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Bill Gates's house

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Bill Gates's house is a huge earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.

General

The Gates home, one of the most expensive houses in the world, is a modern 21st century house in the "Pacific lodge" style, with classic features such as a large private library with a domed reading room. According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million. The home and its accompanying structures cover some 66,000 square feet. The address is 1835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039.[1]

Gates often entertains the rich and powerful at his home. Once when Bill Gates had a private party at the house, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a "temporary security zone" around Gates' Lake Washington home which locked down all of Lake Washington south of the Highway 520 bridge and stayed in effect for two days.

Features

  • Electronics are used abundantly; visitors are surveyed upon entrance and given a microchip that sends signals throughout the house to adjust temperature and other conditions according to preset user preferences.
  • If you wish, your music will follow you throughout the house - even at the bottom of the pool.
  • The 17-by-60-foot swimming pool has an underwater music system and a floor painted in a fossil motif. Swimmers can dive under a glass wall and emerge outdoors by a terrace. A locker room off the pool has four showers and two baths.[2]
  • There is an elevator if you don't want to take the stairs.
  • There are no visible electrical outlets anywhere. Gates does not like "clutter".
  • The wood columns from main floor to roof in entry area are over 70 feet tall.
  • All of the timbers used inside and out are finished the same - inches have been removed from the exterior of the wood and then sanded to a satin finish. They are nearly perfect in that there are almost no knots.
  • Some of the interior passage doors weigh over 800 lbs, but are balanced for easy use.
  • The roofing is stainless steel.
  • The floor is heated everywhere including the driveway and walks.
  • The security system (automated and personnel) is redundant. Hidden cameras are everywhere, including the interior stone walls. Sensors in the floor can track a person to within 6 inches. The system is monitored at the Microsoft Redmond campus.
  • There are 52 miles of communication cable in the building.
  • Gates insisted on saving a 40 year old maple adjacent to the driveway. The tree is monitored electronically 24 hours per day via computer. If it seems dry, it gets just the right amount of water automatically delivered.
  • The entry gate senses when your car approaches and opens fully by the time you arrive.
  • There are several garages. Gates has a personal 4-car garage. The house for the maintenance staff has its own garage. The nanny parks in the 6-car carport across from the main entry. Additional cars can be parked in a subterranean arched concrete building which through an electronic transformation becomes a basketball court.
  • Very old antique cabinets from China have been brought in and built into the walls with adjacent paneling built to match the cabinets exactly.
  • The master bathtub can be filled to the right temperature and depth by Gates as he drives home from work.
  • The shower curtain next to the spa is a 4500 lb slab of granite.
  • All bolts throughout the house are stainless steel and oriented the same direction.
  • All woodwork is flawless. Much of the woodwork is of various rare types from all over the world - imported especially for this house.
  • Acoustics are a concern throughout the house. Various woods and fabrics are used with acoustics in mind. Acoustic panels in the ballroom move out of sight on their own.
  • The ventilation system also conditions the air for health and comfort.
  • Melinda has 42 lineal feet of clothes hanging space in her closet operated like a dry cleaner's rack.
  • The reinforcing steel in all concrete is four times the code minimum. No. 8 steel wrapped with no. 5 ties was common for simple columns.
  • The theater (underground in a concrete shell) is the most state of the art theatre in the world according to specialty contractor.
  • Many doors are blended so well with the walls that it is hard to see them.
  • Situated in the hillside along the east bank of Lake Washington, the house can be seen by over 350,000 daily commuters on the SR-520 Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, which is just to the north of the house.[3]

Construction

  • The house was designed by James Cutler of James Cutler Architects and the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ).
  • It is rumored that the house was designed on a Macintosh.[4]
  • At one point there were 300 workers working on the house, including 104 electricians.[5]
  • When an interior designer disagreed with the layout of a portion of the home, the conflict was resolved by demolition and the removal of 60 cubic yards of cured, cast-in-place concrete.
  • An existing cedar tree was determined by Gates to be in the wrong location and moved 6 inches.
  • Construction took 7 years.[6]

See also

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