On my lunchtime walk I go by this sign; it announces the entrance to a housing development. I'm sure you can't buy one of these "estates" for less than five million dollars, and they may be more than that--I have no way to know, really. I am struck by this sign, though. First of all, the artwork is really bad. It's better than I could do, but I've seen better work by tenth graders in the public school arts magnet program. The word that springs to mind is "cheesy." The fake Greek pillars, the foliage that is just a cloud of green to save the work of painting that area of the sign, the front of the mansion with the two cypress trees, reminiscent of the famous Munch "Scream."
But above all, the dishonesty of the depiction of this acreage surrounding an English country house. For your five million plus, what are you really going to get? You're lucky if there is 12 inches between your house and your neighbor's. Those houses are packed in like sardines. It never stops surprising me that people will buy property like this, instead of buying land.
4 comments:
Florida housing is even more bizarre than anywhere else. I try to explain what a zero-lot line yard is to people and they stare at me like I'm making it up. I used to rent a DiVosta townhome in WPB and no one I know in Maryland can even picture one when I describe it.
Of course, around here we have four-house flag lots everywhere. That's where four huge houses share one driveway. It gets the developer out of building cul-de-sacs that the county has to plow.
Hey, your new picture doesn't have a Yellow Jacket! I can't recognize you.
I once lived in an Addison Mizner faux mediterranean house, the 2nd oldest in Ft Lauderdale at 419 N. New Riveer Dr E. It was sold to the then Ft L News & Sun Sentinel (after Gov Gore and Sons sold to the Chicago Trib) and was torn down for a parking lot. It's now a 30 or so story condo. It was a leaky, drafty, crumbling old place, but had a great view, spacious lawn and character. There were once many Mizner designed or copied houses from the Palm Beaches to the Gables and Grove and I sometimes wonder how many have survived.
Yello seems coolbeans without the jkt.
We have a neighborhood near us of huge homes sitting on top of each other and in each other's front and back yards that my husband calls Garish Acres. I always correct him and call it Garish Quarter-Acres.
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