David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published April 9, 2002

66,000 square feet? Not bad,
but where's the moat?

They say home is where you hang your hat. Well, I don't wear hats. For me, home is the building that contains my stuff. That's a good a definition for home as I've come up with.

For some, home is where the 3,900-square-foot pool building is. Well, not "some," really. I'm talking about Bill Gates. With a net worth hovering around, $36 billion, he's the richest person in the world. He could hire Donald Trump to be his chauffeur. He could afford to make Warren Buffett his pool boy. The guy's loaded.

What does his do with all that moolah? To be fair, I must concede that Bill gives a lot of it to charities. He's given away billions (that's with a B, you know), and I suspect that if I were in (diamonds on the sole of) his shoes, I'd probably give it away, too. What's the alternative? You'd have to give it to the government in taxes. Decisions, decisions -- either give the money to charities that I feel strongly about or send a big fat check to Washington so some congressional yahoo from District 9 can score points with his constituents by voting $50 million to study cow incontinence. The choice is clear.

Anyway, let's get back to Bill's casa. It's impressive, as you might expect.

He doesn't give ALL his cash to charities. He needs a little something to keep the rain off him and his family. His pool building features a 17-by-60-foot swimming pool with an underwater music system and the floor painted in a fossil motif. Then there's the grand staircase. It's 92 feet long and 63 feet high and has 84 steps. I don't mind admitting that I get a little winded by the 60th step or so. When Bill invites me over to play Jenga, I usually opt for the elevator.

After a six-hour marathon Jenga tournament, I like to head over to Bill's 2,100-square-foot domed library. My favorite features are the two secret pivoting bookcases. They make me feel like I'm in the middle of a Hardy Boy mystery. If I need a little reading material during a rest stop, I usually grab the "Codex Leicester," Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook from the 16th century. Sure, Bill paid $30.8 million for it, but what good is it if you don't flip through it every once in a while?

I also like the 2,300-square-foot reception room that can seat 150 people for dinner, the 6,300-square-foot underground garage, and how can a house truly be a home without its own estuary and wetland area to manage water run-off?

Those are just the architectural highlights. In each room, touch-sensitive pads control lighting, music and climate. Visitors wear small electronic pins so the computers know who and where they are. One time, I flushed my pin down the toilet, and the computer thought I ended up at the bottom of the estuary. Boy, that was funny. Bill talks about it to this day. He loves a good toilet prank. All the computer gadgets are run by, of course, the Windows operating system. Sometimes I'll hook up my Apple laptop to the system, just to freak it out.

All told, Bill's pad is valued at about $53 million and boasts 66,000 square feet. More importantly, however, are the 24 bathrooms. It makes sense to have that many, actually. I wouldn't want to be a 700 feet away from a
bathroom when nature calls, would you?

Is Bill's house magnificent? Yes. Awe-inspiring? Sure. Grandiose? Absolutely. Bill's Jenga skills? Average, at best.

I'm still not impressed.

If you want to impress me, build a castle. That's right, a castle. I want to see someone build a towering 100-square-foot castle smack dab in the middle of a glade. No one builds castles anymore. Steel and wood and concrete are for sissies. Rocks are forever. If you build a castle out of 3-foot-thick stones, I'll be impressed. These mega-rich guys should show us something.

Build a castle with a moat. Now that would be a great place to call home. Home is where the moat is.

You'd need some catapults, too. What's a castle without catapults? Oh, and you'd need some of those little slits in the walls so your archers could fire their arrows at the intruding army. Add a drawbridge, cone-roofed towers topped with triangle-shaped banners fluttering in the breeze, plus a hunchback or two and you'd really have a great pad.

I'll have to mention this to Bill the next time I stop by. Maybe he could set up a giant Jenga game, kind of like when royalty used real people as living chess pieces. He could erect a giant Jenga tower of wooden blocks, and we could use construction cranes to poke out the pieces.

Now THAT would be impressive.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.