Hopefully something like the Getty can scrounge up $15m from the couch cushions. Would be a nice museum of some sort.
irjustin 141 days ago [-]
Thanks it was a nice read.
keyle 141 days ago [-]
Great read, thank you!
qmr 141 days ago [-]
[flagged]
JeremyNT 141 days ago [-]
She does explicitly go on to say "by Hollywood standards"
I honestly saw it was $15million and figured that's a bargain for the estate of one of the most esteemed directors of his generation. Relative to his level of fame and respect, his monetary assets do seem low.
But then this certainly matches the public perception of Lynch. He made the things that he wanted to make, not the things that were guaranteed to sell. I'm sure commercial success was important to him, but there were lots of paths he could have taken that would have lead to a lot more.
e40 141 days ago [-]
What people normally mean by wealth is easy access to cash. Someone that owns a $15M house and has very little other liquid assets is not poor, but they definitely don't qualify as wealthy.
Many, many people in CA that live in expensive homes are in this situation. It's what Prop 13 wrought. Variously, in my neighborhood, old people are paying a small fraction of the property tax that I do, and their house is worth a lot of money, but they have almost nothing, living on their social security check, month to month.
I'm not saying Lynch was living on SSI, but given his movies and what we know of how much they made, the story told by his daughter is very plausible.
cjrp 141 days ago [-]
> Someone that owns a $15M house and has very little other liquid assets is not poor, but they definitely don't qualify as wealthy.
Assuming they own the house outright, that absolutely does qualify as wealthy.
e40 141 days ago [-]
I didn't say it wouldn't. I said it didn't qualify as ready cash.
JadeNB 141 days ago [-]
> > Assuming they own the house outright, that absolutely does qualify as wealthy.
> I didn't say it wouldn't. I said it didn't qualify as ready cash.
> What people normally mean by wealth is easy access to cash. Someone that owns a $15M house and has very little other liquid assets is not poor, but they definitely don't qualify as wealthy.
Anyway, whatever it is, I think litigating Lynch's level of wealth on HN is probably not the most useful direction for this comment thread.
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
You can borrow against the house, and spend the cash.
supportengineer 141 days ago [-]
Wealthy people don't spend their own cash.
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
Wealthy people do not hoard cash, unlike what many people imagine. Their money is all invested. They also borrow money to invest.
Anyone who gets a mortgage on a house is also investing other peoples' money. Using a credit card is spending other peoples' money. Buying a car on time is spending other peoples' money.
yndoendo 140 days ago [-]
Let say you are given 1 million dollars. You decided to buy a new home. Do you pay in cash or get a mortgage?
When I ask people this question most will respond with pay in cash so you don't lose money paying a mortgage. The real answer it exploit loop holes in the laws with your gain financial position.
1) Open a trust with the money.
2) Use that trust for banking and make it your mortgage lender.
3) Gain tax deductions for having a mortgage and put tax dollars in your own pocket just by shifting money around in a legal creative accounting method.
The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
How does one accumulate wealth with hoarding it?
WalterBright 140 days ago [-]
Loaning money out is not hoarding it. You also still paid out the money to the seller.
> The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
You'll have to be more specific about that. Most deductions and credits phase out with increasing income.
yndoendo 140 days ago [-]
> Loaning money out is not hoarding it. You also still paid out the money to the seller.
You do realize that the rich loan out to themselves via shell corporations or trusts. The only mobility of money is putting tax dollars into the wealth hands.
Just because a wealth person bought it does not mean someone else wouldn't.
The wealthy can also use their buying power to reduce the value of the sale and harm the seller. Kroger has around 40% market share to throw their weight around a reduce the selling power of the farmer and increase cost to the consumer. So the farmer makes less all because of threat to not buy from in a market that keeps having less and less competition.
Have you had to give free labor in millions of dollars so your company could gain access to one of the big name companies on Wall-street. I have and it just highlight the inequality in wealth at a personal and corporate level.
Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates. I cannot find a the video any more but it talks about how a company was being bought by Apple. Steve Jobs, at the meeting, asked the company's CEO why am I buying your company for $XXX,XXX. I think it should only cost $50,000 less. CEO said there is an agreement again. Jobs, I could just not buy it.
How about the art scam loop hole.
1) Pay an artist $1000 to create a piece via trust or another organization you own.
2) Sell the at auction and buy it for yourself for $30,000.
3) Donate the art work to charity.
4) Turn a $1000 into a $30,000 tax deductible with more creative accounting.
This is not the only artwork scam. [1]
There are loop holes that wealth people pay lawyers, accounts, full time staff to do full time as a job. Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth. [0] Panama Papers even had their methods leaked and the names of their shell companies.
Another great use of a shell company is the ability remove liability from the wealth onto a corporate entity that can easily dissolve in bankruptcy and shed the liability. Laws often are designed to ease the burden of liability from companies while keeping on individuals.
Again how do you gain wealth with out hording it? Are stocks wealth, is property wealth, are bonds wealth?
Let say you own 40% of an industry and work to gain 70%. Have you not increased your industrial hoarding by 30%? Even though it is an investment it is till hoarding.
How about stocks, can you hoard those to consolidate and hoard wealth?
It seems you're changing the subject. How do you buy yourself a mansion without paying for it?
> Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates.
Meaning there was someone willing to sell it to him.
> Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth
They're still not hoarding wealth, they're investing it.
yndoendo 140 days ago [-]
Steve Jobs threaten his business by denying the ability to use their platform if he didn't sell. Even if he didn't sell there would be no business to sell being de-plaformed.
There are trillions of dollar hidden by the wealth to prevent paying taxes / their fair share.
There are no good wealthy people in the world because they hoard not share.
Investing means you must hoard. Keep owing an product or service that has a limit resource is hoarding. Want to invest in housing, one must hoard house to make a profit.
WalterBright 140 days ago [-]
> one must hoard house to make a profit.
You must sell a house to make a profit.
yndoendo 139 days ago [-]
>You must sell a house to make a profit.
Renting and leasing economics prove your statement to be a fallacy. Airbnb wealth is built on not selling houses. Retaining bought houses increases the value because it increases the rarity. By restricting home ownership the rental properties monthly prices can be increased to reflect a manufactured market.
De Beers is a great example of how hoarding wealth grows wealth. [0] They hoard diamonds to create an artificial rarity market. This gives the ability to increase prices. Say you have a type of diamond category with 10% natural occurrence. You hoard 90% and only release 0.5% or less of that category. You just increase the rarity artificially and drove that category in price like a rocket. Even if your competition will increase prices to match or be just a few dollars below. Competition has to because they do not have access to the diamonds hoarded by De Beers.
How would you take that 90% of the hoarded 90% category diamond and make it profitable instead of just sitting on the selves? How about grinding some of the them up and selling them for diamond edge saws and bits?
My definition of _Wealthy_ encompasses individuals (you, me, human HN users) and groups of individuals (trust, companies, Apple, Meta, HN, ...).
By that definition, most people are poor. $15 million is much more than most people have. Even split among the four children, it's fine.
j-krieger 141 days ago [-]
He apparently was cash poor and asset rich. Now the opposite is true for his children.
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
Assets can be easily converted into cash by borrowing against them.
j-krieger 137 days ago [-]
This has the added disadvantage that you will have to pay back this loan with interest. Not everybody can.
tikhonj 141 days ago [-]
Sure, but there's a gap between being poor and being wealthy. $15 million is a lot more than most people have and it's certainly enough to be comfortable and not have to worry about money, but it's still categorically different from having the sort of money that gives you institutional power.
saberience 141 days ago [-]
Yeah but having a 15M house and say 200k income makes you poor, as a 15M house needs a ton of money to maintain it.
giobox 141 days ago [-]
If you are paying property tax in LA based on a 15m valuation, that 200k income will struggle to cover the annual property tax bill let alone any maintenance or anything else.
clpm4j 141 days ago [-]
The property tax is calculated based on the last transaction price of the home, so despite it being estimated at $15m today, the owner would be paying tax on a much lower value (assuming they purchased it many years ago).
supportengineer 141 days ago [-]
The rule of thumb for upkeep of houses, airplanes, and cars is about 1% annually.
vkou 141 days ago [-]
Ill trade 5M cash and 200k income for that any day of the week.
The first thing I'd do is sell.
comfysocks 141 days ago [-]
>>The first thing I'd do is sell
Me too. And it looks like that’s what the heirs are doing too.
But for David Lynch, I can see why he might want to live amongst the people involved in financing, making, and distributing movies. Similar to how founders move to the expensive Bay area to be near VCs, talent, etc.
bombcar 141 days ago [-]
It’s not terribly hard to get into that position, if you spend 40 years of your time and treasure on something with resale value instead of on food and experiences.
You can do something similar if you buy a house and keep buying any neighboring house that comes up for sale (and renting them out, perhaps).
vel0city 141 days ago [-]
Median household income is like $83k. If you were in a median US household and you saved half of all your income every month into something that had a stable 4% return, in 40 years you'd have ~$4M. Not even halfway there.
You'd need a little over 9% of stable returns over that 40 year timeframe to hit that $15M target.
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
The S&P 500 returns average 7% in real dollars (not inflated dollars).
My calculation makes that about $9m over 40 years.
softwreoutthere 141 days ago [-]
> It’s not terribly hard
Uhm, it must be, or more people would do it
bombcar 141 days ago [-]
Losing weight isn’t terribly hard but still lots have trouble doing it.
echelon_musk 141 days ago [-]
There doesn't seem to be much compound interest.
comfysocks 141 days ago [-]
I guess compounds can be a hard sell. I read that Michael Jordan had a hard time selling his.
layer8 141 days ago [-]
Reluctant upvote.
dfxm12 141 days ago [-]
If you read the whole comment, you'll understand the context better.
ode 141 days ago [-]
> not a wealthy man by Hollywood standards
rectang 141 days ago [-]
It’s funny, but as someone who’s worked in music production, when you say that what comes to my mind is that the vast majority of people in the entertainment industry are nowhere near as wealthy as David Lynch. “Hollywood standards” to me is several struggling actors sharing a flat.
steveBK123 141 days ago [-]
It's like the Bill Murray quote though - I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it.
The entertainment industry is filled with a lot of more-famous-than-rich people. By these numbers David Lynch (at 78) was probably as wealthy as 1000s of random (and anonymous) successful Mag7 SWEs are at retirement.
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
Lots of people who are paid well are not at all wealthy, because they spend nearly all their income, and sometimes forget to pay taxes.
See Will Smith.
rectang 140 days ago [-]
I'm skeptical that entertainment industry workers are thousands of times more irresponsible that their peers in other industries. (Those who consume a lot of political media demonizing the "liberal Hollywood elite" may disagree.)
Care to speculate on how many struggling actors sharing flats are fallen celebrities?
The Will Smiths of Hollywood are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
The phenomenon at play in “Hollywood standards” poorly reflecting the totality of the Hollywood population are winner-take-all income/attention distribution and cultivation of an illusion of opulence to satisfy audience demand — not licentiousness and depravity amongst entertainment industry personnel.
WalterBright 140 days ago [-]
I have no idea how many there are. But there is an ESPN documentary, I forgot the title, about suddenly rich pro football players who quickly go bankrupt. They spend the money on parties, cars, lavish gifts, and suddenly the money is gone. Then they age or injure out of the game, and spend the rest of their lives in regretful poverty.
Why would suddenly famous actors be any more savvy?
See the documentary "Val" on Val Kilmer.
rectang 140 days ago [-]
> Why would suddenly famous actors be any more savvy?
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, Hollywood is not exclusively populated with rich and famous celebrities.
supportengineer 141 days ago [-]
Somewhere there is a mere single-digit billionaire who feels poor next to the double-digit and triple-digit billionaires.
DetroitThrow 141 days ago [-]
Yes, I don't think she was saying he was destitute, just that he was effectively house poor for someone who supposedly had a net worth of millions.
Love this compound and all the hiking paths up around in the surrounding hills. Truly an peaceful property to immerse yourself in work and entertaining! Property taxes are gonna spike for the new buyer though due to prop 13 so make sure to factor that into your offer vs the $15k a year in the listing...
Hopefully whoever buys this gem doesn't tear it down to build some modern boxy McMansion.
gyomu 141 days ago [-]
> Truly a peaceful property
What you don’t realize if you’ve never spent time around those ridiculous properties is the amount of upkeep everything takes if you don’t want the indoors to become gross and dusty and the outdoors a wild jungle.
When you have that kind of surface area, you’re not taking care of all the cleaning and maintenance yourself in a few hours once a week. There are countless gardeners/cleaners/repair workers/etc on the property. Nothing peaceful about it.
And you have to also be okay with the labor dynamics of employing such an army of personnel which in LA is… interesting.
TheOtherHobbes 141 days ago [-]
Does it not come with an army of weirdly mundane hopeful monsters who will reveal themselves to you one by one if you buy it?
dfxm12 141 days ago [-]
The lady in the radiator is anything but mundane. :)
eastbound 141 days ago [-]
I have 2000sqm of land and I feel like 1. the CEO of garden operations, 2. a sitting duck in terms of money and invoicing.
shoubidouwah 141 days ago [-]
> Too much land to manually manicure a lawn on top of
> too little land for john deere to be of any practical help
I feel you.
nabla9 141 days ago [-]
That's why you have multiple properties and household manager.
Most of the maintenance is done when the owners is not in residence”.
tills13 141 days ago [-]
If you're dropping $15m you aren't worried about property taxes regardless of how much they do or do not increase.
rconti 141 days ago [-]
It's probably just a general comment for folks who don't understand CA property taxes. I've lived here my whole home-buying life, so it never crosses my mind to look at the Zillow property tax figure when doing my mental maths on whether I can afford something, but if you lived in an area where the figure in Zillow actually means something to the buyer, you might be in for a surprise in CA.
Here, it's just an easy 1%, so the math isn't hard. I'm not sure if other states have highly variable rates on a county-by-county basis, or if other states also tend to have consistent rates within their borders.
HankStallone 141 days ago [-]
In Illinois, how property is valued and taxed seems pretty obscure, and may involve witchcraft.
The rate on my tax bill is 6.03%. But that's on a "net taxable value" that's about 40% of what I paid for the place 15 years ago, and maybe 25% of what I could get for the place now. So the rate is effectively 2.5% of what I paid, or 1.4% of what I could get. The total tax has also gone up 26% since 2020, increasing by more each year, but I don't know whether they've raised the rate each year or the valuation.
It's probably possible to find out how it works, but there's not much point. It is what it is, so you pay it or leave. No one lives in Illinois for the tax rates.
adastra22 141 days ago [-]
Property tax would be roughly $200k/yr, forever. That’s a nontrivial expense for anyone below billionaire levels.
tossandthrow 141 days ago [-]
Ah yes, the ZIRP induces decompression of assets prices - hopefully for people buying into the extreme ongoing expenses, we will see serious inflation over the next years.
If there is not inflation and value compressions kicks in, then there are some people who will be ... burdened.
CamperBob2 141 days ago [-]
Looking at the full set of photos in the Zillow link that esalman posted, sorry, but that kitchen has gotta go.
nadnad 141 days ago [-]
Incredible kitchen! With the narrow tall doors, brass knobs, and nice touch with the all-pistachio countertops.
141 days ago [-]
dilyevsky 141 days ago [-]
Unless you’re also a chain smoker everything inside that house probably needs to go
rob74 141 days ago [-]
Maybe a David Lynch mega-fan who has $ 15 million to spare will buy it and convert at least part of it into a (nicotine-heavy) museum? But the neighbors would probably object, as they always do when tourists dare to stray into hallowed Hollywood Hills...
maz1b 141 days ago [-]
Interestingly, this article made me learn that Frank Lloyd Wright had a son who also was an architect, and that son also had a son that became an architect.
I dunno, I just find that a little bit cool and interesting.
yardie 141 days ago [-]
I was lucky enough to stay in a beach house designed by either the son or grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. So many amazing architectural details including natural cooling towers. I was young then and didn't really get to appreciate it the house since I was spending my time on the water. But I did take photos and see something interesting every time it rotates through my iPhoto library.
wonderwonder 141 days ago [-]
I guess I really don't understand LA house pricing.
I see shacks listed for a million, or is that only SF?
This is 2.3 acres with 3 homes on it and its 15 million.
Although looks like it needs some work.
vlovich123 141 days ago [-]
LA is huge and just like SF has neighborhoods so does LA except sprawled over way more acreage. LA is slightly cheaper than SF because it’s so large geographically - in SF you can drive across the city in 30 minutes. LA is several hours across.
jppope 141 days ago [-]
Its pretty easy to understand actually, and all of metropolitan California is the same way- A normal, dual income, middle class working family has an income of ~$250K-$500K (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc) and they're going to spend upwards of ~40% of their income on their house. thats going to have them spending $6K-$11K. Now they can handle a $1M home no problem. 3 bed 2 bath shitbox from the 70s sure thing... Anything to live in California. Same house in Kansas City is $300K but whatever. However, for them to go after a $2.5M+ property you need real money, a $5M house even more... you aren't working a normal person job to spend the estimated lifetime earnings of most Americans on a house... it just aint happening. So anything after ~$5M is a VASTLY better deal then the rat race housing.
All of these dynamics can be figured out pretty easy thanks to prop 13, Californias insane income taxes, and the job market... if you can figure out a way to buy a house, hold on to it for dear life, never move, and work your entire life to pay for it. The only thing more consistent than people in the northeast wanting to move to California are death and taxes, which coincidentally prop 13 covers. lol
skrebbel 141 days ago [-]
Nitpick, but
> A normal, dual income, middle class working family
> (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc)
That’s not the middle class.
nabla9 141 days ago [-]
That's the traditional middle class. "American Middle Class" is a clever political trick. It was created to remove "working class" from the vocabulary so that people could no longer identify as such.
If we use only lifestyle indicators, such as making enough money to save and retire comfortably, having enough money to go on vacations and to restaurants frequently, and being able to buy a house, the middle class is shrinking.
labcomputer 141 days ago [-]
Lol. Doctors and lawyers are the very definition of middle class!
Middle class is people who trade labor for money, but who sometimes have a (full or partial) ownership stake in the business they work for. They are what marxists might call the "petit bourgeoisie".
dragonwriter 141 days ago [-]
> Doctors and lawyers are the very definition of middle class!
Doctors and lawyers are often middle class (petit bourgeois) but also can be part of the better paid, highly educated segment of the working class (proletarian intelligentsia). Economic class isn’t about job title or even really strictly income, though it correlates to both.
labcomputer 141 days ago [-]
I think we agree.
The main point I was making is that doctors and lawyers (and tech workers!) are not members of some "upper" or "capitalist" (depending on which terms you prefer) class, irrespective of their income, because the value they collect is primarily a result of their labor.
dragonwriter 141 days ago [-]
The petit bourgeoisie and the haut bourgeoisie are both capitalist classes, though the petit bourgeoisie is a hybrid capitalist class (in the traditional formulation, dependent on ability to apply their own labor to their capital in order to live without liquidating capital [0]) rather than a pure capitalist classs like the haut bourgeiosie. And while the petit bourgeoisie is a “middle” class in the sense of being situated between the proletariat and the haut bourgeoisie, both bourgeois classes are “upper” classes in the sense that in capitalist society they together represent an elite minority of the population, most of which working class.
The sense in which they are a “middle class is quite distinct from the usual American sense of “middle class” which is usually an income-defined band centered around median income which is overwhelming part of the working class in the scheme in which the petit bourgeoisie are the “middle class”.
[0] But I think most people who use the scheme now would recognize more diversity, including the form probably most common to modern white-collar professionals, where rather than applying their own labor to their own capital, a lot of the petit bourgeiosie both rents labor out to other capitalists in the manner typical of the proletariat and has capital to which rented labor is applied in the manner of the haut bourgeoisie, with both being significant to their interaction with the economy (distinguishing them from workers with incidental capital holdings or capitalists who incidentally have a “paid job” which they could take or leave without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle or overall engagement in the economy.)
tills13 141 days ago [-]
Am I crazy or reading the wrong info or are you being hyperbolic when you say California has "insane" income taxes?
As an example, the effective rate when making $200k is 25% including federal taxes. That's great. You get to live in a productive and supportive society. The only issue I see is that housing is expensive and $150k, as much as it can support a comfortable lifestyle, would be insufficient to ALSO buy a home. But what we're talking about here is a separate issue from housing.
(your state taxes when making $100k would only be $2k, to preempt that retort)
hylaride 141 days ago [-]
The tone around "high taxes" are set by the uber-rich. Hilariously, most of them borrow against their shares to fund their lifestyles (where the interest is tax-deductible!) if they're even still resident in CA.
That being said, California is an ungovernable mess where state-constitutional amendments dictate a huge percentage of taxation and spending. It'd otherwise be a great place to live if real estate prices were somehow brought into line, but alas...
wonderwonder 141 days ago [-]
I feel like the Canadian style "just let it happen" approach to crime is a bit of a negative as well
141 days ago [-]
nicholasbraker 141 days ago [-]
Damn, only 25%? Luxury!
Nursie 141 days ago [-]
It certainly looks interesting. You would definitely be living in his style. Compelling as his films were, I'm not 100% convinced I'd want to live in his house that clearly has some very personal motifs.
Also you are never going to get the stale smoke out of there!
analog8374 141 days ago [-]
I worked on a house occupied by heavy smokers for a couple decades (then they died).
Nicotine yellow everything.
We pumped it full of ozone. That did a good job destinking. Then we painted everything with killz.
We also sterilized the basement with uv deathlights.
a-r-t 141 days ago [-]
Nice to see a Festool miter saw in his shop, Lynch knew what he was doing.
inasio 141 days ago [-]
There was an auction of a lot of his memorabilia a few months ago, it included a lot of Festool stuff. He was an avid woodworker (the sale also included furniture he made). I like how the work table where you can see the miter saw is made of the most utilitarian plywood, it feels like he was working until his last days
141 days ago [-]
Waterluvian 141 days ago [-]
Anyone know anything about those fluted V-shaped panels everywhere? They look like very heavy cast iron.
Terr_ 141 days ago [-]
My thought was: "Wow, he must've gotten a great deal on those, or else ordered far too many and was stuck finding places for them..."
I don't but wanted to say that I love the continuity of them used in different spaces. The whole place really looks like a single vision put together and not a bunch of disparate rooms.
rdtsc 141 days ago [-]
They remind me of the floor of the black lodge in Twin Peaks.
analog8374 141 days ago [-]
I'm guessing he liked it, visually.
And just maybe it symbolized something for him. Low maybe.
Infernal 141 days ago [-]
TFA says “The facade’s cement chevrons catch the sun” but I’m not sure about the ones inside.
Waterluvian 141 days ago [-]
Yeah the outdoor ones definitely look like cement. The indoor ones are probably too. Though they have a patina that makes them look like worn iron.
Fricken 141 days ago [-]
Lynch made those himself out of grey plaster. They didn't show much of Lynch's studio, but that's where he spent most of his time hanging out, making sculptures and paintings and building things. He was hands on guy who kept himself busy, compulsively so.
ape4 141 days ago [-]
Maybe they would catch rainwater too - mosquito breading area
rurban 140 days ago [-]
I wonder if and how the compound was affected by the recent fires at the hills. Because I heard he died of eventual complications of the fire to his lungs (he also was a chain smoker). But on these photos I see no damage at all. Good. Because you rarely see good modernist architecture, most owners just destroy it by stupidity. As seen on the website with other houses. Also the real estate industry is complicit.
morkalork 141 days ago [-]
I like the contrast between the kitchen and the home theatre, I guess he was not much of a chef haha
helloplanets 141 days ago [-]
Definitely not much of a chef!
> When I get up, I have a cappuccino - that's breakfast. I don't have any food till lunch. I get into phases where I'll have the same thing every day. Lately I've been having feta cheese, olive oil and vinegar, tomatoes, and some tuna fish mixed together. Before that I was having tuna fish on lettuce and cottage cheese, but I got tired of that in about three months. I once had the same thing for lunch every day for seven years - a Bob's Big Boy chocolate shake and coffee at 2:30 every afternoon.
Even though I know nothing about him, this makes complete sense and isn't surprising at all. Also, this is the diet of someone who has no problems with gaining too much weight. Basically intermittent fasting through breakfast and low carb at lunch.
Also, I think a lot of us can relate to this:
>If left alone, my natural waking hours would probably be I 0 A.M. till 3 A.M
superultra 141 days ago [-]
You may be right but it’s worth noting that many mid century kitchens - including my own - were less focused on hospitality in the kitchen and more on efficiency. In some cases this was because homes had hired help.
My MCM kitchen is large enough to host but the cooking area is like this galley. I love to cook. Having lived in a home with with a huge open kitchen, I vastly prefer this galley style. It really does save time. When you’re doing a few things at once, a large kitchen with a lot of space between stations is a liability.
ks2048 141 days ago [-]
I wonder if the price would be significantly different if it wasn't David Lynch's house.
dsr_ 141 days ago [-]
Looking at other houses in the neighborhood, it's probably about 10-15% because it's the Lynch residence, and the rest of it is the extent of the land, the number of houses, and, of course, the place where it is.
By way of contrast, this is listed for 2.5x the money on the other side of the canyon:
Looks great for people who don't want to pick and design their own home, pick furniture, design their living spaces.
sgt 141 days ago [-]
Maybe that's also because it has a view, while the Lynch compound doesn't really have a view of the city. It has some views, all right.. beautiful trees and nature, and some valley. It's tucked away. Some people like that.
CamperBob2 141 days ago [-]
I'll bet the seller makes a hell of a Caucasian!
(Although I guess it isn't really Jackie Treehorn's place, given that the listing says it was built in 2023.)
twalla 141 days ago [-]
Jackie Treehorn’s place is the Sheats-Goldstein residence. Both the residence and the owner are worth going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
Goldstein appears to be quite an interesting "dude." He's exactly what people mean when they point out that Lynch, while well-off compared to most, was not particularly wealthy by Hollywood standards.
i lived about a half mile from this house in the same neighborhood -- it could be a lot more expensive if it had the view some properties around there have.
Do you have generational wealth? Seems like a paradise out there..
labcomputer 141 days ago [-]
One of the oddities of California is that you frequently see shabby, cheaply constructed houses of no significance selling for millions of dollars.
That is because some mid-century developer built it as middle-class housing. A middle-class family moved in and had kids. They continued to live there while property values soared. So the kids grew up in neighborhood where all the houses cost millions of dollars.
I used to know an elderly coupled who lived in one of the nicer parts of Malibu. Both were school teachers. They bought the house when Malibu was cheap because of the "horrible" commute along scenic Highway 1 and the lack of sewers in Malibu. Before the fires, their house was probably worth over $10 million (thanks, prop 13!).
When they passed, the kids couldn't afford to keep the house (even with the feudal property tax system in California, which allows inheritance of low property tax assessments like some kind of medieval title of nobility) because the kids were also just normal middle class people.
So, to answer your question: In some sense, yes, almost by definition, the family of person you're responding to does have generational wealth (in the form of the house). But in a different sense, no, because it's quite likely that they have nowhere near the amount liquid assets implied by the phrase "generational wealth".
sizzle 138 days ago [-]
Really appreciate the thoughtful response and made me see things in a different light. Cheers.
inasio 141 days ago [-]
It's also (partly) a Frank Lloyd Wright house, that alone would justify a very high price
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
The WSJ recently ran an article about Johnny Carson's house that was for sale for $110m:
Scrolling down reveals a picture of it when Carson lived in it. Kind of a dump.
gyanchawdhary 141 days ago [-]
Take away ‘David Lynch’ and you’re left with a 1970s real estate listing nobody would click on …
superultra 141 days ago [-]
To each their own I guess but I think this is a beautiful home. My home was built at the same time (1965) and seems to share a lot of characteristics to David’s home, although my house is much smaller.
You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.
This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.
This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.
Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.
Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.
benrmatthews 141 days ago [-]
Would love to see a video walkthrough of the property (not that I have a spare $15m...)
crossroadsguy 141 days ago [-]
So what about that non-spare $15m..? I mean it's Lynch's house. You never know there might a red room and all that somewhere hidden. Just saying.
vid 141 days ago [-]
Between preserving a 'compound' (presumably by a wealth private person) and converting it back to three properties and homes, I'd want to see the latter.
dwd 141 days ago [-]
Actually didn't know Frank had an architect son.
Personally I prefer the Millard House which is similar and probably an inspiration. The Millard House is the archetype Minecraft House.
tsunamifury 141 days ago [-]
What a dreary sad anachronistic description.
0_____0 141 days ago [-]
I mean looking at the structures it's kind of warranted.
His houses lend themselves to being recreated in Minecraft.
Personally I have always liked his style and Falling Water was my favourite house when I was young.
tsunamifury 141 days ago [-]
its more that it just shows a vast ignorance of history and society to call it a 'Minecraft house.' It's like calling the Pyramids of Giza 'the Minecraft pyramids."
It belays a level of stupidity that is difficult to ignore. The reality is its an Incan Pyramid inspired home.
0_____0 140 days ago [-]
I'm sure that a lot of the people you're describing as "stupid" here would love to know about the true inspiration behind the building style. Maybe this is an opportunity to share information, rather than to lament the uncultured brutishness of the masses?
tsunamifury 140 days ago [-]
It’s in the comment. Really my guy?
WalterBright 141 days ago [-]
My accountant told me of a newly minted Microsoft millionaire who decided to spend it all on a house. His advice was he would not be able to pay the taxes or upkeep on the house.
His client didn't listen, and in two years was forced to liquidate the house.
What you pay for a house is only the beginning of what you're going to pay.
141 days ago [-]
benbojangles 141 days ago [-]
It looks like he was smoking four cigarettes at once in there
sachahjkl 141 days ago [-]
it's raining....
temptemptemp111 141 days ago [-]
[dead]
black_13 141 days ago [-]
[dead]
141 days ago [-]
jdjjkriiekj 141 days ago [-]
It looks nothing like the ending of Blue Velvet.
delabay 141 days ago [-]
They will have a difficult time finding a buyer for this extremely unique property. One really needs rare eclectic taste.
In my personal opinion, this house ugly AF
Rendered at 10:28:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1nhb6q9/comment...
I honestly saw it was $15million and figured that's a bargain for the estate of one of the most esteemed directors of his generation. Relative to his level of fame and respect, his monetary assets do seem low.
But then this certainly matches the public perception of Lynch. He made the things that he wanted to make, not the things that were guaranteed to sell. I'm sure commercial success was important to him, but there were lots of paths he could have taken that would have lead to a lot more.
Many, many people in CA that live in expensive homes are in this situation. It's what Prop 13 wrought. Variously, in my neighborhood, old people are paying a small fraction of the property tax that I do, and their house is worth a lot of money, but they have almost nothing, living on their social security check, month to month.
I'm not saying Lynch was living on SSI, but given his movies and what we know of how much they made, the story told by his daughter is very plausible.
Assuming they own the house outright, that absolutely does qualify as wealthy.
> I didn't say it wouldn't. I said it didn't qualify as ready cash.
I think you did say it didn't qualify as wealthy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45301176):
> What people normally mean by wealth is easy access to cash. Someone that owns a $15M house and has very little other liquid assets is not poor, but they definitely don't qualify as wealthy.
Anyway, whatever it is, I think litigating Lynch's level of wealth on HN is probably not the most useful direction for this comment thread.
Anyone who gets a mortgage on a house is also investing other peoples' money. Using a credit card is spending other peoples' money. Buying a car on time is spending other peoples' money.
When I ask people this question most will respond with pay in cash so you don't lose money paying a mortgage. The real answer it exploit loop holes in the laws with your gain financial position.
1) Open a trust with the money. 2) Use that trust for banking and make it your mortgage lender. 3) Gain tax deductions for having a mortgage and put tax dollars in your own pocket just by shifting money around in a legal creative accounting method.
The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
How does one accumulate wealth with hoarding it?
> The wealthy use loop holes that can be exploited only with money to maximize the hoarding.
You'll have to be more specific about that. Most deductions and credits phase out with increasing income.
You do realize that the rich loan out to themselves via shell corporations or trusts. The only mobility of money is putting tax dollars into the wealth hands.
Just because a wealth person bought it does not mean someone else wouldn't.
The wealthy can also use their buying power to reduce the value of the sale and harm the seller. Kroger has around 40% market share to throw their weight around a reduce the selling power of the farmer and increase cost to the consumer. So the farmer makes less all because of threat to not buy from in a market that keeps having less and less competition.
Have you had to give free labor in millions of dollars so your company could gain access to one of the big name companies on Wall-street. I have and it just highlight the inequality in wealth at a personal and corporate level.
Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates. I cannot find a the video any more but it talks about how a company was being bought by Apple. Steve Jobs, at the meeting, asked the company's CEO why am I buying your company for $XXX,XXX. I think it should only cost $50,000 less. CEO said there is an agreement again. Jobs, I could just not buy it.
How about the art scam loop hole.
1) Pay an artist $1000 to create a piece via trust or another organization you own. 2) Sell the at auction and buy it for yourself for $30,000. 3) Donate the art work to charity. 4) Turn a $1000 into a $30,000 tax deductible with more creative accounting.
This is not the only artwork scam. [1]
There are loop holes that wealth people pay lawyers, accounts, full time staff to do full time as a job. Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth. [0] Panama Papers even had their methods leaked and the names of their shell companies.
Another great use of a shell company is the ability remove liability from the wealth onto a corporate entity that can easily dissolve in bankruptcy and shed the liability. Laws often are designed to ease the burden of liability from companies while keeping on individuals.
Again how do you gain wealth with out hording it? Are stocks wealth, is property wealth, are bonds wealth?
Let say you own 40% of an industry and work to gain 70%. Have you not increased your industrial hoarding by 30%? Even though it is an investment it is till hoarding.
How about stocks, can you hoard those to consolidate and hoard wealth?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers [1] https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f...
> Even Steve Jobs used his wealth of Apple to buy up companies cheap at discounted rates.
Meaning there was someone willing to sell it to him.
> Exploit the laws for personal gain to hoard wealth
They're still not hoarding wealth, they're investing it.
There are trillions of dollar hidden by the wealth to prevent paying taxes / their fair share.
There are no good wealthy people in the world because they hoard not share.
Investing means you must hoard. Keep owing an product or service that has a limit resource is hoarding. Want to invest in housing, one must hoard house to make a profit.
You must sell a house to make a profit.
Renting and leasing economics prove your statement to be a fallacy. Airbnb wealth is built on not selling houses. Retaining bought houses increases the value because it increases the rarity. By restricting home ownership the rental properties monthly prices can be increased to reflect a manufactured market.
De Beers is a great example of how hoarding wealth grows wealth. [0] They hoard diamonds to create an artificial rarity market. This gives the ability to increase prices. Say you have a type of diamond category with 10% natural occurrence. You hoard 90% and only release 0.5% or less of that category. You just increase the rarity artificially and drove that category in price like a rocket. Even if your competition will increase prices to match or be just a few dollars below. Competition has to because they do not have access to the diamonds hoarded by De Beers.
How would you take that 90% of the hoarded 90% category diamond and make it profitable instead of just sitting on the selves? How about grinding some of the them up and selling them for diamond edge saws and bits?
My definition of _Wealthy_ encompasses individuals (you, me, human HN users) and groups of individuals (trust, companies, Apple, Meta, HN, ...).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers
The first thing I'd do is sell.
Me too. And it looks like that’s what the heirs are doing too.
But for David Lynch, I can see why he might want to live amongst the people involved in financing, making, and distributing movies. Similar to how founders move to the expensive Bay area to be near VCs, talent, etc.
You can do something similar if you buy a house and keep buying any neighboring house that comes up for sale (and renting them out, perhaps).
You'd need a little over 9% of stable returns over that 40 year timeframe to hit that $15M target.
My calculation makes that about $9m over 40 years.
Uhm, it must be, or more people would do it
The entertainment industry is filled with a lot of more-famous-than-rich people. By these numbers David Lynch (at 78) was probably as wealthy as 1000s of random (and anonymous) successful Mag7 SWEs are at retirement.
See Will Smith.
Care to speculate on how many struggling actors sharing flats are fallen celebrities?
The Will Smiths of Hollywood are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
The phenomenon at play in “Hollywood standards” poorly reflecting the totality of the Hollywood population are winner-take-all income/attention distribution and cultivation of an illusion of opulence to satisfy audience demand — not licentiousness and depravity amongst entertainment industry personnel.
Why would suddenly famous actors be any more savvy?
See the documentary "Val" on Val Kilmer.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, Hollywood is not exclusively populated with rich and famous celebrities.
Hopefully whoever buys this gem doesn't tear it down to build some modern boxy McMansion.
What you don’t realize if you’ve never spent time around those ridiculous properties is the amount of upkeep everything takes if you don’t want the indoors to become gross and dusty and the outdoors a wild jungle.
When you have that kind of surface area, you’re not taking care of all the cleaning and maintenance yourself in a few hours once a week. There are countless gardeners/cleaners/repair workers/etc on the property. Nothing peaceful about it.
And you have to also be okay with the labor dynamics of employing such an army of personnel which in LA is… interesting.
Most of the maintenance is done when the owners is not in residence”.
Here, it's just an easy 1%, so the math isn't hard. I'm not sure if other states have highly variable rates on a county-by-county basis, or if other states also tend to have consistent rates within their borders.
The rate on my tax bill is 6.03%. But that's on a "net taxable value" that's about 40% of what I paid for the place 15 years ago, and maybe 25% of what I could get for the place now. So the rate is effectively 2.5% of what I paid, or 1.4% of what I could get. The total tax has also gone up 26% since 2020, increasing by more each year, but I don't know whether they've raised the rate each year or the valuation.
It's probably possible to find out how it works, but there's not much point. It is what it is, so you pay it or leave. No one lives in Illinois for the tax rates.
If there is not inflation and value compressions kicks in, then there are some people who will be ... burdened.
I dunno, I just find that a little bit cool and interesting.
This is 2.3 acres with 3 homes on it and its 15 million.
Although looks like it needs some work.
All of these dynamics can be figured out pretty easy thanks to prop 13, Californias insane income taxes, and the job market... if you can figure out a way to buy a house, hold on to it for dear life, never move, and work your entire life to pay for it. The only thing more consistent than people in the northeast wanting to move to California are death and taxes, which coincidentally prop 13 covers. lol
> A normal, dual income, middle class working family
> (Doctor + teacher, Lawyer and a Doctor, Business exec and Accountant, etc)
That’s not the middle class.
If we use only lifestyle indicators, such as making enough money to save and retire comfortably, having enough money to go on vacations and to restaurants frequently, and being able to buy a house, the middle class is shrinking.
Middle class is people who trade labor for money, but who sometimes have a (full or partial) ownership stake in the business they work for. They are what marxists might call the "petit bourgeoisie".
Doctors and lawyers are often middle class (petit bourgeois) but also can be part of the better paid, highly educated segment of the working class (proletarian intelligentsia). Economic class isn’t about job title or even really strictly income, though it correlates to both.
The main point I was making is that doctors and lawyers (and tech workers!) are not members of some "upper" or "capitalist" (depending on which terms you prefer) class, irrespective of their income, because the value they collect is primarily a result of their labor.
The sense in which they are a “middle class is quite distinct from the usual American sense of “middle class” which is usually an income-defined band centered around median income which is overwhelming part of the working class in the scheme in which the petit bourgeoisie are the “middle class”.
[0] But I think most people who use the scheme now would recognize more diversity, including the form probably most common to modern white-collar professionals, where rather than applying their own labor to their own capital, a lot of the petit bourgeiosie both rents labor out to other capitalists in the manner typical of the proletariat and has capital to which rented labor is applied in the manner of the haut bourgeoisie, with both being significant to their interaction with the economy (distinguishing them from workers with incidental capital holdings or capitalists who incidentally have a “paid job” which they could take or leave without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle or overall engagement in the economy.)
As an example, the effective rate when making $200k is 25% including federal taxes. That's great. You get to live in a productive and supportive society. The only issue I see is that housing is expensive and $150k, as much as it can support a comfortable lifestyle, would be insufficient to ALSO buy a home. But what we're talking about here is a separate issue from housing.
(your state taxes when making $100k would only be $2k, to preempt that retort)
That being said, California is an ungovernable mess where state-constitutional amendments dictate a huge percentage of taxation and spending. It'd otherwise be a great place to live if real estate prices were somehow brought into line, but alas...
Also you are never going to get the stale smoke out of there!
Nicotine yellow everything.
We pumped it full of ozone. That did a good job destinking. Then we painted everything with killz.
We also sterilized the basement with uv deathlights.
And just maybe it symbolized something for him. Low maybe.
> When I get up, I have a cappuccino - that's breakfast. I don't have any food till lunch. I get into phases where I'll have the same thing every day. Lately I've been having feta cheese, olive oil and vinegar, tomatoes, and some tuna fish mixed together. Before that I was having tuna fish on lettuce and cottage cheese, but I got tired of that in about three months. I once had the same thing for lunch every day for seven years - a Bob's Big Boy chocolate shake and coffee at 2:30 every afternoon.
[0]: https://www.lynchnet.com/mcdl.html
Also, I think a lot of us can relate to this:
>If left alone, my natural waking hours would probably be I 0 A.M. till 3 A.M
My MCM kitchen is large enough to host but the cooking area is like this galley. I love to cook. Having lived in a home with with a huge open kitchen, I vastly prefer this galley style. It really does save time. When you’re doing a few things at once, a large kitchen with a lot of space between stations is a liability.
By way of contrast, this is listed for 2.5x the money on the other side of the canyon:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1851-N-Stanley-Ave-Los-An...
(Although I guess it isn't really Jackie Treehorn's place, given that the listing says it was built in 2023.)
https://jamesfgoldstein.com/the-goldstein-residence/
note that mulholland dr is just up the street from the house. this overlook is worth a visit: https://maps.app.goo.gl/muMirzaSJsEt9YnR7
That is because some mid-century developer built it as middle-class housing. A middle-class family moved in and had kids. They continued to live there while property values soared. So the kids grew up in neighborhood where all the houses cost millions of dollars.
I used to know an elderly coupled who lived in one of the nicer parts of Malibu. Both were school teachers. They bought the house when Malibu was cheap because of the "horrible" commute along scenic Highway 1 and the lack of sewers in Malibu. Before the fires, their house was probably worth over $10 million (thanks, prop 13!).
When they passed, the kids couldn't afford to keep the house (even with the feudal property tax system in California, which allows inheritance of low property tax assessments like some kind of medieval title of nobility) because the kids were also just normal middle class people.
So, to answer your question: In some sense, yes, almost by definition, the family of person you're responding to does have generational wealth (in the form of the house). But in a different sense, no, because it's quite likely that they have nowhere near the amount liquid assets implied by the phrase "generational wealth".
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/johnny-carsons-...
The house and grounds are beautiful.
Scrolling down reveals a picture of it when Carson lived in it. Kind of a dump.
You’d be surprised how hard it is find houses like this. Many of them have been gutted and rehabbed into “open” floor plans, with a lot of white paint and white barn doors.
This is unfortunate because house builders back then really knew how to create distinctive spaces.
This home has a lot of beautiful light, feels very airy and open, and yet feels very distinctive and characteristic.
Probably the biggest drawback and challenge will be, as other commenters have pointed out, that Lynch smoked packs a day and getting that out will be tough.
Otherwise there absolutely buyers who would love this home.
Personally I prefer the Millard House which is similar and probably an inspiration. The Millard House is the archetype Minecraft House.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_block_house
Personally I have always liked his style and Falling Water was my favourite house when I was young.
It belays a level of stupidity that is difficult to ignore. The reality is its an Incan Pyramid inspired home.
His client didn't listen, and in two years was forced to liquidate the house.
What you pay for a house is only the beginning of what you're going to pay.
In my personal opinion, this house ugly AF