by Phoenix, HSM team writer

Were you aware that Home’s Mansion recently celebrated a birthday? The Mansion is now two years old — its first piece was released on January 6, 2011. As you can guess, it was greeted with mixed reviews. Even today, mention the Mansion in a crowd in Home and you will probably get a fifty-fifty split on like and dislike. Many in Home see the Mansion as a gaudy and over-the-top tasteless, expensive waste of space, time and money. While others see it as the perfect combination of wealth and swag, not just because of the expensive look of the place (which is quite understated compared to some real homes out there), but because it is the still most expensive space(s) in Home.

What if the Mansion were offered the same way many other personal spaces in Home are being offered today? What if it were offered completely devoid of baked-in features? This version would cost $5.99, and all the classic pieces of furnishing could be purchased either in bundle packs $3.99 to $14.99 for a selection, or one item at a time. Say there was also a bundle package that contained the specific piece of the mansion you wanted, along with its furnishings — not baked in, but as separate items for, say, $17.99. This would make it competitively priced with some of the newer spaces on the market. Would you buy this, or the other available, non-baked in form? Or would you still buy the present version, if you’re someone who likes the Mansion the way it is?

Which type of packaging makes the mansion more appealing? I’ve heard it said that the fact that none of the four separate spaces are connected makes it a problem calling it a Mansion. Each individual piece is its own space, even though they have a central theme. So what if the pieces were magically connected? What if there were a way to go from floor to floor, without having to actually leave and select the next space, say like the hotel room at the Casino, which you reach by entering the elevator? Or say you could walk upstairs without spawning into the hallway of the second floor, like the Hollywood Hills space? Would that make it more appealing?

What then of the sheer size of the space. If these pieces where combined, this would be one of the largest personal spaces in Home. Surely you would buy it then, right?

Okay, enough with the what-ifs. I took another look at the Mansion and here’s what I think. The Mansion is really not much different then many houses in the real world. Well, it’s much different than my house, but not from others of wealth and privilege. The Mansion, in my opinion, was Sony’s show of wealth in a virtual world. There have been houses decorated with gold throughout the centuries. The Baroque period, for instance, was one period in time when palaces were adorned with gold.

This was known as one of the gilded periods — the times when the ultra rich and wealthy had gilded and gold furniture. Gold-gilded tables, chairs, beds, statues, and water features. Kings and queens, nobles and ladies, all had access to gold. This was true in every country and culture in the world except that of the Mayans. Mayans used gold in everyday life, for everyday articles such as jewelry and home items such as cups, bowls, etc. Though the kings and queens in this culture had gold as their right, all Mayans had some amount of gold items in their homes. Gold for them was a way to be close to their Gods.

Shifting over to the European world, gold had value of another kind, not just for the church. In the European world, it was mostly the royals and the gentry that had gold. They wore it as fashion accessories, pins, earrings, rings, necklaces, belt buckles, shoe buckles, and as lace with gold thread, since gold is so pliable it can be spun into thread. Their homes were decorated with gold furnishings, beds, nightstands, dressers and chests and desks, as a way to show how much wealth they had. Some royals even had walls of gold — not pure gold, but gold leaf. There were picture and portrait frames, chandeliers of crystal and gold, candle sticks, mirrors and even dinnerware of gold. Sound familiar?

Gold is such a classic way of showing wealth both real and imagined, there is even a bit of gold in the Palace of the Seven Winds. There are houses in the real world that continue the tradition of gold decor  Homes like the Florida mansion of the late Gianni Versace, the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, which belonged to one of America‘s “robber barons”, William Randoph Hearst. Grey Castle in New York and the Biltmore Estate, in North Carolina — more robber baron castles. Modern structures such as Trump Towers and the Plaza Hotel, to name a few, are also decorated in gold.

Many think Home’s Mansion has too much gold, and it has a garish and gaudy feel. I find only the kitchen in the Mansion fits that description. There is way too much gold in that room. It could use a toning down on the gold appliances, but it’s not as bad as it could be. For me, the rest of the Mansion is done in classic lines, with details reminiscent of a bygone era.

Personally, I think I might be interested in the Mansion if it were offered in clubhouse space. As it is now, I haven‘t purchased it because I can‘t decorate it on a big scale. In its present form, only the second floor and infinity pool area interest me. Even this offering would need same extras. I would like the games that are in the garage to be added to the infinity pool area, and they would have to become one space. This new addition would give even more to a clubhouse feel to the spacious design. Of course, I would expect the price to be overhauled to fit the new design.

I imagine the new pricing and design, any of the ones I’ve suggested, would give Sony a new line of revenue from the same basic space. The Mansion’s price already makes it a very lucrative sell for Sony. At $14.99, the first purchase of the Mansion is double and triple the price of some personal spaces on the market. Added together, the staggering $35.00 total does make the combined space carry a mansion-sized price — in the real world, I would imagine such a property would run somewhere around the three-million dollar range. Sony couldn’t go wrong if they overhauled the Mansion. Just think of an offered updated version, perhaps scaled down, as an option: version 2013 of the Mansion.

With so many updates and changes to spaces in Home, perhaps some of the older ones could benefit from the innovations now available, such as swimming, opening doors, day-night cycles, music, active beds, accessible gardens, and so on. Yes, it might slow down the flood of new personal spaces on the market if older spaces were made new again, but would it really hurt any of the developers’ pockets? There might be even more new consumers for the spaces already out there. Think of it as virtual remodel, if you will, offered as a new and separate version of an old classic, much as how was done with the Summer House.

What other estates could be refit and offered anew in Home?

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2 Responses to “Classic Estates Worth A Refit”

1. stevev363 says:

   March 23, 2013 at 3:00 am

   The only places I really want an update for are the mansion spaces, I could care less if they flow together as one piece but let me in the gallery in the main hall and on the balcony in the master bedroom as well as on that beach. The mansion unlocks in unassociated spaces were lame, give me more out of the spaces for owning them all instead of a lame closet or a chariot I have no use for. That really missed the mark for me there. Oh, and higher ceilings in the Japanese apt.

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