Filed under Living on October 27th, 2008:
6 Outrageously Expensive Household Items
For each of us, the term ‘expensive’ can have a different meaning. When you’re in college, a fast food lunch can be expensive. Later in life, the word ‘expensive’ may conjure up images of fine jewelry or exotic travel.
When planning for your new Louisville home, maybe you’re on a budget or maybe you have a big bank account balance set aside to buy some top-of-the-line items. Whatever your financial situation, you most likely won’t purchase these 6 outrageously expensive household items.
Bed
The world’s most expensive bed comes with a big price tag. It costs 1.5 million dollars and was invented by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars. Why the sticker shock? This bed actually floats in thin air. It’s a sleeping surface suspended entirely by magnets.
Sheets
Now that you’ve got your million-dollar bed, why not deck it out with a set of bed linens priced at $60,000? A set of Léron sheets takes a year to hand-embroider in Italy. The sheets are 800-thread count but the true cost comes from the Fuselli lace woven tightly.
If the 800-thread count is too expensive for your taste, try one of the sale items like the 400-thread count Egyptian cotton ‘Emily’ design for the bargain sale price of $1865.
Bottled Water
Whoever thought ‘getting your bling’ might mean buying premium bottled water? Bling H20 is the creation of Hollywood writer-producer Kevin G. Boyd and it’s marketed as ‘fancy water that’s more expensive than wine’. Bling H20 comes in limited edition reusable glass bottles, hand-crafted with Swarovski Crystals. A 375-ml small size starts at $20 per bottle.
Toilet
If you drank too much bottled water and now you need to go, try the $5,000 high-tech Neorest toilet. This ‘hands-free’ toilet, made in Japan, offers luxury features like a front- and back-aerated warm-water spray, an oscillating spray massage, heated seat, catalytic air deodorizer and a warm air dryer. It’s also environmentally friendly, using only 1.2 gallons of water per flush.
Refrigerator
No luxury apartment or home is complete without the Sub-Zero refrigerator. With a price tag of $12,000, Sub-Zero’s newest stainless steel refrigerator boasts close to 30 cubic feet of storage space. The new models of the PRO 48 refrigerator will automatically adjust defrost patterns according to your usage and activate an alarm when you’ve left a drawer or door ajar.
Coffee
No refrigerator is complete without some premium coffee beans chilling inside. At a cost of $120 to $600 per pound, Civet Coffee is the most expensive in the world. The robusta or Arabica coffee beans are eaten and passed through digestive tract of a common Asian palm civet, a cat-sized mammal.
The civet eats the soft outer part of the coffee cherry but doesn’t digest the inner beans. It then excretes the coffee beans, still covered in inner layers of the cherry. It’s believed the enzymes in the Civet’s stomach add to the coffee’s flavor through fermentation.