Here’s another thing about this so-called “Modern Lifestyle” that is a stone in my soul’s shoe:
A SUPERYACHT owned by a Russian tycoon boasting an eye-watering £61million price tag is set to be auctioned off after being seized.
The stunning 240ft vessel – named The Axioma – has a catalogue of bougie features including six decks, a pool with a swim-up bar and even a cinema.
What is it with having an in-home movie room these days? You can’t open a real estate listing without seeing a windowless room with a giant screen and a few overstuffed easy chairs in it, and if I ever bought a house with such a “feature”, all that crap would be tossed out and replaced with something of redeeming social value — like a tasteful, fully-stocked bar — before the ink was dry on the closing documents.
Here is where I could hang out with a few friends, enjoy good fellowship, conversation and companionable drunkenness, all in a friendly setting. Maybe a TV screen in the corner so we could catch a decent game or a Grand Prix maybe, but live sporting events are different from movies, as a moment’s thought will prove: they are definitely group entertainment.
Movie houses are, almost by definition, not a place for gathering and social interaction. Oh sure, you enjoy the movie “experience” together (not that too many modern movies actually provide much of an experience, don’t get me started), but that’s it.
“Oh, but Kim,” I hear the cry, “it’s really a place for your teenage kids to hang out with their friends.”
Yeah, I really want my teenage daughter hanging out in a dark room with her testosterone-laden boyfriend, with the sound turned up loud lest parents actually hear what’s really going on in there. Or if there’s a whole group of them, to be greeted by a sea of thrusting pimply adolescent backsides when I walk in the room.
Okay, enough of that. 
Or if not a bar, then a gun room. Yeah, a wall full of cabinets such as below, inside a securely-locked door and suitably-impregnable walls:
Add a decent cleaning station / workbench, and I think you can all see where I’m going with this one.
Of course, someone might say that this would not be a place where I could entertain my friends — but clearly, you don’t know my friends.
Whatever alternative use you can dream up for that room, you can be sure that you’d get more enjoyment out of it than can be had from a screening of Fast & Furious 207 or whatever other childish comic-book action comes out of Hollyweird.
I agree completely. I rarely, if ever, drink liquor, but I keep a fully stocked bar because I like to entertain and make drinks.
And it’s much easier when someone asks, “What do you have?” to simply respond with, “It’s much easier if you just tell me what you want.”
you’re absolutely right. I’d rather have a den with a bar in it or a sporting room with gear on the walls, an area that can be used for cleaning and maintenance of gear and of those antique pharmacist or physicians desk that sweep open like a cabinet with a desk inside except this would be my reloading bench. I can open it when I want to use it and then close the cabinet wings to hide the mess when company comes.
JQ
When I moved to the Texas Hill Country we purchased a nice little retirement house for old people, just enough size for the two of us easy to maintain and easy on utility prices, super well built by a Mormon couple as their last home, lots of insulation and good windows. Ours was the furtherest NE home in our town, cows to the North of us and a large horse pasture on the other side of a barb wire fence. I watched 140 good sized homes being built, 3K to 4K sq ft on zero lot things going up between 2013 and 2016 as fast as they could throw them up. Most every one had a large in-home-movie room and I asked one of the builders why they put those in without windows. His reply was that it was the cheapest room in the house, just some extra wiring for speakers and equipment tucked into the wall and otherwise just a big shell of a room that probably won’t be used very often once the new wears off.
It all depends on how the well room is done. Most are little more than a marketing gimmick in mid priced home. You need to visit a few 5 to 10 million $ listings to see a true “Home Theater”.
For a few thousand $ you can slap a big screen TV on one wall add a couple of recliners, put a popcorn machine in the corner and call it a “Home Theater”. or you can have a Pro installer come in and install full system with 7 channel Surround Sound, a high end digital projector, sound controll walls, a full bar on the back wall and anything else you can think of. and you wind up with an experience better than any movie theater you’ve been in. without the wait or the lines and the movies start when you want. Think of it as the movie theater version of a Private Jet. ( all for under ~ $ 250,000 or so )
On the yacht a guy might convert the “theatre” into a decent combat information center. Mount a couple of automatic 76mm turrets, a pair of CIWS mounts, and a brace of Exocet or Harpoon launchers. Those missiles are several generations old so they should be available pretty cheaply. Take the whole package and go pirate hunting. I don’t think privateer licenses are still valid but I can dream.
For your Powerball home, I’m picturing a room with a hand-carved wood sign over the doors emblazoned with “Welcome To Kim’s Arsenal & Pub”.
Neon sign. Otherwise, you’d be right.
The gun room looks like James Julia and sons work. That would be on my list Have a look at their website for a glimpse of how some people live. The old adage “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” certainly applies here.
I looked at a listing for a house in my old home town. It had an indoor pool, a library, a ballroom, a huge wine cellar and a fourteen car garage. I think they wanted 4.4 million for the place. The cars they showed in the garage would likely be worth more than the house. Not sure if that listing is still up, I will have a look if anyone is interested…
So what is the new owner going to do if a Russian Navy vessel shows up on the high seas and seizes it as stolen property?
As usual, Biden and politically correct Europe does not think these things through.
Or just torpedoed by a sub?
In the late 90’s I worked at a company in Silicon Valley that made a unique optical projector that was used for home theaters, among other uses. It would take computer signals to generate the video. Popular in Hollywood for private showings. Price was $70k. The control tower in the new Hong Kong airport had 20 of them to project data for the controllers.
We were working on scaling up the lamp output so it could be used for movie theaters when the company went bust. Idiots in the Fab lost control of the process that made the patented bit that produced the image that got transferred to the optical train.
The very words: “…a place where I could entertain my friends…”, makes me bristle.
Does that even happen?
Men actually entertain other men?
I have 2 friends. Twice in the past 16 years both of them have been here at the same time. Both times we were out in my garage/workshop/office and drinking was involved. I have a fridge in my office and there is always plenty of drinking materials in it. NEVER would I consider having a TV involved. Why? Because we are yapping about anything and everything and a TV would get in the way. Besides, there’s nothing worth watching on TV.
A fully stocked bar? Please. It would never get used, but very occasionally. Make mine a beer please.
Guns and guitars are laying all over the place and with all 3 of us players to one degree or another it’s never a dull place.
And the tools. Tools everywhere and anywhere. New tools, old tools, tools never seen before. I’m a dood. My 2 friends are doods. We do stuff. We have durty fingernails. We speak in what some might call crude terms. Nasty jokes. Rude assessments. And back n forth jibes. We’re doods, and we don’t get together to watch TV or drink fancy concoctions. Doods have more important shit to get done.
Add cigars, and that’s pretty much what we do.