I Like Porn
What’s your eye candy?
Saturday morning, I relax looking at porn. It’s my thing. I habitually browse seeking out sensational visuals. The eye candy gets my neurotransmitters firing. I have a couple sites I surf weekly, they’re my gotos. Sometimes I go straight down a rabbit hole and lose track of time. Maybe you do too?
Porn is escapism. The allure of looking, like Being There’s Chauncey Gardner. Porn allows me to fantasize and dream about future possibilities. Even at my age, I have hope! My dopamine hormone levels rise in anticipation those mornings, knowing the images and videos I’ll see. It excites me. My wife doesn’t mind, in fact, I share a lot I find interesting with her, sticking my iPad in front of her. She curls her nose at few things. But we have that kind of open relationship; it’s special and I’m lucky.
You see, I’m a real estate porn junkie. I love seeing big, beautiful homes. Call me a real estate voyeur.
I’m hooked on real estate porn for different reasons than you might suspect. It’s not about jumping in on the real estate market, I don’t suffer from FOMO on the current boom, err, bubble. Nope, I’m attracted for the architectural-styles and property features I see, not the value. And yes, I read the great journalism pieces appearing in Playboy back in the day too.
I love the high-end properties shown in Architectural Digest—but 18 bathrooms seems too many, think of all the toilet paper. My go-to sites the past few decades are Saturday’s Los Angeles Times Hot Property section, the Financial Times’ Weekend House & Homes section and the Sotheby’s International website. Sotheby’s is great because you can pick any geographic locale globally to look at homes. My wife’s porn is more traditional, she uses Zillow to know how much all our friends’ homes cost. Â
BTW: Social comparison being what it is, there’s fantasy, schadenfreude, hopes and dreams, and the survey says…63% admit to having looked up the value of a friend’s house; 53% have looked up the value of their boss's house; and 49% would rather browse Zillow than have sex—apparently adults in their 30s get turned on while looking at houses they can’t buy.
But I blame my parents for getting me hooked on real estate porn. When I was a kid, we took long drives, many times, heading down Lake Shore Drive outside Detroit into Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Farms and Grosse Pointe Shores, where all the old automotive tycoon families lived: the Fords, Dodges, Chevrolets, Buicks, Packard’s, Fishers and Briggs, all had estates there. The Edsel Ford house was 31,000-square feet and had 60-rooms!
I loved seeing those estates, their well-manicured properties, and the different architectural styles too: English-Tutor, Dutch Colonial, Greek Revival, Georgian and a few Craftsman…but there weren’t many Victorians, French Provincials, or Country homes in that hood. Lakefront honeymoon cottages were my favorites: functionally unpretentious residences with decks, boathouses, and docks. I like docks. Had one for eighteen years.
When I was young, I designed houses on graph paper. I may have missed my calling as an architect. I remember my favorite was a two-story 50x50 Australian country house with wrap-around deck. Kind of big. Not my style anymore. One of my girlfriends, Andra Takacs, had a nice house. Her dad designed and built it himself. It was Contemporary Modern, but they didn’t have a dock.
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Aside from docks, property features for our Operation Dream House were: five acres, nature sitting areas, aroma garden, green house, raspberry canes, water features, fruit trees, communal fire pit, guest house/office, tire swing, hammock area, kids’ sports area, a barn, paths through grounds, outdoor shower…and a par-3 is always nice to have. Check to all…
When I moved to California, I was in heaven. All those Ranch-style, California bungalows, Cape Cods, Mid-Century Moderns, Mediterranean’s, Beachfront Houses and Southwestern adobes. But I couldn’t fathom living in a wooden-stilt house in the earthquake-prone Hollywood Hills. Even today, I enjoy driving through Bel-Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu looking at homes. Having lived there, Beverly Hills is almost passe for me. And there’s a big difference between homes owned by millionaires and billionaires, the haves and the have-yachts. Jaded? You betcha.
And I’ve been lucky to have been in some stunning homes, owned by both. Let’s see, there was uber grocer Ron Burkle’s Greenacres (aka Harold Lloyd Estate) that was just amazing sitting on 15 acres of prime Beverly Hills property. Media mogul Haim Saban’s Beverly Park Mediterranean manor was lavish, 33,000-square feet filled with Cezanne’s, and such. And speaking of art, the late home-builder Eli Broad’s smallish 13,000-square foot Frank Gehry-designed Brentwood hillside home was a virtual museum of modern art. All trophy homes extraordinaire.
Some of my friends have extraordinary homes too. But I won’t spill the beans on John, Harvey, Bruce, David, Browne, Bob, Tim or Tony. All wonderful dwellings, some more understated than others however, in fact, one is affectionately known as Versailles West—looks a little hotel lobbyish too me—and another is renting today for $110,000…a month! In the early 90s, I helped my boss procure the home of the late great Roy Orbison for less than a million dollars. It was a Malibu beachfront fixer-upper, and a great place to store my windsurfer—but that’s another story. My wife says it recently sold for fourteen million.
One of my favorite houses I have had the pleasure of visiting was author Gore Vidal’s La Rondinaia on the Amalfi Coast—I worked on his campaign once. It was spectacular…unless you suffer from vertigo. The White House is nice too, I’ve been there a couple times, brought my kids. But now they let just anyone live there.
What styles do I like? Three really.
I am a sucker for exotic Balinese-style that incorporates the outdoors into traditional clean interiors, with lots of natural green and hardwoods. I also love the clean white stucco and terracotta roofs of Spanish Colonials with wings (bedrooms one side, living rooms on the other) with central courtyards and fountains and their colorful decorative tiles, large wooden doors and rounded interior corners. And I am partial to Pacific Northwest homes almost pseudo-Craftsman in style, with lots of wood beams, unique interior colors, big windows and surrounded by nature. I do occasionally miss El sol y La Luna, our British Columbia compound—the original Operation Dream House. But after 13-years, we were in a bad marriage and one of us had to go, so we left.
But I’m still hopeful, looking every Saturday for what may be next: Operation Dream House II.
Finally, I subscribe to the notion that you’re not just buying a house, but a neighborhood. What that means is that it’s not just about finding the perfect house, but an area’s livability matters more. And that checklist is long: lifestyle match; mostly warm weather; swimming nearby; walkable to stores, cafes and pubs; an hour from an international airport; vibrant nightlife; trees & green belts; public transportation; politically stable; universal healthcare; drinkable water; civil neighbors…and hotels nearby for guests!
The search continues…
Thanks for giving me your attention for a few moments, it is the most precious thing you have, and I appreciate it. Be well.
William D. Chalmers © 2022 GreatEscape Adventures, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I can go down that rabbit hole too - I just deleted my Redfin app
BTW...this piece was supposed to be my April Fool's piece. Gotcha!