bfv mentioned the phrase a couple days ago, so I thought I'd riff. Especially as someone who really wanted a missile silo until I, too, discovered that missile silos - at least the ones that weren't dug up and repurposed - tended to be built in places you'd never want to live.
But fear not: actual supervillain real estate can be had, and it doesn't suck. It's not cheap, though.
First up, the Elrod House, from Diamonds are Forever:
Recently sold for about $8m, it has the benefit of being in Palm Springs and the benefit of not selling for the $16m it was asking two years ago.
If that's a little rich for your blood, there's always the Volcano house in Joshua Tree, which just sold for a mere $650,000.
For true supervillain cachet, though, it's tough to beat the Ennis House by Frank Lloyd Wright:
...other than the $6m or so worth of restoration it needs. However, the company you're in includes -
- Blade Runner
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Black Rain
- The Glimmer Man
- Twin Peaks
- The Rocketeer
- South Park (fer real)
and I've run out of time but I'm pretty sure there's more. Feel free to add your own.
I need to win the lottery and build a castle. If I am going to go super villain digs, to hell with that second hand garbage, I'm gonna go New. 1.6 million not far from Tuscon, AZ which, let's be honest, is better than BFE Maine and Kansas.
Pretty good astronomy, too. It's also really close to the one you can tour so you can get a sense of your lifestyle before you commit.
I did a tour of one outside of Dayton, OH about a decade ago when they were finishing up the rebuild. The university system -maybe the state?- was turning a few of them into underground museum storage. They had cleaned up the water and mould, made some shelving and built floors and even a clean room for books, old furniture etc. They found it was easy to climate control the underground area, keep it safe from the weather and keep looters and other types away. They did a few tours before they finalized construction and did the last climate control before there were any items in the place. Each floor of the silo had 3000 usable square feet or so, and each level was 15 feet high; if I remember correctly there were seven levels. It was neat to say you've been in a missile silo, but other than that it was kinda dull, honestly. And they had issues where the silo was so deep that they needed to create a special high capacity sump systems to pump water up the 150 feet or so to the surface. I did see people talking about using these things as off-site data centers, emergency backup and recovery sites and other "high redundancy" sort of hardened facilities. But still, there are some out there no too far from civil society that it is fun to dream about. And most of them come on acreage that you can turn into farm to be self sustaining. Build barns on top of the old silo entrances to hide the nature of what is underneath, deploy solar and the batteries from Solar City, run a fibre connection and stock the place with food and you got a bunker that you can live in for years.