A place to hang your cape and anti-telepathy helment
February 8, 2014 9:01 AM   Subscribe

 
Asking price: 3 million.


Rueful New Yorker Sigh.
posted by The Whelk at 9:03 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


So many spiders in that house.

Just waiting for me to get comfortable, then whammo!

Touching my stuff and being creepy.
posted by Lord_Pall at 9:05 AM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


Hey check this out: the Joshua Tree Giant Hairy Scorpion, which blends right in with the open decor.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:10 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


That's exactly the kind of house I'd expect artist Beverly Dolittle to live in.
posted by hippybear at 9:11 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Not cool man, not cool.

Now i cant buy that house even more.

I mean, aside from not having 3 million dolars and the hordes of tarantulas.
posted by Lord_Pall at 9:11 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


So many spiders in that house.

I was thinking more scorpions, but, yeah. It's sitting there unoccupied for ten years, and then when the owners finally move in, they move out almost immediately? Hmm.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:12 AM on February 8, 2014


Asking price: 3 million.

Funny to see a local listing on MeFi. $3 mil is nothing. Here's Bob Hope's UFO house in Palm Springs going for $34 mil.
posted by phaedon at 9:15 AM on February 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


It said they moved in in 'the early aughts' which I am assuming is 2001-2004 so they could have lived there for ten years. That's not exactly 'almost immediately'...
posted by Brockles at 9:17 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Nice house. Gonna be a shame when James Bond blows that shit up.
posted by briank at 9:18 AM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Awww, this got all tragic for me now.

Uninhabited for 10 years.

All those tarantulas and scorpions find out someone is gonna move in.
The scorpions are in charge of snacks and beverages. They spend all their allowance on a nice punchbowl and ladle, get the tables setup with whimsical tablecloths. No gordettos, for the new guests, the make chex mix by hand (which is hard when you've got tiny claws).

The Tarantulas spend a week making a "Welcome Home" banner, coloring it in with finger(ish) paints and crayons. They blow up balloons (also hard).

And they're all so happy. No more living alone in a big empty house, they're going to have friends, be part of a family.

New owners walk in, all of them yell "SURPRISE" and everyone waves their arms (claws) in the air.

And then the owners run away screaming.

And the scorpions sit there, sad and dejected with an unused punch bowl they spent all their allowance on.

And the Tarantulas sit there, forlorn with their banner, one end hanging loose, surrounded by flat crayons.

And so much uneaten chex mix.
posted by Lord_Pall at 9:20 AM on February 8, 2014 [78 favorites]




mauve
posted by phaedon at 9:26 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Flintstones meet Jetsons. Genius!
posted by IndigoJones at 9:43 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Reminds me of the buildings from the original Planet of the Apes.
posted by octothorpe at 9:51 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Someone compare this to what you can buy in Vancouver...
posted by Napierzaza at 9:51 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Sorry, if I want a rustic villain lair I want more James Mason in North By Northwest. All the better for lounging with a turtleneck with my Completely Hetrosexual Henchman.
posted by The Whelk at 9:53 AM on February 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


Also the interiors make me feel like I'm visiting a planet with the Enterprise away team.
posted by The Whelk at 9:56 AM on February 8, 2014 [14 favorites]


MetaFilter timeshare. 3 million isn't that much considering a bunch of people. we could totally goddamn do it. Who knows anything about timeshares?
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:03 AM on February 8, 2014 [13 favorites]


Probably full of sun spiders. Big six-inch suckers that rear back on their hind legs and track you as you move around.

And surrounded by ants. And coyotes. And production crews filming car commercials and music videos.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:05 AM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Also the interiors make me feel like I'm visiting a planet with the Enterprise away team.

Yes. It would be one of the ones where the natives at first appear to have achieved a utopia, but the away team start to receive ominous hints that their society holds a terrible secret.
posted by strangely stunted trees at 10:05 AM on February 8, 2014 [14 favorites]


I would contribute fifteen dollars minus the cost of airfare to this timeshare plan.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:07 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I would just gaze out the windows with that Planet of the Apes syncopated drum music playing. Martini in hand, natch.
posted by Dr. Zira at 10:12 AM on February 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


MetaFilter timeshare. 3 million isn't that much considering a bunch of people. we could totally goddamn do it. Who knows anything about timeshares?

You get August.
posted by srboisvert at 10:19 AM on February 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


That is a beautiful house. I often don't like that style of architecture, but this one I like a lot. And the interior is also beautiful. Not very comfortable, I think, but stunning.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:23 AM on February 8, 2014


Who knows anything about timeshares?

$20, same as in town.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:24 AM on February 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


From the outside it looks like a place where the guy who owns the quarry Fred Flintstone works at would live in.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:38 AM on February 8, 2014


Does it have water?
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:46 AM on February 8, 2014


Morrowind?
posted by TwelveTwo at 11:10 AM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


I often don't like that style of architecture, but this one I like a lot. And the interior is also beautiful. Not very comfortable, I think, but stunning.

I'm all meh about the architecture, but I love the balcony, the artwork, and the view, especially. The interior stinks. Very unwelcoming, more a place someone buys as their second or third home for the status, and then stays there two or three weeks out of the year. Gonna be cold and bleak in winter--JT does get cold, and miserable hot in summer. Not to mention the isolation.

Now if I had my own private plane and a personal FedEx delivery driver....
posted by BlueHorse at 11:28 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I often don't like that style of architecture, but this one I like a lot. And the interior is also beautiful. Not very comfortable, I think, but stunning.

I'm with you on this, to a T. I think the interior decor needs some softening, maybe some bright fabrics or something, but this really is an astonishingly beautiful home in a style I don't usually care for.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:43 AM on February 8, 2014


Cost? No. Man. Can. Say.

Asking price: 3 million.

Oh, right then.

Looks like a cross between Tony Stark's place and the underground Skywalker residence on Tatooine.
posted by Smedleyman at 11:51 AM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


This architecture manages to be both quite strikingly beautiful and, to me, a little repellant. I both admire and recoil from all those shapes overlapping like scales. I can imagine the Xenomorph from Alien relaxing there, its feet up on that glass-topped coffee table, puffing a pipe and enjoying its retirement.

Sorry, if I want a rustic villain lair I want more James Mason in North By Northwest. All the better for lounging with a turtleneck with my Completely Hetrosexual Henchman.

I must have seen North by Northwest at a crucial point in my sexual development because that image made me go a little funny inside yes please hellllllllo Martin Landau James Mason puppy pile.

I admit to having stopped working last night despite my deadline just so I could watch a young Martin Landau play a cruel gunslinger on a "Twilight Zone" episode.
posted by Elsa at 11:56 AM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


(I'm writing a lot about Hitchcock lately, and I may have yelled "KISS KISS KISS" at Landau and Mason several times the last time I watched NbNW.)
posted by Elsa at 11:58 AM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


I like Bob Hope's old house.

I didn't think this house was as fabulous as I hoped. It does not compliment its surroundings enough to be all that interesting, and at the same time isn't enough of a contrast to be interesting approached from the other extreme.

Thing I liked the least was the single rock "integrated" with the terrace railing, that just seemed so tacked on. The house itself also looks like one of those places which, in 35 years, will take the equivalent of $100K a year today to just keep structurally sound.

I don't think the interior is a success, either. The melding of "high end normal furniture" with rocks isn't as cool as I think the designer thought it would be. I'm not sure I've ever seen a house whose interior can best be described as starting from "cave" have a really successful interior design.
posted by maxwelton at 12:01 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


I have always wanted a cave house myself, having read Swiss Family Robinson at a formative age, but that house is indeed way too much first Trek secret dystopia setting for me.
posted by winna at 12:09 PM on February 8, 2014


If you'd like a smaller scale, more austere version of this place (I sure would!), you can substitute Albert Frey's place, which is unfortunately not for sale but could more easily be replicated at another location.

Ken Kellogg was local to me, so there's a lot of his stuff around here. It's usually fairly interesting, but this place looks like it could have easily been done by John Lautner, perhaps more successfully.
posted by LionIndex at 12:11 PM on February 8, 2014


I had a look last week- the view is lovely, and the desert air is quite refreshing, but there really isn't enough room to land my jump-jet, and the local power grid is somewhat unsuited to my...requirements.
posted by Alexander J. Luthor at 12:25 PM on February 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


I was impressed initially while looking at the photos. Then when I saw the closer shots, particularly the interiors, I decided that I dislike that house. The exterior looks like something that Frank Lloyd Wright would see just before he got a migraine, and it was a bad move to hire an interior designer from the Frank Herbert school.
posted by Mayor Curley at 12:26 PM on February 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


According to comments at the link they actually did shoot scenes for the first new Trek movie there.
posted by kmz at 12:42 PM on February 8, 2014


Why do I click on EVERY LINK about spiders? Why do I do that to myself?
posted by elmer benson at 1:18 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Why do I click on EVERY LINK about spiders? Why do I do that to myself?

You, too? I read that thing, thought hard about Big six-inch suckers that rear back on their hind legs and track you as you move around, said out loud to myself "prob'ly don't click that, 'kay?," aaaaaaand then clicked.
posted by Elsa at 1:21 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


"I'm not sure I've ever seen a house whose interior can best be described as starting from "cave" have a really successful interior design."

Well, I think I'd love to live inside of one of Ra Paulette's works (previously), particularly this one. I'd decorate it like I would the typical New Mexican adobe home — ranch-style furniture, generally minimalist. Like some of these that come up in a google image search.

But this home is different. It's not so much "cave" as it is all about marbled rock and steel and such. I dunno.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:40 PM on February 8, 2014


The interior definitely is not as good as the exterior, and with all those open gaps and direct sunlight, I can see the rock insulating effectively in summer, but in winter it would surely be bitterly cold. I also didn't notice a lot of lights. I mean, those are real estate shots, so presumably taken to flatter, but much of the interior seemed quite dark.
posted by smoke at 1:43 PM on February 8, 2014




The interior reminds me of Moya. I demand Chiana and Dargo cosplay.
posted by Brocktoon at 2:06 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


There's a hallway where the floor curves up into the wall.

Evilness indeed.
posted by yohko at 2:32 PM on February 8, 2014


I love it so much. It just needs some staircase slides and outdoor beach-themed fire pits, and it will be perfect.
posted by KGMoney at 2:37 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Video, in case you missed it. And coffee table. It's like this house was built out of Tremors monster parts.
posted by phaedon at 3:02 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Also the interiors make me feel like I'm visiting a planet with the Enterprise away team.

Yes. It would be one of the ones where the natives at first appear to have achieved a utopia, but the away team start to receive ominous hints that their society holds a terrible secret.


And Wesley Crusher tramples the flowers while playing space football!
posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:08 PM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


I don't expect you to talk, Mr. Bond, I expect you to refinance!
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:09 PM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


oh god this is lovely
posted by PinkMoose at 5:08 PM on February 8, 2014


$3M? Why so cheap? It's the same price as this totally normal 4 bedroom/2 bathroom house.
posted by GuyZero at 5:23 PM on February 8, 2014


location location location integratron
posted by lalochezia at 5:30 PM on February 8, 2014


GuyZero: "$3M? Why so cheap? It's the same price as this totally normal 4 bedroom/2 bathroom house."

Totally normal except for costing 10 times as much as any normal person could afford.
posted by octothorpe at 5:31 PM on February 8, 2014


I hate to be all, "in Toronto, blah, blah, blah..." but christ it costs a ton to buy a house here and in winter, it feels like we're living in a frozen recycling bin.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:32 PM on February 8, 2014


Beautiful, it looks like something Gehn would live in. I've daydreamed about owning a fantastical house since before I can remember, though as has been suggested, they're probably better for visiting.

Man, I should have stuck with the whole architecture infatuation.
posted by lucidium at 5:45 PM on February 8, 2014


Rueful New Yorker Sigh.

Sounds perfect for supervilliany if it already makes you rue the day you heard of it.
posted by ckape at 6:34 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


It's a beautiful house, but not cosy in the slightest. I'd love to visit with Roger Moore in his safari suit.
posted by arcticseal at 9:14 PM on February 8, 2014


I'd seen this before but not the night shots. They're spectacular. But yeah, this is not a place I can imagine wanting to live.
posted by immlass at 10:16 PM on February 8, 2014


but this place looks like it could have easily been done by John Lautner, perhaps more successfully.

True: compare the Elrod House (seen in Diamonds Are Forever; there are screenshots in the gallery).
posted by dhartung at 12:03 AM on February 9, 2014


$3 mil for a supervillain lair, there's better be sharks with fricken lasers on their head!
posted by DreamerFi at 1:29 AM on February 9, 2014


Supervillian House For Sale.

I've always taken the word "supervillian" to mean "very, very vaudevillian". So slightly disappointed, here.
posted by Grangousier at 2:28 AM on February 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


As overdesigned houses go, this is really quite nice. Let me check my bank account … hmmm, no spare $3mil. Oh well.
posted by hattifattener at 3:20 AM on February 9, 2014


The problem with Super Vaudeville House are all the parts built for pratfalls and slapstick. dangerous that.
posted by The Whelk at 3:23 AM on February 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


Ivan Fyodorovich: That is exactly what I was hoping the interiors would look like.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:53 AM on February 9, 2014


Totally normal except for costing 10 times as much as any normal person could afford.

I doubt you could pick Palo Alto residents out of a police lineup. 2 arms, 2 legs, etc. They're pretty normal.

This is also dirt cheap compared to Vancouver and somewhat less rainy to boot.
posted by GuyZero at 7:32 AM on February 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


They're pretty normal.

Possibly but it's still pretty abnormal to be able to make $12,045 dollar a month mortgage payments.
posted by octothorpe at 7:36 AM on February 9, 2014 [2 favorites]


The Card Cheat: "From the outside it looks like a place where the guy who owns the quarry Fred Flintstone works at would live in." That is Mr. Slate.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:17 AM on February 10, 2014


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