An elderly client visited my office recently to inquire about the interest rate for a personal loan. The purpose of the loan, he said, was to purchase a new water heater to replace the one that had just broken in his home. The man’s home…a 2.5 million dollar Tudor-style mansion.
This incident reminded me of something that happened to me when I was a college student. I had answered an ad for a basement suite, and was surprised to find myself standing in front of a hundred-year-old residence complete with carved oak staircase, vaulted ceilings, a library, a study, and an observatory. The owner, who had fallen on hard times, had recently converted the damp basement into six rental suites with a shared kitchen, suitable only to college students who will accept this type of accommodation. I kept looking anyway.
Most aristocratic families have, in their history, a successful ancestor who builds a massive family residence to showcase the family’s success. Winston Churchill’s ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, for instance, built a massive residence named Blenheim Palace.
Subsequent generations develop businesses, pawn heirlooms, gamble, steal, and whatever else is necessary in order to maintain the family estate, some generations more successfully than others. At some point, the family gives up trying to maintain the entire building and moves into a single section, leaving the rest to decay.
Eventually, the family mansion is donated to charity or opened to the public as a tourist attraction, since poor people will pay money to see how rich people live. Sometimes this eventuality takes hundreds of years, and sometimes it occurs within the builder’s lifetime.
The Marlborough family has thus far kept their estate. Due to Winston Churchill’s book royalties, his family has preserved Blenheim palace intact. Before Winston became a famous author (and later politician), the survival of the family residence was in doubt.
In Canada, people have the peculiar habit of moving into larger and larger homes as they become more established, until finally, after the children leave the nest, they find themselves in a home with far more space than they need. In due course they retire, and spend six months of every year in the warm southern United States, living in a camping trailer and enjoying it because it’s “easy to maintain.”
For aristocratic wannabes (easily distinguished by the phrase, “I do a lot of entertaining at home”), remember the lesson you can learn from the mistakes of real aristocrats: buy a home that you can comfortably afford, with rooms that you will actually use. The idea of having 10 extra rooms will bring you much more pleasure that actually owning them.
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"Few rich men own their property; the property owns them."Robert Ingersoll, speech, New York, 29 October 1896
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