Is This Too Much House or Just Enough?

The most expensive home in America is up for sale.

Houses can be very expensive for many different reasons, but this house — the most expensive home for sale in America — is frankly, insane. It costs $250 million and was designed with the idea that a home should contain everything a person could ever need within its very walls. Home is where the heart is, after all.

A look inside the most expensive home for sale in America

Designed by Bruce Makowsky, the house has a number of features that, when collected under one roof, are kind of overwhelming.

“I saw the opportunity because people spend so much time on their toys — planes, boats and yachts — but they live in the home 12 hours a day,” Makowsky said in a phone interview. “Home should be the best it can possibly be. A place you never have to want to leave.”

Here are some of the things in this house, which is less than a house and more like a giant complex full of activities and breakables around every corner.

• 12 very expensive-sounding cars that each come with their own staff
• 2,500 bottles of wine spread across two wine cellars
• A seven-member staff to run the house itself, which, if you somehow have the scratch to live in a place like this, you’d definitely need.
• 450 speakers and the service of an AV technician for two years.
• A home theatre with 7,000 movies available
• A bowling alley and something called a “candy wall.”

There are also a staggering 30 seating areas, including one with its own personal VIP section, 21 bathrooms and my favorite touch — a lazy river that circles the lower level and a $2 million projection screen that rises above the pool on hydraulics. The point of this house is clearly not for someone to live in, really — it’s way too big! It’s a flex, a show of wealth, an ostentatious display so deeply ridiculous that you have to laugh.

What would you even do if you woke up one day and lived in this house? Sleep in every room, once? Drive all the cars? Swim in the pool while watching HGTV? Invite every single person you’ve ever met over for just one night to see if you could fill the place up? Personally, I would cycle through all 21 bathrooms day by day, just because I could and then find a corner of the house that wasn’t all sharp angles and frosted glass to sit for a while and think about how it is that I ended up here and why. Maybe I would AirBnb the whole thing and go live in a caretaker’s cottage.

I’d also use the lazy river. More than once. All the time.

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