Mukesh Ambani’s Skyscraper-Mansion is the World’s Most Expensive Home
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 by xcodex
India’s richest man, and the fourth-richest man in the world, has eschewed understatement and built a 27-story Mumbai skyscraper, as Forbes reported this morning. Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani plans to move into 570-foot building, called Antila, this month. But in addition to being an imposing postmodern edifice, it likely sets a record as the world’s most expensive residential home. The Telegraph reports the home is worth £630 million, or $1 billion. Yes, you read that right.
The last time Forbes ranked the world’s most expensive homes was November 2009, when The Manor, Candy Spelling’s Beverly Hills mansion, won out- it was priced at $150 million. That home is still for sale, and its price hasn’t budged, qualifying it for the number one spot on our recent list of America’s most expensive homes. Our global list limits itself to homes currently on the market, and Ambani’s behemoth isn’t for sale. Plus, that ranking is a year old – new mansions may have come on the market since. But even given those facts, at $1 billion the Antila outprices any home on the market, anywhere in the world, by an order of magnitude.
But the story goes back further than that. As we reported way back in 2008, the billionaire has planned to break records with this home for years. When he was worth $43 billion (his net worth is down by nearly a third), he commissioned architecture firms Perkins + Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates, the minds behind the Mandarin Oriental, to design the home. We have a full slide show of their original plans on the site.
Now fully constructed, it’s the most ever spent on a home that we know of. In June the world’s richest man, telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim Helu paid $44 million for an Upper East Side Beaux Arts town house. One could interpret the two tycoons’ recent moves as a billionaire version of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses. If that’s the case, Ambani won by a long shot.
Given the enormous gap between the Antila’s sale price and the known closing cost of any home sold in recent years, there’s an awfully good chance that this is the most paid for a home, ever. Consider the highest price paid for a home in 2010: somewhere between $47 million and $72 million for Le Belvedere, in Bel Air.
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