And the rising damp is Perrier
F OR the last year or so I’ve been looking for a new home, so I’ve been keeping a close eye on the property market. Although clearly not that close, since I managed to miss this gem: a house for sale in Camps Bay for R300-million. That’s about à30- million ( à29.5- million more than Greece has).
Curious to see what R300-million would buy you these days, I went snooping on the internet. The mansion has four banquetsized reception rooms, three en-suite bedrooms, a master suite and a six-car garage. OK, so that’s the first R15-million taken care of, what in the name of Liberace are we paying the other R285-million for?
Apparently it’s not your typical fourbedroom, four-bathroom home. This one sits on more than 7 000m² and has a stonker of a view. It’s also dripping in lavish art, sculptures and statues and ridiculous fixtures and fittings. Every light, underfloor-heated tile, fireplace, live unicorn, and sound system is controlled by a series of iPads. Nkandla architects and interior decorators, are you taking notes?
It also has an atelier (rich-person-speak for an art studio), a refrigerator room (we poor people just call that the fridge), a sauna, gym, teahouse, massage temple, 3D cinema, staff quarters, winter garden, herb and veggie garden, a dozen terraces, paradise gardens, parks, waterways, ponds, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A tour of the grounds would take you well over an hour, so don’t forget your Prada hiking boots. It really has every extravagant necessity, from velvet floor-to-ceiling wallpaper to Versace crockery and even solid-gold taps and toilet seats.
I get why you need taps in a house, I’m just not sure I understand why you need gold taps. If you’re curious, you could always rent the place — known as Enigma Mansion — for R155 000 a day to find out.
To my mind, the only thing missing is a room the size of Bulawayo, for storing all your money, and a separate adjoining Gucci-shaped room for cash counting. Oh and a helipad, there’s no mention of one of those. It could probably also do with a teleporter, a white-tiger enclosure, an ego massage room, and maybe a padded room too, because anyone building something like this has to be nuts.
And speaking of nuts, who’s buying a house like this? I imagine the only people who could afford it would be a prince, the artist formerly known as Prince, or perhaps a retired dictator. You’re looking at R2.6-million a month for the bond alone, and that’s not even taking into account rates, electricity, or gold-toilet-seat polish.
At this price the offers haven’t exactly been rolling in, but according to an estate agent “The Most Glamorous Property in the World” has been on the market since September last year and the seller has already turned down two offers. The first was for R185-million, and the second was for somewhere in the region of R250-million.
I can understand the seller turning down R185-million, that’s just cheeky, even in a buyer’s market. You can barely buy a decent country for anything under R190-million these days. But turning down the R250-million offer makes me wonder if they’re really serious sellers?
When you’re dealing with so many millions, how much difference does 50 really make? So you don’t buy another Arabian stallion that month, or you take the private jet to Paris for your weekly diamond dust facial instead of riding there on the backs of 62 virgins, big deal.
If Enigma Mansion sells it will shatter all Cape property records — R110-million is the most anyone has ever spent in this town (cheapskates) and that was for a duplex penthouse at the V&A Waterfront. But the real enigma here is if you’re spending R300-million on a house in August, what do you do for fun in September?