A Look inside Bill Gates’ Palatial Home in WаsҺinɡton!

Bill Gates, the father of Microsoft, and his family reside at a 66,000-square-foot mansion in Medina, near Lake Washington. The house is known as Xanadu 2.0, after the estate of Citizen Kane, the film’s main character.

The home was created by James Cutler Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and it features a contemporary “Pacific Lodge” architecture.

The structure is an earth-sheltered home with steel reinforcing many times stronger than those required by the local building code to avoid seismic damage. It has a stainless steel roof, Douglas fir timbers, and a concrete base.

High tech is, unsurprisingly, a crucial component of the compound. Each person has a pin on their lapel that contains a unique chip that, when entering a room, automatically adjusts the temperature, music, and lighting to suit their tastes.

While windows on the lakefront side of the home provide views of the lake and Seattle to the west, the majority of the building is buried into the hillside in order to maintain solitude. A 2,100 square foot library with a domed reading room has paneling throughout and is one of the property’s most fascinating features. A sentence from the epilogue of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is inscribed near the base of the dome. He had traveled far to get at this blue meadow, and his dream must have felt so near that he could barely have missed it, according to the sentence.