More bedrooms planned for growing Gates family
By Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent
Bill Gates - Microsoft
Virtual tour of Gates' estate - USnews.com
WITH 37,000 sq ft of living space, parking for 28 cars and an artificial stream stocked with salmon, Bill Gates's £75 million home, sprawling across five acres of hillside, is one of the largest and most expensive built.
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But for the world's richest family, it is still too small. Designed to impress heads of state, Hollywood celebrities and industrial moguls, the house on the bank of Lake Washington needs extending for a remarkably prosaic reason: Bill and Melinda Gates are expecting their third child.
According to planning permission documents lodged with his local council, the founder of Microsoft made a crucial oversight when commissioning his home. He specified 24 bathrooms, six kitchens, a 60ft indoor pool and a dining room to seat 120 guests, but only four bedrooms in the 11,500 sq ft inner sanctum.
In documents lodged with Medina city council, an exclusive suburb of Seattle, Mr Gates's representatives argue that the house was designed for a batchelor and is now occupied by a family that finds it "isn't fitting as they expected it to".
The planning applications says the Gates family "found errors were made in the way the house was designed, and the way they expected to use the house has changed".
The planning proposals include creating an additional child's bedroom, eliminating space originally intended for a live-in nanny and connecting the house to its guest pavilion, which has a further two bedrooms. It also specifies creating a new play and study area for the children near their bedrooms, which, according to a spokesman, "are relatively small".
In Washington State, where Microsoft has its headquarters, the Gates home is known simply as The House. But the massive complex - not so much a house as a small village - would make most estate agents weep with avarice, even if they despaired at the paucity of bedrooms.
The rustic, high-tech home - visible only from the lake - is frequently compared with William Randolph Hearst's mountain-top Xanudu. Built of stainless steel, flawless wood, concrete, 800lb solid doors and stainless steel bolts that all face the same way throughout the property, it is claimed to be earthquake proof.
Melinda Gates has 42ft of clothes-hanging space, operated like a dry cleaner's rack, and the master bathtub can be filled to the right temperature and depth by Mr Gates as he drives home from work.
The house contains over 50 miles of wiring for multi-media communication systems, but no electrical outlets are visible as Mr Gates abhors clutter. Sensors can pinpoint anyone within the house to within 6 inches, adjusting to their personal preferences the temperature, lighting, sound and television systems surrounding them.
The 17ft by 60ft swimming pool has an underwater music system and swimmers can dive under a glass wall to emerge outdoors. The exercise facilities include a gym, sauna, steam room, separate men's and women's lockers, a trampoline room, putting green, multi-sport court and a boathouse.
Along the 84-step grand staircase, the towering Douglas fir beams that support the stainless steel roof were selected to ensure that they had not a single knot of wood.
A cedar tree in the grounds was moved 6in because Mr Gates thought it was in the wrong position. The 20-seat Art Deco cinema has plush chairs, couches and a popcorn machine. The ornate, panelled library has a rotunda-topped reading room, fireplace and two secret pivoting bookcases, one containing a bar. It holds Leonardo da Vinci's 16th-century Codex Leicester, bought by Mr Gates for £22 million.
Although the planning documents specified a child's bedroom, a spokesmen for the Gates family refused to comment on whether the new bedroom was required for the couple's third child, who follows a daughter born in 1996 and a son born in 1999. The spokesman said: "The fact that they're adding a bedroom to the house wouldn't necessarily be an indicator one way or another about anything in particular." |
