waiting for the FAA to come out with the Sport Pilot Rules. Then I can do the same thing.
Jon