Tasteful Friends - $14,700,000

Well, I did find a shot of the interior. Now we know why.

I wonder how many Portuguese octogenarians creamed their pants after seeing that patio.

I spent a week on Kiawah Island once (professional conference), and no Datalounger wants a home there.

Lovely natural setting, miles of beaches, lovely accomodations, terrific food... but it's a rich white Republican "bubble". Access to the island is controlled, the only people of color there are working service jobs, it's a place where well-to-do sociopaths can get together on the golf course and chat about putting the gays and n-words in their place, and wish the whole world catered to them as wonderfully as Kiawah Island does.

It appears to be a very large boxy house. The railings look cheap.

The Shingle Style facade is okay, not bad yet not exactly a display of particular talent or any finesse.

The rear elevation is a mess, a sort of afterthought, looking more like one bad contractor-designed remodelling job on top of another. The setting and landscaping is lovely and the big draw (along with the Kiawah Island thing, for those who like that sort of thing.)

The appeal of Kiawah Island, R3, is that, living there, everyone is already in their place. There's no work to be done to put anyone in his place, no need to keep upleasantness out of sight and out of mind because that's a given.

Tasteful friends do not live or visit shitty, RED places filled with racist cunts and evil pricks. Thank You.

Sung to the tune of Meow-Mix.

Frau Frau Frau Frau

Frau Frau Frau Frau,

Frau Frau Frau Frau,

Frau Frau Frau Frau,

They must be hiding something very nasty inside.

I see this more and more for expensive properties: a few or even a good number of exterior photos but, for the interior, maybe one or no photos and a scant description of the interior touting location, privacy, and other general qualities over specific features (appliance brands, finish materials, systems, etc.) It's not a big trend, but I see it much more than even a couple of years ago. If having the interior of your house featured in Architectural Digest is a feather in the cap of some, for others having no photos in circulation of the interior of your house is another sort of plume.

It seems the idea is to suggest that at this steep price those things are what one would expect, and it's expected that a purchaser will change of lot of things anyway in the same way he will change finishes and furnishings and room functions to fit his taste. Further, it's a modest bow to privacy: no one will be looking through a portfolio of106 Zillow photos of how your house looked when you bought it six years ago. Where someone *might* see a listing of a palazzo in Venice and jump on a plane to view it just because they can, a place like Kiawah Island is its own market, people know it and want to live there, or they don't, there's not a lot of benefit from teaser photos of the interior if the market is already so well defined.

I loathe it. Too big, institutional-looking like some regional bank headquarters, and the brick seems completely out of place on a subtropical island setting. Tasteless.

There's some photos of the interior at this listing from last August.

Wow. WTF is that "kitchen"? No way in hell.

R11: Inside it's vast, and vastly boring and downscale. The large rooms one opening to another to another and the horizontally stretched cased door openings and relentless stretches of hardwood floors have the effect of making the main floor look vertically shortchanged and dreary. The interior is too Chip and Joanna Shiplap for a house priced that high, but then the architect's 35+ year career was built on resort homes -- lucrative, heavily derivative, trend-driven and not the stuff that wins any regard from his peers.

The entry hall with its off-mark nod to Charleston architecture (of course, the natural handmaiden to the Shingle Style exterior, or one elevation of it) is rather comical, the curve of the stairway all wrong, a big flashy ill at ease space and with the fielded panels framing beaded board (found in the main entry hall of not one refined historic house in Charleston, strictly servant's hall and down-market stuff.) And the segmental arch looks like something from a 1980s Baptist church social hall.

R12 That kitchen made me laugh, My own home is just over a 1000 sf, and its kitchen is bigger than that. This looks like the kitchenette at a condo community clubhouse. I was thinking maybe they don't cook, and just have the caterers bring the food in and set up there...lol.

"The appeal of Kiawah Island, [R3], is that, living there, everyone is already in their place. There's no work to be done to put anyone in his place, no need to keep upleasantness out of sight and out of mind because that's a given."

Absolutely! The island has a built-in social structure!

Access is guarded by checkpoints, and you can't get in without a job there or a hotel pass, and there are inner levels of access with checkpoints guarding the more expensive real estates. Hotel guests get into the first level, I think there was a second checkpoint guarding the more "exclusive" hotel areas, and then there were more checkpoints keeping the hotel guests from driving into the really expensive real estate. They can walk or bike there, but as you said, they know their place. The place must be hugely appealing to a heirarchical, authoritarian mind, and some of them must adore it enough to aspire to a house in the areas they're excluded enough, and to be willing to pay for a boring McMansion on a golf course where there's nothing else to do.

I prefer this, on Edisto Island, for $10M less.

$14 million to live in Hurricane Central. Uh, no thanx.

Nice place, r16, but I look at it and see just two things: mosquitoes and hurricane surges.

I must admit, I LOVE the idea of a roof platform accessed by a spiral staircase on the balcony. I'm adding that to the wish list for the dream house I'll build when I win the lottery!

And the private or semi-private boardwalk that leads t the beach is probably a good idea, if you've got a raised path you're less likely to be sharing the path with the alligators, snakes, and flooding from heavy rains or mild storm surges.

How odd.

R16’s house is spectacular. It was built in 1803. The driveway alone—Spanish moss draped oaks—is worth it. It does seem suspiciously cheap.

Yes, there are things to change (bathrooms!) but overall a very comfortable place.