The Bad Taste Boutique
Readers suggested a topic on housing bubble stuff. “What is the most absurd form of conspicuous consumption you have seen with an HBB theme? I flew for Thanksgiving so I had a chance to peruse the Sky Mall catalog. Here are a few of the contenders: Wood (or wood-like) end tables that you can also use to crate your dog, because heavens knows, you can’t have an actual dog crate in the room your dog stays in - about $500. Brobdignagian Sports Chair - about $150. Programmable 5 meal pet feeder - only $60.”
“Cast iron giraffe toilet paper holder - I was going to eliminate this one since it actually holds extra toilet paper and therefore serves a real function, but the extra TP really should go under the sink so it is only needed if you over renovated your bathroom to have no storage space at all - $30. Almost anything in the Design Toscano section, but especially ‘The Peeing Boy of Brussels’ Statue and Fountain. Really. - $200.”
“But I have a favorite. It is a kit to make you modern garage doors look more like carriage house doors. Kits include ‘no maintenance’ hinges and handles with the ‘appearance’ of cast metal. I think these are probably decals, but they might be some other form of plastic. So you can change your regular flip up garage to look like a garage that has double swinging doors even though it still flips up and there isn’t even a way for it to split down the middle. Which fits right in with the pretend window stickers. You can paint the trim to match your house, but the windows are fake…excuse me…faux. - set of two pretend windows is $275 and the garage door hardware is $220. To match what they show on a pretty ordinary garage mahal (3 cars split into a two car space and a one car space) you would need 3 sets of windows and two sets of hardware for a total of $1265.”
“Can anyone beat that?”
A reply, “Professional-grade kitchen appliances for people who don’t cook their own meals. To increase the value of the house for resale. To someone else who doesn’t cook.”
Another said, “In the ‘outdoor’ high-end kitchen/BBQ with granite counter-tops that people use maybe 5 weekends a year…(at the vacation house).”
One had this, “I laugh whenever I see a six-burner stove, and those little ‘prep sinks.’ Anyone who installs a prep sink obviously never prepped anything — you’re just asking to wipe up the floor. And the six-burner stove? I don’t have that many pots. Even if I did, I could never keep track of six things on the stove at once.”
And another, “$3000 electric gates at the head of a drive way while the rest of the lot is wide open. Custom signs with gentrified calligraphy stating ‘_____ Farm.’ (What are you farming? Ag? animals? I don’t see any farming going on here). Any architectural gingerbread. ‘Custom’ means a bunch of additional $$$ for contractor. And what do you get? Lame architectural that will go out of style very quickly. Stick with timeless architecture.”
“Not absurd consumption but lame and herd-like: Granite (of course) instead of epoxy resin. Hydronic radiant heat (It’s got radiant heat in the floors!). ‘It’s got hardwood floors as if they’re a new building material.’”
And finally, “My favorite entry in the Bad Taste Boutique (well, other than the gold-plated rotary telephone with the Mona Lisa in the middle of the dial,) are the ‘manufactured’ McMansions that sprang up like bad mushrooms here in our rural community.”
“Imagine all the architectural embellishments we’re grossing out about made manifest in a snap-together Barbie house. ‘Triple-wides,’ they called them. Some even have prefab partial second floors you can snap on to the existing trail…,er manufactured home. They’re not cheap, either. These atrocities were selling in the $300-500K range– without land, labor, or infrastructure.”
“Coated cardboard pillars hold up the pre-fab plastic archways, elaborate interior ‘elements’ are concocted from particleboard and styrofoam. Composite granite, (though I never saw one with stainless steel sinks, they did sport those fake slate jacuzzi baths in the ‘master.’) ‘Log’ exteriors made out of fiberglass panels. The chandeliers in the two-story ‘foyers’ are made from acrylic bronze-colored composite, and don’t even get me started on the resin trophy racks to hang over the fake-log fireplace….”
“The things remind me of nothing so much as the pneumatic housewives of Orange County. Layers and layers of expensive-yet-cheap cosmetic glop and glitz to hide the essential bad bones underneath.”
The Verge. “Somewhere in the old Cincinnati-Dayton Defense Area that spans Southwest Ohio and Southeast Indiana sits a $1.5 million ‘man cave.’ Built in a decommissioned Nike missile site, the residence boasts a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths, an exercise room, indoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, and an elevator for lowering the owner’s classic automobiles below the surface. On clear days, the doors that once exposed anti-ballistic missile for launch can be opened to let sunshine penetrate the otherwise dimly lit basement.”
“A lot of effort has been made by the current owner to cheer things up: a Care Bears mural graces a wall in one of the bedrooms, a building on the 14-plus-acre property has been converted into a white and red horse barn.”
“There is no way of knowing how many privately owned bunkers there are in the United States, but if the number of stories on the internet and the twenty-four hour news channels is any indication, there is considerable consumer interest.”
“The Survival Condo Project is a nearly 200 foot deep, nuclear blast-hardened hole in which contractors recently built a steel frame, not unlike that of a skyscraper. Once complete, the facility — located somewhere in the middle of Kansas — will offer half and full-floor residential units designed to withstand floods, electromagnetic pulses, and indirect nuclear strikes (among other things) for $2 million or $4 million.”
“Larry Hall seems to be weary of the media attention his Survival Condo project has attracted. ‘I’m kind of getting inundated,’ he told me. ‘Most of my calls,’ explained Hall, ‘are from doctors and well-educated [people], engineers, a much higher caliber of people, and they like the overall concept, and they’re glad that I’ve been open and on some of the publications and TV programs because it gives credibility to it.’”
“The completed Survival Condo will literally be a 14 story, nuclear blast hardened, luxury apartment complex — underground. It will hold roughly seventy occupants, indefinitely. The implication here, of course, is that in isolation they will have to develop some sort of basic community or society. How would the rules be enforced, we ask: will you have a police force?”
“The answer is as logical as it’s unexpected: ‘There will be a condo board.’”
