Flush with cash – why do the super-rich need so many bathrooms?

LAST year, a house went on to the market billed as “America’s most expensive residence”.

The Bel Air mega-mansion was once predicted to sell for half a billion bucks. It didn’t. Not even close. It went for US$126 million. But perhaps the most interesting thing about it was not the price but the number of bathrooms. The 21-bedroom mansion had 42 bathrooms. 42. That is not cloakrooms or servants’ WCs but full bathrooms. Two for every bedroom in a house probably intended for a family of four, or perhaps two. Or one.

“The rich are different from you and me,” F Scott Fitzgerald famously said.