You Won’t Believe What Rich People are Putting in their Big Sky Homes
While average Montanans struggle to keep up with inflation, lousy wages, and big property tax increases, the wealthy continue to blow their millions on luxury homes in places like Big Sky and the Yellowstone Club.
These extravagant, multi-million dollar homes (many of which remain largely unoccupied for most of the year) are filled with the usual luxury necessities like saunas, high-tech home theaters, gyms, helipads, and walk-in wine cellars. But those are so yesterday...
Now, the latest trend is spendy oxygen booster systems.
Not for COPD, but to combat altitude sickness when they jet into Bozeman to ski for the weekend. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) wealthy homeowners in ski towns around the United States are spending big bucks to retrofit existing homes with fancy systems that pump oxygen into their rooms.
It's becoming so popular, that many home builders at high-altitude locales are now including plastic tubing for the oxygen during the framing stage, giving the owner the option to add the generating system at a later date or install it when HVAC and plumbing go in.
According to the article, a Bozeman engineering firm has installed over 140 of the systems in Big Sky and they now include the piping for all new homes at the Yellowstone Club and nearby communities.
Home oxygen boosters don't come cheap.
If you're dropping $20 million on a part-time ski house, money is not an issue and customers seem happy to cough up big bucks to combat the effects of altitude sickness. The WSJ report said that each oxygen generator costs around $15,000 and some bedrooms (depending on size) can require two or three of the units.
Customers who wish to have extra oxygen pumped into each bedroom can drop hundreds of thousands of dollars to outfit their home. Talk about rich people problems.
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