In Georgia, a Megamansion Is Finally Sold

[n2doc]

JOHNS CREEK, Ga. — Bit by bit, Larry Dean’s life, at least as he had constructed it over the last two decades, was ebbing away.

Hundreds of strangers and many friends — most in black dresses or dark suits — showed up on Friday night for an estate sale here at Mr. Dean’s Xanadu-like mansion, once the biggest home in metropolitan Atlanta. They scrutinized every object, from a $10 snow globe to a $60,000 dolphin-sculpture fountain. And many walked out the $17,500 leaded glass and mahogany double front doors, which came from the Chicago Cotton Exchange, with an artifact from Mr. Dean’s past.

And Mr. Dean, a relentlessly upbeat software entrepreneur with cropped gray hair and a busker’s aim to please, gladly watched it go.

“It’s all good,” he said, standing in the soaring rotunda of his megamansion, the pressure almost visibly rising off his shoulders.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/us/22house.html?_r=1&hp

[Solly Mack]

1. That's just fugly.

[rfranklin]

2. Looks like a cheesy wedding hall...

Especially the two story glass wall in front.

[3waygeek]

6. It was occasionally used for weddings...

ISTR one or two celebrity weddings happening there over the years.

[endless october]

3. not sure why anyone would pick that particular style.

a lot of it just looks like a waste of money with little style payoff.

to each his own, i guess.

[Warpy]

11. It's kind of a hodgepodge

and that ridiculous entrance belongs on a house of several stories, servants' quarters at the top.

I guess the marriage hung together only as long as there was a single surface unencrusted by gilt or fresco.

[malaise]

4. People are crazy

Who builds anything that large and that ugly :puke:

[3waygeek]

5. I live only a few miles from the Dean Mansion...

I used to drive by it every day, back when my commute took me over to Alpharetta. Lots of very high-end homes in that area, but Dean's was definitely the highest.

[CurtEastPoint]

7. Tyler Perry bought it. Madea can go CRAZY in there! n/t

[xultar]

8. I heard he is tearing it down. Johns Creek is out by me.

[GoCubsGo]

9. Yep. He's building an environmentally-friendly house.

Sorry, Medea.

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. He bought that heap and is tearing down?

yeah, that makes sense.
wish I had enough money to buy a monster house just so I could tear it down.

hell, I would spend the money buying a couple hundred acres to preserve them, and build
a green house on one acre.

[Warpy]

10. This is why new money goes broke

They feel compelled to try to compete with old money by outdoing them on glitz and glamor, making their new mansions more spectacular than the often threadbare museums full of antiques that started out as hand me downs the old money lives in. They're like addicts chasing that first buzz and nothing is ever enough for them. Eventually they go deeply into debt trying to impress people who will never be impressed by anything but that elusive quality they call breeding, really inbreeding among members of a tightly knit upper class, and that debt finishes them off.

The most hilarious example of this isn't the mausoleum above, it's in Newport, RI, the "summer cottages" of the old Robber Baron class. It's a real study in class ambition gone awry, whole rooms of castles dismantled in Europe and reassembled in Newport in a vain attempt to impress their original, titled owners. It didn't work then and it won't work now, no matter how oversized the entrance to a one story mansion is. It's just going to fail to impress, every single time.

Sic transit glorious money.

[Hugin]

14. Yup, I'd say your assessment is a bullseye, Warpy.

I'd imagine that this guy still has more than most of us even in his depleted state.

But, it's never enough...

[cleanhippie]

18. Bingo. And why "old money" looks down their noses at "new money".

[Warpy]

26. Exactly. I can tell you from personal experience

that they prefer people with no money to people with new money, especially if the people with no money are amusing.

[cleanhippie]

33. We are like pets to them.

As long as we don't pee on the rug, we can stay in the house.

[Warpy]

34. Oh, they don't care about that, that's what the servants are for

and they do enjoy amusing company. They are generous almost to a fault, but they have to be the ones who decide what to give. Should anyone ever try to tell them what they actually need, their bums are rushed out the door before the last syllable parts their lips. I've seen it happen.

I dropped the acquaintances myself because it was their company that was unbearably dull. I do miss sailing, though.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

13. That's tacky and hideous.

I guess money can't buy class.

"Mr. Dean said he thought the sale would be harder on his oldest son, Chris, who at 21 was given the task of decorating the house and now, at 43, is still trying to come to terms with the experience. It was his first effort at decorating something on such a grand scale; he made one more effort, which ended in disaster, and retired from interior decorating at age 24."

:rofl:

[tabatha]

15. It was a quite well-wriiten article ...

with just a slight undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek.

"and would probably write a book on Internet dating, which he says has been a letdown. Everyone lies, he said, especially about their age and weight."

[monmouth]

17. The toilet seat did it for me. Hope the son didn't come up with that one..LOL..

[kevinbgoode]

16. I just don't understand it. . .it is beyond my comprehension

I read this story and tried to piece together what kind of mindset rewards itself by such blatant overindulgence. I'm not trying to criticize Dean, but he seems symbolic of all the greed I constantly sense oozing out of so many conservatives I know. The relentless drumbeat of "anyone can become rich in America if they work hard enough" translated to "anyone who is unemployed is lazy and stupid" and then I look at these pictures and wonder what kind of real happiness and security did that family get out of building such a monstrosity?

Now I vaguely remember my younger years, when I had a partner who became fairly successful (while I kept moving to accommodate his "dream" and often sacrificing my own) and how we bought into the "bigger is better" meme - but we never went beyond a large condo with multiple bathrooms (which made me resent spending all day Saturday cleaning rooms we weren't really using). And I remember all the furniture selection (the first time in my life we picked an entire room of furniture rather than buying one piece at a time). Heck, I can remember years before that, when wealthier friends would laugh and tell me that I decorated in "hodge-podge" because we could only afford to buy one thing at a time and chose things we liked though they usually complemented some sort of decorating scheme.

But my biggest memory was the time spent on maintenance, and no, it never made us happier. In fact, within a year, our long-term relationship ended and I moved away and back to school to pick up the pieces of my own lost life. Suddenly, I was living in a tiny, one-bedroom, unattractive apartment with ugly dark wood paneling (and later, a tiny apartment with concrete block walls!) and for six months I felt like I had lost everything. Except, in the end, I had actually gained. . .the downsizing, though painful, became much more enjoyable - less maintenance and cleaning time, a newfound avoidance of purchasing anything I had to dust (no stupid knick-knacks). And, I'm happier now.

There is just something wrong with the motivation that success is "having" more. I grew up poor, and remembering that my biggest ambition was to be "free from worry". . .so while there are certain things I'd love to indulge in, I was more concerned about being free of concern. Having a lot more only gives you more to be concerned about maintaining - and I don't see how that really enhances someone's life. And, in the Dean case here, it seems like having so much more only increased the worry and potential for even more debt. I'm not saying that being poor is great, but in some respects, it does remind us of what is really important.

I see this overindulgence as the real issue with our economic problems in this country. When people are only motivated by a desire to construct monstrosities to "show-off" to others, what kind of "morality" are we endorsing? The neverending quest for greed (something I see in many conservatives I've known) doesn't really accomplish anything. I still see it in the eyes of distant relatives who swoop down on the estates of their estranged gay cousins, suddenly rediscovering a "family right" when that cousin dies. There is something just so fu*ked up about valuing a person only on how much you can get from him/her, and yet that seems a hallmark of much of our culture.

You know, we can have a thread on here about people begging for food in this country - and how some people walk past the homeless and blame them for their condition or situation. And then we see stuff like this story, where the wealthy downsize and become (maybe upper middle-class)"failures" - in my mind, there is just something fundamentally wrong with a society that places so much emphasis on things for success.

Maybe I'm just glad that I'm getting older, or have grasped the idea that I'll not be wealthy and don't care, or maybe just that I finally understood that things don't make someone much of a success or provide happiness. Or maybe I've matured enough and experienced enough to know that, for many people, bad situations aren't always about bad choices, but circumstances they can do little about solving. But yet, when it is obvious that Dean's situation is partially based on his multiple marriages and divorces, rather than a homeless person whose only "choice" was involuntary unemployment, why is it that someone like Dean still has more than the homeless person? Where is the justice in that?

[smalll]

19. That really is ugly. Are there NO architects out there who know how do to proper Beaux-Arts

stuff anymore?

Reminds me of a huge place sold out in New Jersey recently - just as hideous.

There's really nothing wrong with classical, columns-and-pediments stuff. But there must be some architects out there who know how to do it right. I guess they're all too busy at architecture school learning how to create Gehry-style buildings that look like crumpled-up paper.

[Odin2005]

24. Such crappy architecture is very typical of a civilization in decline.

In Imperial Rome the aristocratic villas become increasingly overdone and tacky over time, mixing and matching fossilized old artistic forms with no creativity or concern about things fitting together.

[Liberal_in_LA]

20. It's huge. How many homeless could live there?

[tammywammy]

21. More photos

http://www.wsbtv.com/entertainment/24524222/detail.html?sms_ss=email

There's a slideshow. And no wonder the son didn't go into professional decorating....

[Binka]

27. With Each Slide I Was Yelling NO NO NO

What a fucking abortion of a house. Greek, Egyptian, Japanese, Michaelangelo, and Warhol. Good grief. What a mess. How did this guy make his money? What a fucking dolt.

[Warpy]

31. It was the son's first big interior desecration job

and the article says he quit after his second one. I guess the son realized his artistic limits even if his doting parents did not.

[AnnieBW]

30. Ow... my eyes...

I've seen less tackiness in Las Vegas casinos.

[WinkyDink]

22. Yeah, over-taxed. Gotta let those Bush cuts keep on keepin' on, for more King Ludwigs.

[Odin2005]

23. The tackiness is awful.

What happened to all the good architects and interior designers?

[tammywammy]

25. This is what happens when you let your art school student son decorate

It's just awful. No wonder they divorced....

[kwassa]

28. It is not all that tacky, and a great value for $7.6 million.

Of course, real estate values in that area are about half of what they are around here.

That is a lot of house and land for that price. The biggest issue is the high upkeep expenses.

I've seen far worse collisions of big money and bad taste than this. Some of the rooms are done rather well, for that style of decoration.

Check out the old mansions in Newport, R.I., for example, for opulent tastelessness. There was also an infamous mansion in Beverly Hills decorated by a Saudi prince that was amply used in Steve Martin's "The Jerk". I've also seen the horrifying results of many of professional interior decorator that makes this mansion appear the height of taste.

[blueamy66]

32. Are you kidding me?

That is the ugliest house I have ever seen.

[mitchum]

29. Even Elvis Presley would consider that pile to be gaudy