Real Estate porn! What is your present fave house/apartment/residence?

I'm surprised they can't find another person who wants to use the place on the 2-3 days they aren't there. A cleaning service could come in on the exchange days and clean. Closets could be split and personal items kept in separate chests/bins.

Of course it's understandable if they don't want to go that way, but it's an idea. I would only do this if the 3 day a week person exactly fit my needs of sleeping there 2 nights, and no mucking about.

My next door neighbors rent out their entire house maybe 2 or 3 times a year for a week at a time for music/sports events. They take this time for a quick vacation themselves. Apparantly works out quite well for them financially.

What if the person wants to or has to spend the week end in town?
There is a big difference in renting out now and then when you want to and have to leave your living area at a certain time every week.

Below is the one I like most from this link tsar. It's the only one I see that does not involve OCD cleanliness, and provides a sleeping space one can actually access when you're tired. Put some non skid material on those steps/drawers and you're in business.

Well, obviously that is one of the considerations that would make that a deal breaker. Duh.

From my understanding lordy said those people had a home elsewhere.

Like everything else in life saab, it takes consideration, tradeoffs, and not being a self entitled whiny butt.

Wah....the person staying here is covering most of my mortgage....but I want to stay here tooooooo......wah.

No one said anything about being obligated to do this. It's an idea to consider. You wouldn't do it, some people would.

There are people who have obligations through their work and might have to stay longer than planned. That is all I wanted to say.
Do not understand what that has to do with being a self entitled whiny butt.
Not once did I say anything about what I would prefer to do or not.

I presently subscribe to the paper edition of Dwell. Enjoyable read and pretty cheap.

I have never heard a single poor person turn down a steak and/or lobster dinner. If you insist on using a silly anecdote for whatever reason you want to turn this cheesy art thread into a political one, you can maybe use the analogy of a person who is allergic to chocolate while claiming he/she doesn't like chocolate in the first place thusly isn't missing out on the consumption of chocolate even if he/she could safely eat it.

I subscribed back when it first showed up, I think circa 2001 or so. I remember liking it then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwell_(magazine)

I liked the first one best.

Myself, I lived for several months in a two room place, total sq ft = 250, in a kind of artists' old building in Venice, CA. Bathroom down the hall.. added a raised loft.

Then the opposite happened, a pal and I leased a 3000 square foot place, the top floor of an old Eagles Lodge.

I liked the second one a lot better, but that first little place was right smack at the beach.
here -

Hey, it's been fancied up since I lived there.

I remember taking my family to Hearst Castle and seeing all of those extravagant workmanship, and the smaller house on the property where Hearst invited VIP's to stay.

Unfortunately, Hearst was a racial bigot.

Worrying about something like that if you've decided to go through with a plan like that makes you a whiney butt.

If you have to stay extra days, you go to a hotel. You can afford it because someone is paying you rent. That's one of the things you would consider.

Do you really think you needed to point that out, as if someone making a big decision that that wouldn't have considered it?

My fave house would have been the one I would have designed by myself - with the help of an architect that had the similar ideas about space use and minimizing squares and rectangles. A smaller house that will accommodate the needs of my wife and I with one guest bedroom with bath - preferably at a location that has some open space to view nature every day as well as access to some good shops and restaurants and pubs - like a college town. A place where there's a good mix of young, middle aged, and old.

But, alas, my wife loves it here in the middle of Silicon Valley where we are close to family and friends.

My Dorset friend actually tried this (sharing/split time) for a short while, but found that a good friend/colleague when occasionally socialising quickly became a pain in the neck when she was a flatmate.
Luckily it was only a short trial and both parties decided to do their own thing.
Her shoebox is only affordable because she's at the arse end of the buiding, and her tiny porthole looks out over traffic. If it was the posh side (Thames view) she would have had to pay four or five times the price.

Saying that, if she was buying her shoebox today she would never be able to afford it as prices have gone absolutely crazy in the ten or so years she's owned it.

She has a terraced cottage in Lyme Regis (South Coast) with a sea view, which at the time was worth about double the price of her shoebox in London. The situation is now reversed.
How young people can even think about getting on the property ladder (even in a shoebox) in Central London nowadays, gawd only knows.

How NOT to sell your house: Hilarious collection of world's worst estate agent photos (so would YOU want to live here?)



Andy Donaldson stumbled across a variety of awful estate agent pictures while looking for a flat in London in 2013
He decided to set up a blog to share the pictures with friends and after it went viral he decided to turn it into a book
Pictures include a house with a toilet in the utility cupboard and a bathroom with a rug and armchair in the middle
Family pets also featured in some photographs including a dog and a huge pig and some residents appeared too.



For instance:








Many more here.......

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2947277/Terrible-estate-agent-pictures-homes-dodgy-decor-random-animals-bizarre-furnishings.html

Had to laugh about the pictures.
Did you notice the one showing the end of a bed it is just after the picture of a kitchen
Caught short: This man appears to have been unable to hold it in as he demonstrated the use of the bedroom's en-suite bathroom (far right)

Hi, all. I stopped posting on this thread because I dropped reading my favorite newspaper's real estate section. That was in the free part of the San Francisco Chronicle, but they renovated that part of the newspaper to non-likeability, to me, and I don't do the pay part.
I read a lot of other newspapers, but that was the one I enjoyed for the real estate region I like a lot, and also for many comments on the real estate by the readers.

Today I ran across one of the sponsored ads on yahoo and actually clicked on it, since it was going to show the Clooney Alamuddin place in England. Hey, I thought when I saw the aerial shot, Lordy might have a thing or two to say about this -

I enjoyed looking at the photos, lot for me to complain about. I wonder if this is the before..

http://www.lonny.com/George+Clooney+and+Amal+Alamuddin's+English+Country+House/articles/MZE155ePclY/Mr+and+Mrs

Some people do have priviledges and a lovely house
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/italian-mayor-trespassers-clooney-villa-fined-article-1.2174798

Were you referring to the solar panels on the roof, Osso?

When these were first introduced about ten years ago, it was a bit like the sattelite dish awfulness to me, but over the years as these panels have become much more efficient, and energy costs have soared, I can just about see the attraction, as long as some thought goes into placement, if at all possible.
Looking at the Clooney pad, it looks as if these panels are on the internal angles of the roof, thereby making them all but invisible from the ground.

I am also positive that these are the 'before' shots, as would have been included in the sales brochure.
Clooney likes his privacy it would seem, so don't hold your breath for any after shots.


As far as the rest of it is concerned, I love the internal bones of the building, but maybe not the decor here and there. I absolutely hate the marble bathroom as it reminds me of a hospital sluice room. Yuk.

The formal terrace garden is all very nice but not my cup of tea, as I tend to go informal and much more natural in borders. Gertrude Jekyll style is much more to my taste than somewhere that has been clipped and made regimental.


Getting back to the solar panels....this is an interesting article about Castle Howard, the setting for Brideshead Revisited.....so as you can see, even the aristos are saving a bob or two when they can.
There was a TV follow up programme which showed that Castle Howard has gone further down that route, including solar panels, and now pay virtually nothing to keep the house at a warm temperature.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/geothermalenergy/7970859/Brideshead-house-Castle-Howard-goes-green.html

Zaha Hadid's High Line Condos Have Finally Arrived

I'd missed the posts after mine, baaaad followup, so now I'm going back to look at what I didn't like about the newer Clooney Alamuddin abode. Likely it was the interior decor that got to me, not the building itself.

Tsar, didn't know Hadid had designed for the High Line route, or maybe I did and have forgotten. I've slightly read about her difficulties in Tokyo, mostly agreeing with her detractors on that one, at least at the time I was reading about it.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jul/17/the-troubled-history-of-zaha-hadids-tokyo-olympic-stadium-project