Beyond The “Getaway Apartment”: 10 Options For The Unimaginably Wealthy
Friday’s New York Times contained a trend piece about wealthy Manhattanites’ newly-discovered habit of purchasing multiple, noncontiguous apartments in the same building. One serves as a residence. The other (the “getaway apartment”) provides a home-away-from-home-office, facilitating such activities as sculpting, novel-writing, and guitar-playing. While this article serves as an effective slap to the face of the poor, it barely hints at the potential for the ultra-rich to carve out peaceful havens away from their 6,500 square foot prisons. Here are some outside-the-box (or, apartment building, as it were) ideas for how to escape the tyranny of your dream home for a little peace and quiet.
1. Work out an arrangement with your building’s superintendent that allows you to fill the unfinished basement with soil and maintain your organic garden under high-powered sunlamps.
2. Purchase an ancient Egyptian coffin from a morally flexible museum and fasten it to your fire escape for use as a sensory deprivation chamber.
3. For a secluded location in which you can write your angry letters to magazines, you can’t beat a hermetically sealed bubble set adrift in the ocean, tethered to land by fine silken ropes.
4. Take the customers and employees of a bank hostage. Use your unimaginable wealth to bribe the hostages into acting as if you are a dangerous madman who is not to be bothered. Once you are granted access to the vault, lock yourself in and practice calligraphy.
5. For the same price as your 1,000 square foot apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan, purchase the entire town of Huntington, West Virginia and build a monorail to ferry you back and forth to New York. In the Huntington town square, practice use yoga poses to build core strength and improve your posture.
6. Put a helicopter inside your private jet so you can feel like you’re flying solo through the sky without doing the work of navigating. Store your model train collection in the helicopter.
7. Hire an adult human woman to take enough human growth hormone (HGH) until she is large enough that you may be surgically implanted into her womb where you can peacefully catch up on reading all the classics you blew off in high school.
8. Jackhammer a hole straight to Earth’s molten core for an intense and private bikram yoga experience.
9. To view John Woo’s films in the most immersive way possible, seal yourself in a sleeping bag tied to a thousand doves and watch Face/Off on your iPad while soaring above the city.
10. Using DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber, clone dinosaurs from various prehistoric eras. Build a theme park that will capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for dinosaurs. Teach yourself to play saxophone in the control center of this theme park during off-hours.