Tasteful friends: a delightful CASTLE IN TEXAS!

Why do the exterior stone walls look decrepit and mouldy?

r1 It's a castle. Old building technology.

Also, Texas? NO fank you.

Castles with w2w carpeting? No. A blight.

An absolute horror show.

hidjus, just hidjus in every respect

I believe this is a wedding venue. Burnet is a cute town in Hill Country and they have an awesome bluebonnet festival every year.

[quote] Falkenstein Castle

No, Frankenstein Castle!

Its like the monster’s body parts collected from charnel houses and dissecting rooms.

Ooh! You could have jousting competitions in the basement!

You lost me at Texas.

It's in the Hill Country but there's not a lot around. It also looks like it's poorly constructed and is already showing signs of wear from the elements. Nope. Hideous anyway.

Priceless sales pitch, OP!

I couldn't make sense of some the interior choices until I searched and saw that it was a wedding and event venue. Some rooms are very half assed, but it will work for pics taken from certain positions.

Apparently r8 is my straight cousin's husband.

There is tacky, then there is that.

We saw this monstrosity from the road this summer when we went to a nearby vineyard. So hideous!!

The "draperies" in that sitting room look like cheap Dollar General sheets.

Another monstrosity about an hour south of there off 281 is the Arc de Texas. It stinks up the gorgeous landscape for miles and miles. This photo doesn't convey how tacky it is.

Where's the moat? For $15 million the place should have at least one moat.

[quote]I believe this is a wedding venue. Burnet is a cute town in Hill Country and they have an awesome bluebonnet festival every year.

It can be used as a wedding venue or an Airbnb, but there are dozens (if not hundreds) of similar wedding venues also within a 90-minute drive of Austin. (I'm friends with the owners of one just south of the city, a gay male couple I've known forever. THEIR place is truly incredible, with far more lushness.) Also, Burnet gets less cute with each passing month: it's evolving into a bedroom suburb for Austin. They just extended one of their main toll roads all the way north to the turnoff for Burnet. It also doesn't seem to be a successful one, or at least not successful enough given how quickly land prices are rising.

Burnet's also kinda "meh" as far as Hill Country towns go, but mainly because it's on the edge of it: immediately north of there is where the state's prairie lands start, and they extend all the way up through the Midwest.

OTOH R17's house may be one of THE ugliest buildings I've ever seen. If it looks even *worse* in person ... JFC. But please: $15 mil for what's basically a McMansion cosplaying in Bavarian castle attire?? (The land's only worth a fraction of that amount, so no, this isn't meant to be a teardown, it seems.)

*Doesn't seem to be a successful *venue*, meaning the castle.

I am at a loss to understand what on earth would possess someone to build this. And R17's offering looks like it was made with Legos.

Here's a San Antonio news feature on the Arc de Texas. The terrain is gorgeous, and then out of nowhere that thing assaults your eyeballs.

I agree that Burnet is meh, but Perissos vineyard makes excellent wine.

That’s Hill Country? Why it’s as flat as a board and scrubby.

At least it’s not a McMansion.

The Hill Country is not flat; it just looks flat in those photos.

It takes a special talent for American builders today to build a structure in the style of buildings constructed hundreds of years ago in Europe. The architects may make it look good on paper, but the builders and designers rarely have the talent, or the access to the proper materials, to make it look convincing. It more often than not ends up looking like exactly what it is, a laughable tacky imitation.

That thing at R17 would be better off burned to the ground. All that money to build that hideous thing and they didn't even bother to build any sort of garage to park cars out of the elements.

This is the entrance to the Arc de Texas. Looks like they ran out of money at some point.

Finding a bricklayer who can do more than the bare minimum is difficult now.

I like the idea but it looks kind of cheap and half-assed.

if I was looking for a classy wedding or party venue and I drove up to that at R26, I wouldn't even bother turning off the road. Whoever owns that place has apparently never heard of "curb appeal".

From 1998? It's period!

Perfect for a kitsch wedding, but I'd guess people go to Vegas for that.

Tacky but could be HQ for the new RenFair. The Magnolia location had some scandal and drama surrounding it plus the landowner croaked.

Do I spy acoustic ceiling tiles?

It wouldn't be suitable for a children's play space or the Bawdy Wench from the RenFaire's wedding. The exterior makes fome (vert) small effort; the interior, however, is a low, low, very low budget shit storm.

For $15M USD, You could buy an authentic and finely restored and well furnished medieval castle, have money left over to ensure its maintenance and care over a lifetime, and pocket $10M. And not be in the USA or fucking Texas, which is priceless.

Bad math: "For $5M USD..."

What even am I looking at? My mind can’t process that something like that can exist.

Freaks with far less money have made truly unique castles all over this country.

This looks like the Junior High version of a castle - like every student took a break after learning Venetian plasterwork and didn’t bother to come back.

Only if the castle comes with a weekly 'grand tournament of knights' and a chef to prepare those mutant Turkey legs and pewter tankards of Ale.

Let's be clear...there is nothing tasteful about a castle in Texas.

It looks more like a whorehouse, where the prostitutes and johns can go to Mass on Sunday mornings after spending Saturday nights in all types of debauchery.

I refuse to believe the owner is an 'architect'. He's a housing developer who has worked with architects, but no way does he have a degree.

I guarantee you this house was built with leftover materials or hidden costs from his development company. So many developers and home builders do that. They literally build houses from the over-order/overstock from other projects.

The 110 acres is probably the majority of the value. People are just fucking crazy and egomaniacal. I can't imagine ever thinking this was a good idea and worth their time.

And then after you spend all that time on it - you furnish it with the cheapest looking, discount store furnishings?

This is so Texas. Bunch of weirdos living down there.

…perhaps a bit less footage, and a bit more attention to detail…

TBH, I vastly prefer the monstrosity at r17 over the castle.