The greatest horror series on television is Secret Lives of the Super Rich. It’s a truly eldritch documentary show about the things that people with a lot of money inflict on themselves. Rich people, it suggests again and again, are odd. They don’t just want a garage full of Lambos – it’s always Lambos – they want a house in which the garage doubles as the dining room, where you can eat breakfast next to the parking turntable. They don’t just want endless access to Patron, they want a specially modified motorbike that runs on Patron. They want to eat gold leaf on absolutely everything – even grilled cheese sandwiches. And when night comes they want to retire to a house lined with mink fur.
The mink fur was one of those moments that I actually sat up straight while watching this show. Robert Frank, the host and Mephistopholes of the Secret Lives world, has a wonderful tone to him – he’s mocking the super rich but he’s also fascinated by the bizarre things they get up to. The mink fur house was almost too much though. I swear he briefly ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.
And yes: the mink fur house is truly hellish. It’s dug into a mountain in Switzerland, and it has a huge ornate staircase that serves as its spine. Alongside mink fur in one room, it also has white fox fur in a bedroom, I think, and the whole thing culminates in an underground lake filled with Swarovski crystal lights. After that it gets properly Lovecraftian. There’s an egg sculpture in the dining room that cost $145,000. There’s a Himalayan Salt Chamber. There are secret doorways and levers that do weird things. The whole place is yours for a little under 200 million.
