Features of Bill Gates House:
Electronics are used abundantly: visitors are surveyed upon entrance and are given a microchip that sends signals throughout the house to adjust temperature and other conditions according to preset user preferences.
A 17 × 60 foot (5.1 × 18.2 metre) swimming pool. It contains an underwater music system and a fossil-motif floor. There is also a glass wall which can be dived under in order to emerge outdoors, by a terrace. There is a locker room off the pool that has four showers and two baths.
Each door handle in the home is custom made on a CNC machine to specifications laid out by Mr. Gates. Each handle (2 per door) cost approximately $2000.
Construction of Bill Gates house:
The number of building permits needed completely overwhelmed the Medina county clerk's office, necessitating the move to a new Linux-based computer infrastructure to deal with the volume.
The primary color of the house is red.
More than 64 km of optical fiber is used in the house.
The house was designed by James Cutler of James Cutler Architects and the architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ).
At one point there were 300 workers working on the house, including 104 electricians.
PDL was the lead designer on the project.
An interior designer, Thierry Despont disagreed with the layout of a portion of the home, which resulted in the demolition and removal of 60 cubic yards of cured, cast-in-place concrete.
An existing cedar tree was determined by Gates to be in the wrong location and moved six inches.
Construction took seven years.