Tasteful friends. What do we think of this mountain mansion?

How fortunate they are to have a giant-sized, Dr. Scholl-shaped swimming pool adjacent!

No thanks.

I know the area and that place is going to be swallowed in a fire within five years.

CHOLA Lane…

Ugh, that is a whole lot of ugly.

So many questionable ceiling choices.

Couldn’t get past photo 3…. Just no

The setting is lovely. Those views!

But the house itself is hideous. And not even fun hideous. Just vomit inducing.

Interior by Cheesecake Factory

The setting and the prospect and the general program of a glass-sided house clinging to a cliff sets off with some promise. Promise completely undone by the mediocrity with frequent hints of vulgarity.

I know it's Arizona where you wouldn't expect to find nice furniture, but did no one think to have it delivered instead instead of buying locally and that granny shit from Design Toscana?

Not a single solar panel?!

I like the layout but the architectural touches and most of the decor have got to go.

Way to desecrate that mountain.

I think it's fucking glorious!

Garbage.

Holy fucking tar, $100,000 a month house payments. It does look like Cheesecake Factory. That headboard looks like a royal Star Wars villain that comes to life after you fall asleep.

The house, minus the interiors and furnishings, could be rather amazing. I mean, those views from the giant windows! That said, whoever did the decorating needs to be sent to a designer’s re-education camp for at least 10 years. Hideous!

It looks like a good place to be murdered in.

There are several Wayfair customer service representatives who received a bonus slice of Domino’s pizza at the holiday party because of this customer.

17 million to live in Arizona? Fuck right off. That's one step above moving to Texas.

Stunning views and windows. Everything else is pure trash.

And even if it wasn't, nothing, and I mean nothing, could make me buy a hut in the Arizona desert let alone a $17 million home there.

Makes me wonder who lives in this floral abomination.

How much to cool 9500 square feet of space located in the Arizona desert?

Glad I'm not responsible for that electric bill.

We did this one already.

It’s built into a mountainside. Do boulders ever roll down?

Dramatically situated and the capacity to house 50 members of a doomsday cult.

Shcottshdale

I love the views, especially the night time views. The house is odd to me.

That enormous and empty swimming pool, in a region that is parched dry and extremely hot most of the year, makes me root for Mother Nature. Be it fire or be it a landslide. .

R8-It just looks like the interior of a run of the mill MCMANSION who’s inhabitants are rich RIFF RAFF.

AAAAAAAAAAAALL that money and so little taste.

The views are great. From straight on it actually looks like the builder/architect thought about trying to integrate it into the natural environment a tiny bit. But yes, I hate what they've done with the place.

I think it can be salvaged. Remove the hideous decor and redo the kitchen and baths. I might also get rid of the glass-enclosed interior space, but I can’t quite figure out its purpose.

Ostentatious

If this were Nevada, I could see that becoming an upscale members only gaming/social club. Like a country club without a golf course or tennis courts. You could probably get away keeping the same furniture. Bedrooms can be massage rooms, etc. Seems like a place that can accommodate parties and receptions. You'd just need a parking lot somewhere downhill and transportation to and from.

Interiors by Laura Ashley from their "Vomited in the Mountains" collection.

Why only 4 bedrooms in a house that size?

[quote]Why only 4 bedrooms in a house that size?

Why not. I think there´s a grandual recognition in the fact that people who can afford very large houses are not always young families with umpteen kids or the need to house older relatives. And maybe, too, that Americans recognize that they are not as social as they think they are: the days of country houses filled with weekend guests ended a century ago, and now there's a trend of destination vacations for getaways with old college friends or just one partner's friends or the other's at some rented party house somewhere. Real estate agents are the last to recognize this and always want to inflate the number of bedrooms, but most Americans with some money to spend don't really need loads of bedrooms or see them as desirable if not easwy put to other uses.

Bedrooms have traditionally been fairly specific in type: in size, location within the house, closet space, proximity to bathrooms... But it seems houses are showing evidence of more flexibility of use of rooms, of spaces made a little bigger so that they can hold more than a double guest bed and be used as an exercise room, hobby room, something other than a bedroom. It seems that large houses with few bedrooms are in many ways more luxurious and practical than large houses with large numbers of bedrooms.

Pressed, this place could sleep a small army unit on the scores of sofas, and with it 6 bathrooms and a mountain to piss off of, there's room for the odd drunken sleepover or other occasion if needs be.

I know the pace is 24 years old, but it seems a little ahead of its time in the bedroom/square footage ratio.

I require a floor plan. I don’t understand why the “living room” is divided into two spaces by the giant aquarium in the middle.

For about 1/3 the price, a much less tacky house, maybe even actually tasteful, within walking distance of Old Town Scottsdale and the Fashion Sq. Rather than have to renovate the $17M place and replace the super-tackiness, this seems like an easy decision other than of course those views.

For $17M I'd rather have 4 lovely condos in four other cities.

Agreed, R40. For me it feels a bit 'Smegner Research Library & Art Center of the Universwity of Whatever,' a little sterlile and institutional. But without the staged furniture (how clever those upturned apple baskets!) and with a couple of very modest changes and acres of good oriental rugs and good large scale art, it´s a very nice, comfortable place. The setting is very nice and seems a very flexible house with some design to it -- whereas OP's $17M place looks like it was scrolled by a drunk on a coctail napkin and executed by a low end builder-architect.

R40, that trends with all these interior-focused houses in Dwell.

Custom built now features walls around the perimeter.

I pray viny-panell fencing is illegal in Scottsdale.

House at R40 has some nice details but the exterior is incoherent and unattractive and there is no property and what little privacy there is is created by walls. Agree with r42 that the interior is ultimately cold and cheap looking, despite some expensive flourishes. All the ceiling fixtures and vents are highlighted by the photos . Perhaps they’d fade in real life,

Too much white.

As NoPalmOil R11 says up thread no solar panels. With all that roof space it should be overflowing with solar panels and good battery packs on the ground. We have 32 panels on our place in Aussie ( we feed the excess back into the National Grid) and the same in New Zealand but with battery storage. So annoying to see all that sun wasted. Rant over.

Perhaps someone requested the Cone of Silence and got that interior dome.

Love the views, but the weather in that part of AZ is completely unreasonable.

To R42-I agree with you! It was the "Phillywhore Research Library& Technology Center at the University of Cruising"

It looked like typical University teaching center, however the kitchen was "AWESOME", I could cook there. The home was too white but paint could take care of that,

Built in 2000 - and not a single furnishings update since! I can smell the old white people from here. Can't seem to get a hit online of who owns the place.

R45 - there are two reasons why they don't have solar panels - one, they're right into the mountain, so I'm presuming they are shaded from the direct daytime sunlight needed.

Second - AZ has extremely inexpensive electricity rates. It's around $0.10 to $0.11 for a kwH. Comparatively speaking, Southern California's rates are usually 4-5x that. There's only like 8-10% home adoption rate of solar in AZ vs 35-40% in SoCal. I used to work for a solar company in both CA and AZ. There's usually a financial incentive to going solar - there really isn't one in AZ. Although they should do something with all that sun.

To R36, your post is "spot-on", I'm still laughing sooo hard at Laura Ashley " Vomited in the Mountains" collection.

WTF!! They need to shoot the decorator-burn all that paisley& the other shit, the view was great and that's it!!

To R49, Yes, old white people lived there!!

Looks like Mexican cartel drug lord headquarters.

Here is a casebook example of why mixing modern and traditional generally doesnt work. Especially when the traditional elements are as they are here.... not very good. Some of the furniture would be nice... in a completely different house. It doesnt work here.

This would actually be a great modern minimalist house, if every last bit of furniture / decor was stripped out and the interior repainted and furnished all in white/ grey or similar, this house would suit that treatment, and the views need to be the focus of interest here. You can get away with blandness with views like this.

I've seen a number of beautiful old ornate historic homes posted on here staged with completely inappropriate modern furniture, and it just looks wrong. This is the first time I've seen it the other way round, and it looks just as wrong.

If they wanted a traditional historical style home... they should have built one, or bought one

R52 - but that was the style back in 2000 when it was finished. We forget how shitty things were with home decor back then. Take a look at ANY Trading Spaces episode - it's a fucking horror show.

It's an elderly owner - they're not going to upend their lives to keep up with new styles and tastes. Particularly when they probably spent a ton of money to do it.

It's mainly fixable by just removing all the furniture and accessories - although that kitchen needs to be gutted.

Man - some rich people just LOVE that Tuscan/French Chateau shit. I'm not even sure what we'd call that overly ornate crap.

It's horrible. More proof that money can't buy taste.

Isn't this the house in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery?

The house design with the absence of traditional square and rectangular rooms with right angle walls and ceilings is a bit sick-making, though had potential. Am I right that many of the meetings of walls and walls and ceilings are, additionally, ever so slightly rounded?

Here is a good example of what I mean.

Is this all poured cement? Is there are regular cement or steel structure that has been thickly stucco'd? What?

There was a potential for all that goopy massing to be fantastic but everywhere you look it's like potential design success in the structure is thwarted by one final bad decision or another.

Seventeen million and a neighbor right next door? It’s like having an empty movie theater to yourself and someone walks in and sits right next to you.

I don't like R40's house any more than OP's house. But it is indeed loads cheaper.

As expected, it's s terrible state uf you like historic houses. I found 313 houses in all of fucking Arizona that are >$500,000 and built before 1940. Of those, this one is perhaps the best in still having some original character and not having been fucked up 47 dozen ways.

For $2M, a mere 12% of OP's cliffhanger house, you forfeit the wide views over brown rocks and brown earth and get 6000sf in an odd, scrubby looking enclave behind the Tuscon Best buy and surrounded by neighborhoods of modest mid-century houses and later. Not the best, but the house, with its sprawling plan at least has some pleasant spaces and the later alterations are fairly few and easily undone or improved upon.

Not in love with the house, but at least it's a 1929 house and has some nice attributes.

If I see an exposed beam, I HURL.

OP's house has no redeeming features. The view is just generic urban sprawl. The odd showroom as a room thing is just weird. Who owns this place? It looks like a former owner was Bert Pitre, a car dealer.

R62 - Bert's listed on a lot of properties on that street - I think he used to own a lot of acres and sold them off for development.

I saw a Craig Carter who is 83. But a lot of weird other names associated with that address - different last names and different ages. Not something you expect from family members living there.

R60’s isnt bad.

R60's post is over 100 miles away in Tucson. Like it or not - this is considered super prime real estate on Camelback and with that view - and being in Scottsdale/Paradise Valley.

R60's house is much nicer but the location really makes the difference.