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A bay window seat for reading. I know it's common in some homes, but I've never had one, and would love to have one single, solitary place with a lot of sunlight that I could devote solely to relaxing with a cup of iced coffee and a book. No kidlets allowed.
A home theater room--I don't necessarily want one (I'm sure my husband would) but I think they're decadent and extravagant and definitely a luxury that we will probably never be able to afford.
A wonderful view of either the mountains, a wooded area, or the beach.
A jetted jacuzzi tub.
A "lanai" or screened back patio. I watch a lot of episodes of the Golden Girls. lol
For me the most important mark a real luxury house is if it makes you feel "right" when you look at it inside and outside and from all angles. A real luxury house is a piece of art...it focuses not on size or ammenities (although they are often included) but on proper porportions and setting. It will look like it belongs and will incite a positive reaction from the viewer.
A real luxury home exhibits excellent craftsmanship, is "architecturally honest" (no faux building products that often look fake and don't have the warmth and variation real wood and stone have) and is a coherent, balanced and pleasing architectural style. The details (moldings and such) must also be integrated into the whole and one of a kind to distinguish the property as "special" (no off the shelf Home depot moldings, doors and columns). And it obviously has to be functional as well.
Compare that to a standard "mcmansion" that is thrown up without regard to it's surroundings, has a frankenstein front facade that is a mishmash of conflicting styles and is covered in cultured stone and vinyl. The back of the house will often be an ugly mess of vinyl siding and odd sized windows. The inside will be full of huge spaces but wrapped in the same poor quality materials that would be put in a cheap apartment. Outside, the builder probably bulldozed a lovely forest to put in the development and surrounded the houses with turf and maybe some scraggly flowering pear trees. The whole thing is peddled as a "luxury lifestyle" but it is a deception meant to take advantage of people who don't know any better.
I guess Americans spend too much time pondering the TV to appreciate good architecture, because it's a rarity here.
This is an interesting thread. For me personally, luxury always meant the quality of the materials used inside. Such as:
Real wood trim
Real wood floors
Real wood doors
Marble
Beautiful hand-carved details
Craftsmanship (Where the builder actually took pride in his work and not threw a bunch of junk together that will fall apart within a year or 2)
Basically, anything that's non-builders grade or cheap. I mean, I've seen 500K+ houses with Ikea kitchen cabinets (trust, I can tell no matter how much you dress them up), and though there is nothing wrong with using Ikea, don't try to pass them off as luxury and inflate the home price just because someone threw a granite countertop on top of them. I'm supposed to pay 500K for a house with 3K kitchen cabinets? I think not.
Funny, you are describing almost any pre 1930s home. All those people had no idea that they were living in luxury.
I guess I have modest tastes.
I consider central air and a dishwasher luxuries. Subdivision home I grew up in didn't have them. I didn't get them until age 48 when I built my little dream house.
I hope that my life is not coming near the end yet. But I have had the pleasure of working on a number of homes like have been described here and I will still take my hundred and fifty year old house any day because you see it's payed for and I still can and will continue to remodeled it till it has a few of the so called nice things listed here. But the bigest luxury we have and love is our home with our three kids. All the noise, toys, clothes and cleaning up after them will some day soon be a thing of the past and this twenty six hundred foot house will be as big as the pictures of the hotel house. Thank God for our future.
Well, since my wife disallowed a dishwasher in our ca 1929 kitchen rehab, I guess a dishwasher would be pretty luxurious! I know my 14 year old daughter(the current biological dishwasher) thinks so!!
It would probably also be nice for our "master" bedroom to have its own private bath, but at least we have a door into the community downstairs bath directly.
I guess other "luxuries" would include anything beyond practical and essential, the definition of a luxury I would imagine
Al
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Anything non-essential, by definition I guess
