I’m fascinated with gigantic homes. I’m not talking McMansions: they’re boring. I mean, like, seriously giant houses. It probably started when I first saw Tim Burton’s Batman — remember the scene where Bruce has Vicky over for dinner, and they’re eating in this gigantic room, and he admits he doesn’t think he’s ever been in that room before? Even though he’s lived in the house for, like, thirty-plus years?

The Wayne Manor my imagination conjured probably had dozens of dining rooms. Formal dining rooms, informal dining rooms, dining rooms to be used on Wednesday mornings, and others for rainy Saturday afternoons. And if the mansion had that many dining rooms, imagine, just imagine!, how many billiard rooms it must’ve had: “And this room is for the blue felt billiards table, and this for the red felt…” I imagined a mansion that was so large Alfred had to occasionally consult one of those maps you find in a shopping mall: “Oh, drat, I’m in the Southeast Adjacent Second North Wing, and I meant to be in the Southwest Adjacent Third North Wing!”

This is the largest floorplan I’ve been able to find using a “house plan” search engine: with 22,000+ square feet with two wings and various towers, it isn’t large: it’s fucking gigantic. I would probably be a little nervous to be in such a large house by myself, although I find myself gleefully imagining the purposes to which I would dedicate each room: “And this is my weekday Lego hobby room, not to be confused with my weekend Lego hobby room, or my Lego hobby room for when I suffer bouts of insomnia…”

However, even that house is squashed in size when compared to what was once called “America’s Versailles”: Whitemarsh Hall, located in Wyndmoor, PA (near Philly), which boasted one hundred and fifty rooms on 100,000 square feet and 300 acres of property. A lavious estate (duh) — estimates of the construction costs vary between two & twelve million to build, and a million per year to maintain* — it fell into eventual disuse, disrepair, and destruction. On its site now sit, ironically enough, McMansions.

And the lesson here, is don’t build three Lego hobby rooms when one will do.

(There’s a really great information site on Whitemarsh Hall here.)

Also cool? I remember touring Heart Castle the summer before I started high school. It was just a huge complex — (four separate houses altogether). I think there were still zebra on the estate, left over from the private zoo. Even though it doesn’t look it (‘cuz of some really cool tile work), one end of the Neptune Pool is considerably deeper than the other.

*Using this inflation calculator, in 2006, it would cost $17,872,749 per year to maintain that estate, and between $35,745,498 and $214,472,990 to build. Holy crap.