
DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709130113

SECTION: HOME & GARDEN           PAGE: G1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JAMES WALLACE, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER 

                                            LENGTH:  292 lines

THE HOUSE THAT BILL GATES BUILT

NOT SINCE NEWSPAPER baron William Randolph Hearst Sr. built his grandiose 165-room castle on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific Ocean at San Simeon, Calif., has America been so fascinated by a private residence of the rich and famous.

Welcome to San Simeon North, the high-tech Xanadu of William Henry Gates III, richest guy on the planet.

Seven years after construction began on a project expected to take about half that long, the Microsoft mogul's futuristic dream home on the shores of Lake Washington across from Seattle, in the affluent Eastside community of Medina, is nearing completion.

Gates, his wife and toddler daughter began moving last week, even before the last of the construction trailers leave and the only evidence of their interminable stay is planted over by a forest of Northwest alders.

``I am in no way comparing my house with San Simeon, one of the West Coast's monuments to excess,'' Gates wrote in his best seller ``The Road Ahead,'' which for $29.95 came with a CD-ROM that included a virtual tour of his home.

It is difficult to compare the nearly five-acre Gates estate, which has so far cost the software king upwards of $50 million, with anything else because there is nothing else quite like it.

The county assessor's office, in trying to determine the market value of the home, could not find anything comparable, and it looked at expensive waterfront mansions as far away as Florida, including the Miami home of Sylvester Stallone. (The actor is now trying to sell it. Asking price: $27.5 million.)

Sorry Sly. No comparison.

Although the Gates home has about 40,000 square feet of living space, it is not size alone that makes it unique. Nor is it the gee-whiz factors that draw the sightseeing boats past the work-in-progress several times a day.

The house has a vaulted 30-car underground garage that was tunneled into the hillside; a reception hall that can accommodate more than 120 guests; a 60-foot-long indoor pool with underwater music system; a boulder-rimmed hot tub; two elevators and a three-story spiral staircase; a rotunda-topped library for Bill Gates' rare-book collection; a movie theater with a state-of-the-art sound system; a 1 1/2-story trampoline room; an 18-hole miniature golf course; a trout stream; and a man-made estuary.

But it is the home's technology that will make it one of a kind, like the Hearst castle, and provide the Gates family and their guests with a rich multimedia experience that will be educational and fun.

One would expect nothing else from the world's No. 1 computer geek and Harvard dropout who co-founded Microsoft long before he was legally old enough to drink and is now worth about $40 billion. (Bill Gates' net worth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $2.5 billion in the summer of 1990, when work began on what was then a bachelor's pad - a measure of how long the construction has taken and how well Microsoft's stock has performed).

Though Gates may not want to compare his digs with those of Hearst, he did drop in at San Simeon a few years ago by helicopter for a private tour of the famous mansion on Enchanted Hill that was too expensive for one of America's richest families to maintain after Hearst's death in 1951. Most of the mansion was taken over by the state of California seven years later and is now a tourist attraction.

There is no word on how much it might take to maintain the Gates home, but the property taxes alone will be more than $500,000 a year.

The Hearst mansion, started in 1919, cost about $30 million (several times that amount in today's dollars). It had a telephone, telegraph and radio system so advanced that Hearst was able, from his home, to run his vast publishing empire of about 30 newspapers, 15 magazines, eight radio stations and a number of film companies. President Calvin Coolidge once remarked that the Hearst Castle had a better communication system than the White House.

Not that Gates plans to run Microsoft from his home, but he probably could.

``The technological innovations I have in mind for my house are not that really different in spirit from those Hearst wanted in his,'' Gates wrote in his book. ``He wanted news and entertainment, all at a touch. So do I.''

And just as Hearst spent a million dollars or so a year for about 50 years on art and art objects for San Simeon - enough to fill several warehouses - Gates has been doing the virtual equivalent without having to travel the world.

In 1995, touring China with his wife and his pal Warren Buffett, Gates purchased several replicas of Chinese centurions that will be erected on his estate.

And eight years ago, about the same time he had finished buying 4.5 acres of some of the most expensive waterfront property in America as the site for his home, Gates formed a private company to acquire the electronic rights to photographs and art works.

That company, now known as Corbis, owns the electronic reproduction rights to paintings that hang in museums around the world, and to the photographs of Ansel Adams and the famed Bettmann Archive, which contains millions of images of the 20th century.

This huge data base of digitalized masterpieces will be available for display on high-definition television screens built into the walls of nearly all public rooms of Gates' home.

As far back as 1984, Gates told a reporter that the home he envisioned building would be controlled by a computer similar to the fictional Hal, which ran the systems of a Jupiter-bound spaceship in the movie ``2001: A Space Odyssey.''

In this space-age marvel of technology at San Simeon North, in addition to helping out with security, the computer system will monitor electronic pins worn by people in the house. The computer will keep track of the music they may be listening to, or the TV show they may be watching or the art work they may be admiring, and shift the electronic images from room to room as they pass through the house. The computer will even keep track of personal preferences for the next visit.

In the huge reception hall are two dozen 40-inch monitors that form a flat-screen display covering an entire wall. In May, when Gates threw a dinner party there for Vice President Al Gore and about a hundred chief executive officers, those monitors displayed a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic.

Gates obtained a temporary occupancy permit to use the reception hall. He and his family were not yet living in the home.

Until they began moving last week, Gates, Melinda and their daughter, Jennifer, 1 1/2, were living about a half-mile from San Simeon North, in a waterfront home on Medina's Evergreen Point Road near the east end of the state Route 520 floating bridge.

This 4,000-square-foot home, built in 1941, was previously owned by Seattle SuperSonics basketball star Jack Sikma. The home was assessed at $4.3 million when Gates purchased it from Sikma for $8 million in 1993 so he could be closer to the construction site of his mansion.

The home was recently sold by the Gateses to Gerald and Lynn Grinstein. Gerald Grinstein is former chairman of Burlington Northern railroad and on the board of Delta Air Lines. The Grinsteins are also friends of the Gates family.

Although Gates has insisted on confidentiality and privacy, blueprints for the home, including the many changes that have been made, are on file in Medina City Hall. The blueprints fill several file drawers. Gates paid the city more than $50,000 to have them checked, because the building department did not have the resources to handle a project of such scope.

And enough people have toured the home and talked afterward that few secrets are left.

Earlier this year, building officials from a dozen municipalities were invited to check out the project. They reportedly were impressed with such things as 800-pound interior doors that are balanced to swing with ease.

Late last year, Gates gave Time magazine writer Walter Isaacson a rare personal tour one night.

In a revealing cover story about Gates that ran in the Jan. 13, 1997, issue, Isaacson wrote that the only completed part of the home, other than the garage, was the large indoor pool under the family quarters. A sleek lap pool, reflecting images from a wall, snakes its way through glass into an outdoor Japanese bath area, he wrote.

One car was already in the underground garage, Isaacson noted. It was Gates' prized red Mustang convertible that his parents bought for him when he was in high school at Lakeside, the private school in North Seattle where his obsession with computers began.

Gates told Isaacson that his wife had already left a large imprint on the design of the home. If Gates had remained a bachelor, his home might have been finished a couple years ago. But Melinda Gates wanted interior and exterior changes in the imposing techno-structure, and that furthered delays.

Not long after their marriage, several internationally known interior decorators were flown to Seattle to inspect the home and make presentations.

The Gateses picked French-born designer Thierry Despont, whose clients included actor Michael Douglas, designer Calvin Klein and Gap president Millard Drexler.

Soon, a scale model of the house about 8 feet by 10 feet was being shipped back and forth between Seattle and Despont's New York office.

Among other things, Melinda Gates wanted her own space - including a bath, dressing room and study - that had to be added to the original design.

Though his wife found the original design wanting, Gates had already given some thought to the end of his bachelor days. The first blueprints included three children's bedrooms and a room for a nanny.

Melinda Gates' study is smaller than her husband's, but her dressing room appears slightly larger on blueprints. Her closet boasts 42 linear feet of clothes-hanging space, operated like a dry cleaner's rack.

Originally, construction was to have been completed in 1994, the year they were married.

San Simeon North, however, has taken twice as long to build as it took to construct the $67 million Kingdome in Seattle.

It was 1988 when Gates purchased the first of five adjoining lots of prime Medina real estate for $3.6 million. In all, Gates acquired about 450 feet of shoreline.

The following year, he held a competition to pick an architect.

One of those invited to join the competition was James Cutler of Bainbridge Island, who had worked on the renovation of the Pike Place Market and whose design philosophy is to blend homes with the natural environment.

While Cutler was thinking about his design, he got a call from architect Peter Bohlin, whom he had once worked for in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Bohlin was trying for the Gates commission, too, and suggested they team up.

Their challenge was to design an unassuming home of nearly 50,000 square feet on a steep hillside that dropped more than 150 feet down to Lake Washington. Their goal was to make the home look like it was part of a forest.

Their design won, and construction began in 1990. The site first had to be excavated to shore up the steep hillside, which is prone to slides.

At one point in 1993, there were 23 construction trailers on the property, some stacked double. A construction crane also was on site, with electric rails to minimize noise that might disturb neighbors.

From the start, Gates went out of his way to accommodate a neighborhood concerned about the scale and the impact of the project.

He sends out newsletters to keep neighbors informed. The army of workers are bused to and from the project each day to minimize traffic. The narrow public street leading to the site is cleaned daily.

It helped. But there have still been complaints from neighbors.

Most people who live near the Gates' home don't want to talk about their soon-to-be neighbors. Privacy is one of the benefits of living in Medina, where multimillion-dollar homes - several owned by Microsoft executives - are set behind hedges or tucked away along narrow winding roads.

But privacy has been hard to come buy.

A few years ago, Argosy Cruises added the Gates home to its popular daily sightseeing tours of Lake Washington.

The tour boats stop for several minutes a few hundred feet off shore to allow passengers to take in the enormity of the kind of home someone with $40 billion can build.

Some people take the tour each year just to see for themselves the progress that has been made, said Brock Gilman, captain of one of the tour boats.

He got a briefing about the home from Geoffrey Whitten, Gates' personal representative at the construction site, not long after the boat tours began. Gilman said Whitten wanted to make sure he had the facts straight.

One accurate piece of information that has been hard to come by is just how much money Gates has poured into the project.

The figure most often used by the media nowadays is $50 million.

Last year, the property was assessed at $33,445,900. It was only about 75 percent finished. Gates paid $388,833 in property taxes.

Brent Wilde, the county's chief commercial appraiser, said that as of July 31, the home was about 85 percent complete and the cost of materials listed on the building permits totaled about $50 million.

The property is classified commercial because the construction techniques are more like those used for an office building than a home, Wilde said.

To assess the value of a newly built home of such magnitude, it helps to know what similar homes have sold for. Last year, in trying to assess the property, Wilde looked at the Miami bayfront mansion that was purchased by Stallone for $8 million in 1993.

Stallone's 24,000-square-foot house has four bedrooms, nine baths, a ballroom, billiard room, library, gym, 10,000-bottle wine room and fur storage area, indoor shooting range and movie theater.

Gates' 1,700-square-foot guest house, now finished and already an award winner, cost about $700,000. That much more was spent on its landscaping and site work. It has only one bedroom and one bath, with a combination kitchen, living room and dining room, as well as a study where Gates is said to have spent many hours working on ``The Road Ahead.''

In addition to the guest house and main house, the estate has a guard house, administration building and caretaker's house.

The basic design that Cutler and Bohlin created was for a main house of several pavilions terraced down the hillside to look like as many as seven smaller houses hidden in a forest.

Hundreds of mature alders and big-leaf maples have been planted on the property, and more will be planted once the home is finished.

Most of the wood used in the main home comes from ancient Northwest forests. Gates bought about a half-million board feet from what was once the Long-Bell Lumber Co. work sheds in Longview. The huge sheds, some nearly a quarter-mile long, were built in the 1920s to house the company's lumber and cabinet businesses. Many old-growth Douglas fir beams, some measuring more than 75 feet in length, were used.

Rain and groundwater are diverted into a 100,000 gallon cistern below the garage and will feed wetlands created just for the home. The wetlands take up about 125 feet of the 450 feet of shoreline.

Cutler said he told a reluctant Gates he would one day come to appreciate the expensive wetlands.

``You'll mark your life by the changes in this landscape,'' he told Gates. ``Your children will come to this place.''

A stream that runs through the property and feeds the estuary will be stocked with salmon.

Jay Peisptrop, project manager for contractor Sellen Construction, said he considers the wetlands and salmon stream the most amazing aspects of the site.

Paul Schell toured the outside of the house a couple of times a year ago when he chaired the architecture department at the University of Washington.

``Once you get past the sheer scale of it, it represents Northwest character and feel,'' Schell said.

Underground passages connect the various pavilions. One pavilion will be mostly for entertaining.

Another contains the library. Gates hired a rare-book dealer in New York to stock it.

His most valuable treasure in the library will be the Codex Leicester, an original 72-page manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci's diagrams and notes. Gates paid $30.8 million for the manuscript during an auction at Christie's in New York in 1994, a record price for any manuscript sold at auction.

The Codex has been on a world tour but eventually will be returned to the home's library, where it will be kept in a special case.

Even Citizen Hearst, who bought Cardinal Richelieu's bed just for the bedroom of one of the three huge guest houses at San Simeon, would be envious. MEMO: Contributing to this report were Post-Intelligencer reporters

Teresa Talerico, Ellis Conklin and Susan Phinney. Additional information

came from freelance journalist Deeann Glamser. ILLUSTRATION: SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER color photos

Seven years after construction began, Bill Gates' futuristic home on

the banks of Lake Washington across from Seattle is nearing

completion.

Bill Gates

Graphic

ABOUT THE ESTATE

A vaulted 30-car underground garage tunneled into the hillside.

A reception hall that can accommodate over 120 guests

A 60-foot-long indoor pool with underwater music system

A boulder-rimmed hot tub