4 Ways Your House is Better than Bernie Madoff's
This post was updated on September 18, 2009
Bernie Madoff's Montauk beach house is for sale, [update: according to our friends at Bloomberg News, the house quickly sold for more than its asking price of $8.75 million] and it's "not that palatial" (New York Post); has "no garage" (Associated Press via Yahoo!); and "formica countertops" (CNN.com).
No one has come straight out and called it a teardown, but our dear friend Jonathan Miller, a New York-based appraiser who writes the popular Matrix blog, did remark to CNN that "new buyers often do a gut renovation" before they move into houses of this era. (The proximity to the beach makes the house worth a few million, but otherwise you wouldn't want to spend a weekend at Bernie's. The Martha's Vineyard-style stone fireplace is a pretty heinous one, and the real estate agents didn't even include photos of the kitchen and bath, which the Feds have released, on the listing.)
Now, it's not that Madoff has terrible taste; this one was really the secondary beach house, and we'll see more luxury when Bernie's nearly 9,000-square foot Palm Beach, Florida house, situated on the Intracoastal, hits the market.
However, while we're all looking at photos of the Montauk house -- which has been listed by the Corcoran Group at $8.75 million, with the proceeds going towards restitution for Madoff victims -- it is time to tell you four ways that your house is better:
- You probably have ice within easy reach. I grew up, decades ago, with a GE refrigerator/freezer that had what was then one of the coolest new features available -- it would dispense ice to you through the door, so didn't have to open your freezer and melt your ice cream. Here in 2009, that's still the technology, and you can get it from GE for about $2,000, and from other appliance brands even cheaper (I see a perfectly cute Whirlpool on the Best Buy site for under $700). But most high-end homes are stuck with other, "fancier" fridge brands, which provide the option of either 1) no ice dispenser at all or 2) an ice dispenser that shoots cubes across the room, with half of them landing in the glass and half of them making an obstacle course on the house's pretty wide-plank floors (yes, SubZero people, I'm talking to you!). Madoff's kitchen is old enough that the fridge has option one, no ice dispenser in the door at all. So go feel smug the next time you get yourself a glass of iced tea.
- You probably have a bigger, better bathroom. Feel free to correct me, but I think the trend we've seen in the past two decades towards the giant master bath was brought on by the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1992. Once the point was to have a bathroom door you could get a wheelchair through and a bathroom you could turn a wheelchair in, architects and designers got creative with all that space. America is still shockingly far behind other countries in terms of accessible designs (as this thread from John Bridge tile shows); just ask any American contractor to build you a roll-in shower, and you'll hear how the right shower pans and shower drains have to be imported from Europe -- but at least we have a high-end standard now that there's a separate stall shower from the master tub, with double sinks, decent lighting and a couple of towel bars. The bath behind the Madoff's master bedroom? By current standards, yuck. In fact, the bath in "Bull," Bernie's 23M Leopard Sport Yacht, might be better. In the Montauk house, there's a square outlined on the wall where either a medicine cabinet or a small flat-screen TV used to be, but in terms of functionality, you'll get a better shave in your bath, where it's not possble to have uglier lighting, and you can probably reach your towel.