Last Friday, as I waited for Ian to be released from school, I chatted with the other parents by the playground. One woman said that her cousin was a landscaper who was making a fortune decorating the houses in a nearby, rich town. He charged $20,000 for the deluxe treatment, which involved putting up lights on the house, setting up the trees indoors, and then taking everything down after Christmas. We laughed for a while at those crazy rich people until the little guys came running out of the side door.
I guess that shelling out big bucks for glow-in-the-dark homes is not that unusual, because two days later the Times reported on it. They really do have to be the first on the block to report these important tidbits.
Among his more ambitious customers was a man who lighted virtually everything on his property in Bethel, Conn. Not only did Mr. Fancher’s company light the house, the garage and virtually every tree, but it also created a display over a waterfall so that it looked as if the lights were spilling over with the water.
“It would take six guys about four to five weeks to do his whole place, inside and out,” Mr. Fancher said, noting that it cost the customer at least $20,000 for the display and nearly $2,000 more a month to light it. “The first year we blew the transformer out because it was too many lights.”
The Home Section today reports on perhaps the craziest rich person yet. The Times alternates between telling his story with its usual adoration and expressing some concern that this man may be off his rocker. This guy spent months looking for the perfect nickel plated door knobs for his mansion in New Jersey.
So it is with a great sense of expectation that one awaits a look at the latches of his English Tudor-style home and horse farm — the metallic tail that wagged the architectural dog, as it were. The anticipation is heightened by the knowledge that each of them required three different companies and four different craftsmen: designer, caster, machinist and fitter-finisher.
At last, they are unveiled: a clean silvery line, devoid of squiggles. And as so often happens, life is like a song — in this case, “Is That All There Is?”
Oh, Mr. Baxter, that’s it? This simple hunk of hardware took months to create and was the impetus for building a $3 million foundry?
As the gap between rich and poor expands, our only consolation is that we’re left with these excellent stories.
Apt. 11d 
If we can draw any comparisons with the Gilded Age, we may have other lovely consolations to look forward to.
It’s just a matter of time before one of these folks founds a new school, a la Vanderbilt or Stanford. “Ballmer State”, anyone?
I really enjoy touring the giant houses after they’re turned into museums. Wait, that could take a few decades.
In Chicago at least these rich folk invariably end up sponsoring a wing to the Art Institute, or perhaps the new lion house at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
See??? We’re all TOTALLY BENEFITING from non-progressive taxation!
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Buddy of mine is a landscaper, in NoVa. He told me the phone stopped ringing three months ago. Same with the $80000 granite counter kitchen guys. Prices are not rising, and folks no longer can fool themselves into thinking the kitchen, or the mini-Versailles landscape is FREE, roll it into the payments for the five years you are in the house and get the $80000 back on sale. Houses here are sitting on the market a long time before they sell, and when they go it is for less than the asking.
Maybe New Jersey is different, and the hedge fund guys have invented the perpetual motion machine, but my own guess is that we are heading towards a less, shall we say, irrationally exuberant time, and that a lot of these homes of wealth will look like dated white elephants in five years.
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Based on what Dave S and the housing bubble bloggers say, now may be the perfect time to do a (modest) remodeling project. There are a lot of cancelled sales for new homes, developments are being back-burnered, and people who normally are up to their ears in work may be a lot more willing to work on your little project.
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Building materials should be less expensive too, they say.
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It depends on where you are. Our housing bubble hasn’t burst here (it was more of a recovery than a crazy bubble). My university just delayed the start of a slew of construction projects because of costly materials and too-high bids.
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I went to look at that article and I have to say: I never get the point of a small pool. You can’t do laps, you can’t dive in, maybe you can do hand stands but your legs will hit the side of the pool when you’re coming down.
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The High Price of Holiday Spirit:
The rich folks are hiring specialists charging $20-30,000 to put up and take down their holiday decorations. (11D)…
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