Fancy upgrading your three-bedroom semi to an 8,707-room palace complex? Justin Pollard reveals his top tips for constructing a luxury dwelling that your ancestors would be proud of
We humans have always wanted a home, from the rock shelters of the palaeolithic period to the mansions of modern oligarchs – the main difference being that rock shelters were often more tastefully decorated. But there’s a difference between a house and a dream home.
If we want something really special, we could take a leaf out of the Roman emperor Nero’s book. Following the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, he took the opportunity to level part of the city and build the Domus Aurea – the ‘Golden House’. Taking a personal interest in every aspect of the design, Nero turned a 300-acre site in the middle of the city into a private pleasure ground, with sheep pastures, an artificial lake, a 300-room pavilion for entertainment and, of course, a 30-metre colossal statue of himself. That’s all before we get to the actual palace with its revolving dining room. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, when it was finished Nero proudly announced “that he had at last begun to live like a human being”.
Just a façade
Poorer Romans also got in on the dream home act. While in Britain the wealthy built their own, drafty palaces in true Roman style – like the one at Fishbourne, West Sussex – more modest dreamers simply put a Roman-style square frontage on their roundhouse.
- Read more | What were houses like in ancient Rome?
This form of dream-home cheating re-emerged in the Georgian period when owners unable to afford a fancy villa simply stuck a classical façade on their medieval building. This made them instantly fashionable – as long as no one went indoors. For our medieval predecessors, even the rich found that security was often more important than comfort, so most castles could hardly be considered dream homes – unless your dream was conquering a nation, in which case Edward I could claim to have had a lovely series of dream homes in north Wales.
True dream homes in Europe would have to wait for the Renaissance when, feeling a shade more secure, the ruling classes could finally turn their attentions to palaces and stately homes. In China, palaces had been de rigueur for some time. The country’s most famous luxury home is the Forbidden City, built for the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, which has no fewer than 8,707 rooms.
This poses an interesting question: how big does a dream home need to be to be comfortable? Was the Forbidden City too big? Certainly Frederick the Great of Prussia thought so. When he built Sanssouci, his dream home at Potsdam, it had only 10 formal rooms, making it even smaller than Ludwig II of Bavaria’s fantasy castle at Neuschwanstein. Designed by a stage designer rather than an architect, Neuschwanstein included a grotto, artificial waterfall and a rainbow-making machine – essentials for any eccentric autocrat. In the end, only 14 of the planned 200 rooms were finished before Ludwig was mysteriously found dead in a local lake alongside his psychiatrist.
Not-so public property
Of course, it’s not just monarchs who can dream. What about dream homes for the people? That was the idea behind the Bauhaus-inspired Narkomfin building in Moscow, begun in 1928, which was designed so that the newly collectivised workforce could enjoy a shared eating and entertaining space while using their tiny personal apartments for sleep and study. Well, not quite all. The penthouse that was meant to be a communal recreational space instead became the private luxury apartment of the building’s sponsor, Commissar of Finance Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin.
This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed