Mansionmania Tournament: Round 1, Heat 25
 

Mansionmania continues. I'm going to show you the most expensive homes in every state and a few territories, with a few extras thrown in from the largest states to get the tourney up to 64. It'll be a single-elimination tournament.

You will choose among each pair of houses with the following assumptions:

• The purchase price for you is $0.
• All maintenance, utilities, property taxes, HOA fees, and cleaning is included.
• You must live in the home for the rest of your life.
• You can't travel more than 100 miles from home (via google maps drive time) other than 1 two-week vacation each year.
• You get $250,000 per year as a living allowance
• You get an additional living allowance at the cheaper home, which will be valued at 1% of any cost difference annually. I will note this amount in the poll.
• You get the furnishings. If unfurnished, you get an allowance that will give you mid-grade furniture in every room.
• You get any vehicles in the garage. But only the garage - nothing parked outside.

I encourage you to click on the maps in the listings to see the general location and neighborhood.

Also, I will only enter contestants if they have a sufficient number of photos to judge, as determined by me.

Your entries in this heat are:

Rhode Island:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...0_M98127-03006

Washington:

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...5_M94535-05252

While the idea of owning a literal castle overlooking Martha's Vinyard is somewhat intriguing, the cost/headache associated with rehabbing and maintaining that place would be staggering.

43K square feet of a home that was disassembled, relocated and rebuilt (in some parts, twice)? Pass.

Hmm, let's review.

Rhode Island - It's a castle! It's a freakin' castle, man! I've always wanted a castle, even it does seem like it would be a little cold inside. Plus, it's a Newport mansion that's the size of a suburban mall, and if you ever wanted to be in The Great Gatsby, this is the place to do it. I would sit on the large lawn and read my newspaper and curse William Randolph Hearst's pro-labor arguments and wonder about the long-term repercussions of the war reparations from Germany. And then I would play tennis with Daisy on one of the three tennis courts. I'm not an east coast guy, but I can get to Boston and Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket, so I could make this place work.

Washington - this seems like a nice place. You've got trees and water, and I think I could live in Washington pretty easily. We don't know the exact location, but it's in Seattle so there are big city amenities, and Olympic National Park is within range. I can't get a bead on the house, though. Parts of it look old-school traditional on the inside, which doesn't match the exterior style.

I like the Washington house and I could live there, but I cannot re-enact Great Gatsby parties there. I cannot pass up a mansion in Newport. Rhode Island it is.

Yeah, that was an interesting history. It sounds like the house is the moved house that was added and built around an existing house. I wish the web site had the 3D tour set up for that place, because I'd love to walk through it.

Washington hands down. Castle is cool, but would need millions to make it livable IMO

You'd spend a decade far too cash-poor for a Gatsby party.

My in-laws spent $100K renovating the inside and adding a nice deck and outdoor kitchen to their 2400 square foot house built in 1986.

You're talking 7 figures to get that place into any kind of modern shape. Then the interest on the inevitable HELOC you're gonna need to finance it is gonna be stout. Not to mention the inevitable decay that comes with a stone castle in that part of the country.

Shit man, you're gonna need $100k in rugs. That place will echo like a tomb. It has like 5 chairs in the whole place. The only way you can make that work is as a B&B and once it becomes a B&B, you're not gonna have people thinking you're fancy enough to throw a Gatsby party.

And in the end you'll be the only guy in Newport driving a 1993 Ford Festiva with mis-matched hub caps.

Per the rules, maintenance is covered, and I can get mid-grade furniture in every room. I'll spend most of my time in Photos 18 and 6, use the rest for jogging in the winter, and I'll hold my Gatsby parties on the lawn in the summer. I can use my stipend to deck out two or three rooms all fancy-like for when the guests need to use the restroom.

Can I live there, Mr. Gatsby?

"Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

"I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before," I say, nodding determinedly. "She'll see."

The Washington mansion is my favorite one to date. Needs more pictures, but what I see, I love.

The Washington house is 3038 Laurelhurst Dr NE Seattle, WA if anyone wants to take a look at the map.

I'd take either of these above most others so far, love both these old homes. I'd like a bigger stipend in RI, it feels like a seminary which is OK, just needs a lot of investment to make it a home. Definitely going to need a wifi booster. Seattle it is.

I've heard they have good coffee in Seattle.

The Seattle home is in a very swanky and exclusive part of town, but is conveniently located mere minutes from a large homeless encampment (as is all of the Seattle-Tacoma area).

Also, it is just outside of Union Bay, where Huskies fans gather in their boats during home games, if boating during college football games is your sort of thing.

RI house makes me want to buy a shit load of swords and armor, then have big parties. To enter the party you must pick out another guest and battle to earn your way inside.



Wonder how many politicians I could convince to show up for the first few years? Cull the herd some

Definitely take the one in Wa. The castle looks cool but damn, It'd be like living in a warehouse.

the castle has 29 bedrooms in addition to 53 other room.
I don't know that many people that I would care to have stay overnight.

Yeah, this one stretches the definition of maintenance.

Washington for me. Neither are really my bag but Washington is closer.

Neither location or house really appeal to me much. East Coast bias gives Rhode Island an advantage but the Washington home is more my speed.

I don't know. I guess I'd go Seattle but I can't see myself voting for either of these in the next round.

I'd move to a different one every month just for fun. It would give me something to do for years.

RI for me

washingtons way too loony

The wine stays with the house in Seattle, right? Both have some really cool features, but I think I'd get tired of the RI Skipper and Bitsy thing. Seattle has more temperate weather and seems a little more homey, so I'll take WA.

exactly. Plus the stylized pictures in the listing really turned me off. I don't understand why realtors have to go all HDR on these photos.

You guys are invited to my first Gatsby party.

Rhode Island looks like something straight out of the Gilded Age with ghosts of robber barons. Definitely not my style. Providence has some mean Portuguese Chourico Stew, which in my opinion is the single best comfort food dish on the planet, but not a whole lot else.

It would be the Washington house and Seattle area for me.

Washington for me. I can’t quite tell but on Rhode Island it doesn’t even seem like an ocean front property.

I must say, I'm surprised at how this heat is going. Washington is great, but I thought that few would pass up a Newport castle. I figured Washington would make a good showing but that Rhode Island would win rather handily.

I think the absence of furniture in the RI house really contributes to a cold feel.

This shows the importance of "staging" to evoke a feeling of homeyness.

Good point. It would cost a fortune to fully stage a house like that, but even if they did three or four rooms it would help to visualize the place.

Furniture, artwork and heating that damn RI mausoleum would be WAY over the stipend. Yeah, parking a used Ford Festiva out front might be embarrassing.

Love Washington as a whole, but a castle is too much to pass up. Will have to go with the Rhode Island one.

I'll be honest, I have an irrational hatred of parquet flooring.

Broke your mother's back?

That’s a good point. There’s likely an OCD driven anxiety vibe I get from them.

They’re like the old timey hardwood version of loud casino carpet.

Tough rounds lately... we need another Dakota vs Southern California for the first round. LMAO

I love Seattle and don't want to turn it down.

It's a ****ing castle.

I'm not excited about either location (east coast vs. Seattle), and the castle would be cool, but I have to go with WA. Great wine cellar.

It's pretty impressive how savage a beat down this was when it seems like just about everyone was at least a little torn.

It's a haunted castle that was used for exterior shots in Dark Shadows!

Fans of the 1960's television series "Dark Shadows" would most likely recognize this French renaissance chateau located on Newport's Ruggles Avenue. Used for all of the external shots of the television series' Collins mansion, Carey Mansion has a bit of haunted history of its own. Edson Bradley built the mansion, originally known as Seaview Terrace, in 1907 in Washington DC. In the 1920s, Bradley relocated himself and his family to Rhode Island, and along with them came Seaview Terrace, dismantled into pieces and then rebuilt on Ruggles Avenue. In 1929, Julia Bradley, Edson Bradley's wife, died. Bradley held her funeral the chapel located within the mansion. Five years later, Edson himself passed away. One year later, the mansion became an exclusive all-girl summer boarding school, renamed Burnham-by-the-Sea where incidences of smoke detectors going off for no reason, bottles flying off desks and radios turning on and off by themselves were often reported. It's believed that Bradley's late wife Julia felt such a great attachment to the house that she refused to leave even after her death.

Now I want it even more. I'm hoping for a big late rally.