Floor Plan Porn

Forgive me for the slightly saucy post title. I copied it from one of my favourite property sites in the world – Curbed. If you're a property follower, as I am, then you'll love Curbed. It features insider news, insights and sale prices on real estate in New York, the Hamptons, LA and many other US cities, although I wish it would extend to Paris, London and Sydney too. It also has lots of celebrity real estate but one of its best sections is the Floor Plan Porn one. {ny.curbed.com/archives/ categories/floorplan_porn.php?page=2} I don't know what it is about floor plans, but I find them fascinating. As Gerald Makowski, director of marketing at Halstead Property quipped: “When you look at a floor plan, it is the apartment standing there naked.” Curbed features some of the best floor plans in New York, allowing you an up-close-and-personal glimpse into the closets, libraries and rooftop terraces of the rich, famous and cashed-up penthouse class. Such as this one, at 834 Fifth Avenue, New York...

 Just in case you hadn't noticed, this grand, three-bedroom penthouse has extensive staff quarters – seven staff bedrooms, to be exact, plus three staff bathrooms and a sitting room with its own kitchenette.
It also features:
– a 38-foot long panelled living room with wood burning fireplace and views over Central Park.
– a sweeping curved staircase that leads to a ballroom-scaled upper landing, which opens to three grand bedrooms.
– an enormous master suite with fireplace, boudoir, custom-fitted dressing room amd two additional walk-in closets, plus a large bathroom.

– a sizable service wing that contains a large walk-in china storage closet (very important), a fully-equipped kitchen-sized pantry, and separate breakfast room.

It's on the market for a nest $27,500,000. Of course, you may want to bargain the price down so you have some money left for the maids and the butlers you'll want to hire.

Or there's this residence:

A New York triplex penthouse on Park Avenue with an octagonal tower and some pretty impressive terraces on two levels.

And then there is this, a duplex at 123 West 15th Street, New York. This floor plan makes me rather nauseous, though.  It's like being in a submarine.

I also came across this at another site: Rupert Murdoch's Manhattan penthouse at 834 5th Avenue, which he purchased for $44M from the estate of Laurance and Mary Rockefeller. The triplex penthouse extends from the 14th to the 16th floors. This is one of them (above). The proportions of the rooms speak for themselves.

But by far my favourite floor plans are those of the great chateau of Versailles (above), and its smaller, chic little sister, the Petit Trianon. The floor plan of Versailles is available at 720plan.ovh.net/~jardinsd/Chateau/Appt-2/Pages/00-PlanRdC.htm  and it's an interactive one, so you can sit and click and discover all the salons for hours. But it's the one of Petit Trianon (below) that I really love. {via architectdesign.blogspot.com/2008/12/petit-trianon.html}

I love floor plans so much, I even have some of the famous Floor Plan dinnerware from Fishs Eddys in New York. Every time I'm near this fabulous store, which is just down from the Flatiron building, I pop in and buy another platter. (I can't bring an entire set back on the plane, so I have to collect the set, piece by piece. You can't imagine how difficult it is squeezing an enormous platter into your Kate Spade handbag...)