7 Homes Of The Rich And Famous (That Are Gloriously Insane)
Remember when you were 6 and you meticulously planned out how you were going to live in a mansion that was also a rocket ship? For most of us, that dream dies on the vine the first time we have to rage-build an IKEA closet. Celebrities, however, have the type of money that allows them to never stop living that dream. For instance ...
Alien Designer H.R. Giger's House Is A Nightmare Mansion With A Haunted Train Ride
H.R. Giger was a Swiss artist and creature designer best known for giving PTSD to an entire generation of teenagers who snuck in to see Alien in theaters. Throughout his career, Giger enjoyed creating beautifully violent sexual imagery by pairing frail humanity with cold, unfeeling machinery, like RoboCop masturbating to ballet. So with so much creepiness going on in his work life, it probably makes sense that he left that madness at the door to retire to a much more relaxed and reasonable environment at home.
Just kidding. His house is as terrifying as you would imagine the home of the creator of a phallic space monster to be.
For years, the man who wrote the book on biomechanical horrors enjoyed taking his work home with him, which explains why most of his rooms make you feel like the walls are about to rape the furniture. But make it through the house and you can relax in the garden, which is populated by statues from Hell's miniature golf course.
Next to some familiar nightmares, Giger also filled his large backyard with some of his private designs -- not that those are any less terrifying, upon closer inspection.
If you can avert your eyes from the creepy statuary, you'll notice the real star of the backyard: a fully operating train ride (Giger may have been a dour man, but he was not without his moments of whimsy). While it was still working, any of the guests could hop on board the Penetrain and take a ride through an endless vortex of suffering. It's beautiful.
Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, even mentioned once that Giger was hoping to take his ghoulish garden and turn it into a theme park, but unfortunately that dream died along with Giger in 2014. Honestly, that's probably the theme park Giger would have wanted.
Speaking of theme parks ...
Celine Dion Built Her Own Private Water Park
Once you reach a certain level of superfame, it gets hard to go out and buy garbage bags or whatever without someone taking a million pictures of your crotch. Fortunately, with enough money, you can bring the outside to you. That's why so many celebs populate their massive mansions with pools, tennis courts, movie theaters, and Bennigan's franchises. But Celine Dion, the Grammy Award-winning vocalist who made made trillions of Canadian money buttons singing about the Titanic, went one step further. When she saw that she couldn't go out and have fun with her kids, her response was, "Screw it, let's build a water park in the backyard."
Located on Jupiter Island, Florida, Dion's property is totally big enough to house a respectable-sized water park. There are multiple slides, a flowing canal, at least three bridges, and a pool large enough to drown every orphan in Canada.
But the fun doesn't end there. The inside of the house features a fully functioning arcade. All that's missing is its own McDonald's for the elegant Quebecois singer's mansion to be mistaken for the home of a child billionaire.
Good news for all those adolescent tech CEOs, though, because the house is currently for sale and just this year received a massive price drop to a mere $45.5 million. She also just sold an island castle straight out of a fairy tale. At the rate she's shedding homes, all she'll be left with will be her theme park on the moon and her palace in Narnia.
Danzig Had A Giant Pile Of Bricks On His Lawn
Glenn Danzig, leader of the band Danzig and former lead singer of the Misfits, doesn't have the kind of money to be building his own water park mansions, but we're happy to report that he gives just as few fucks as Celine Dion -- possibly fewer. As it turns out, up until a few years ago, the man had been sporting a big-ass pile of old bricks right in the middle of his front lawn, because screw you all, he's Danzig.
This is apparently a known fact among Danzig fans, as the bricks have been referenced in the name of a Misfits tribute band, Danzig Brick. The pile of bricks is also referenced on the MySpace page that someone set up for the house itself, though the page no longer exists, probably because the house decided to upgrade to literally any other social network.
According to Justin Halpern, creator of the ShitMyDadSays Twitter account and former Danzig neighbor, there was an incident a while back regarding the pile of bricks. Another of Glenn's neighbors had been feuding with him about moving the pile, complaining that it was bringing down the neighborhood's property value, but Mr. Danzig was adamant -- and lazy -- enough to refuse. This eventually culminated in the musician heading out to his yard and tossing all of his bricks into a dumpster while yelling (this is allegedly a direct quote), "HERE I AM, MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY MOTHERFUCKING BRICKS, BITCH." We assume he added a "WHOOOOOOOOOOA" for flair.
Apparently the brick incident soured Glenn Danzig enough to move away, since everyone now knew where he lived and he preferred to live a simple life of brick-throwing by himself. He reportedly moved into a house formerly owned by Lucille Ball, where he hopefully is raising a small colony of broken glass out front.
Lemmy's Tiny Apartment Was Covered With Nazi Paraphernalia
It's hard to imagine Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister as living any sort of normal life -- you don't walk around with a historical victory of a mustache on your face and then go home to a tasteful Dutch colonial. But despite his fame and fortune, Lemmy never, ever forgot his roots as a poor English lad in a small Northern town. Which explains why he insisted on living in a shitty closet of a house near his favorite pub.
While Lemmy has since transcended into eternity, back in the mortal realm he preferred spending his time in his cramped Los Angeles apartment just off the Sunset Strip. The rock 'n' roll millionaire paid only $900 a month for his hole-in-the-wall place, which was within stumbling distance of his favorite shitty bar, the Rainbow Bar And Grill, where he spent basically all of his time drinking Jack and Cokes, playing bar trivia, and generally being about 30 decibels louder than everyone else. What did he do with all that extra cash he saved living like a 20-year-old line cook? He spent it on Nazi memorabilia, obviously.
In addition to all the empty Jack Daniel's bottles, Lemmy's apartment was absolutely covered in Nazi collectibles. According to Lemmy, he didn't subscribe to their beliefs or politics -- he just thought they looked cool:
"I've always liked a good uniform, and throughout history, it's always been the bad guy who dressed the best: Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis," he was quoted as saying. "If we had a good uniform, I'd collect ours as well, but what does the British Army have? Khaki." It is unclear whether Lemmy was aware that the Nazis also wore khaki.
This wasn't just a passing fascination, either -- Lemmy had items in his collection that were worth upwards of $10,000, and those were on top of items gifted to him by colleagues like Ozzy Osbourne, because apparently Nazi bowls are just what rich British metalheads bring to barbecues.
Enya Lives Alone In A Castle Filled With Cats
Eithne Padraigin Ni Bhraonain, also known as Enya, is probably best known for her hit single "Orinoco Flow (Sail Away)" and for writing the Celtic music that made you sad about Hobbits. Her songs often feel as though they're coming from a place of pure rustic serenity, capable of turning any room into a day spa. It might not be so surprising, then, to learn that Enya used her fat stacks of easy-listening money to buy an actual castle, complete with turrets and guarded by an army of cats.
Enya purchased Ayesha Castle in 1997, renaming it Manderley Castle and pulling up the drawbridge. She's lived there for almost 20 years in near isolation, her only sign of continuing existence being to put out an occasional album. Her closest neighbor is Bono, but apparently they live far enough apart that she doesn't even need to yell at him to turn down his music.
If you worry about her being lonely, though, don't fret, because we weren't lying about that army of cats. Reportedly (because humans aren't welcome), Enya has had up to a dozen cats at once in the past, launching the "reclusive cat lady" trope into the celebrity stratosphere.
Bob Dylan's Mansion Features The World's Shittiest Christmas Lights
Bob Dylan, in addition to being one of history's most celebrated and prolific songwriters, is now also a crotchety old man. Listening to him today, he sounds less like a legendary troubadour and more like he's been uninterruptedly shouting at rascally neighborhood children to get the hell off his lawn for the last 20 years. And there was a lot of yard to get the hell off of at Dylan's old Malibu mansion.
If you can see past the Eastern Bloc fencing, you'll behold a luxurious estate with a beautiful manse, a gigantic pool, and an incredible view of Malibu, only slightly diminished by the single shitty string of Kmart Christmas lights he threw into his bushes every year like a recently widowed grandfather.
Maybe he meant it as commentary against organized religion or the commercialization of the season, but whatever the reason, Bob Dylan decorated his sprawling mansion like the drunken stepfather in Radio Flyer. And lest you think that he was having a bad year when he lassoed one of his bushes with that festive cry for help, he did the same thing over and over for seven straight years.
Redman Went On MTV Cribs To Show A Surprisingly Relatable Home
In the early 2000s, the reality show MTV Cribs was created for the explicit purpose of allowing celebrities to show off the Solomon-esque waste going on inside their flagrant mansions. For those who closely followed the show for its decade-spanning run, there were some noticeable trends in the homes of musicians, such as the abundance of cars, pools, and stripper poles and the non-existence of bookcases. So it was quite a surprise when the Cribs team showed up to film rapper-turned-actor Redman's crib, only to find him living in the kind of shitty duplex apartment generally reserved for teenage newlyweds.
In sharp contrast to the vast majority of his contemporaries in the hip-hop industry, Redman (whose estimated net worth is $10 million) was happily living in a modestly sized condominium. Part of Redman's persona had always been being kind of dirty, and this episode of Cribs confirmed that he doesn't give a tinkerer's damn what anyone thinks of his living situation (unlike 50 Cent, who apparently garnished his Cribs episode with three borrowed Ferraris). The opening shot of the episode even shows Redman busily rubbing wires together just to get his doorbell to work, before he presumably went into his living room and burned a pile of magazines to keep winter at bay for another night.
Redman's house was so small, the Cribs crew had a hard time placing cameras to capture its shittiness. They had to set up all of their equipment in Redman's kitchen, because it wouldn't fit anywhere else (he didn't have a garage, or even a giant pile of bricks to hide his car behind). In fact, Redman's commitment to not giving a shit was so strong, he had only just woken up when everyone arrived to start filming.
For more ways celebrities are nothing at all like us, check out 23 Bizarre Demands Celebrities Have Made Behind The Scenes and 8 Acts Of Rock Star Debauchery That Would Destroy You.
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