In my former life employed in architectural practice, I once worked with a client who wanted a wine cellar below his newly remodelled kitchen.
Sadly for him, the ground conditions meant digging out and building below the existing house was prohibitively expensive. In the end, we settled on a nicely-appointed and temperature controlled room, accessed by a short flight of stone steps (which meant it was, ultimately, below ground level, even if only by a few hundred millimetres).
Jeff Bezos, it turns out, has had a similar sort of wine room installed in his mansion in Washington, D.C. That, however, is where any similarities end with the house in Cheshire that I worked on.
My wife has just finished a book about the influence that Amazon exerts, especially on decision-making across towns and cities in America where communities are desperate to benefit from the new jobs that investment by Amazon represents. There was much more to it than that, and it shocked her so much that she insisted I’ve got to read it.
At one point, she read to me the scale of renovation that Bezos undertook on this Washington mansion. As well as a wine room, there is a large whiskey cellar, a ballroom and 25 bathrooms. It was a dizzying list of rooms and features to try and take in, so I found myself looking for more information about it on Google.
And, hey presto, here is a news article from 2018 on the Washingtonian website, complete with floor plans and other drawings.
I’ll never understand the driven personality (or the desperation for validation; whichever may be the case) that leads to the accrual of such wealth, and results in displays of status like having a house with 25 bathrooms. I listened to my wife and I read the article I’ve linked to and, for the most part, I considered it nothing other than obscene.
A tiny bit of me, though - the architectural technologist who still has an appreciation for construction drawings - can’t help but enjoy (if guiltily) scouring those plans, reading them for little details, and wondering what it’s like when money is no object on a project.