Big Fat Deal: $7 million to be ready for your close-up, Mr. DeMille

Each week, BCBusiness takes you inside one of the most outrageously upmarket real estate offerings in the province

Address: 2190 West 18th Avenue, Vancouver

Price: $6,680,000

Listing: R2254135

The skinny: Seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom, 4,268-square-foot house on the west side of Vancouver. 

The bling: Finding a move-in ready home is such a trial these days. You spend millions of dollars for a house that’s all raw concrete and glass, plain walls and white ceilings and half the time they don’t even put curtain poles up, let alone rods capable of holding the kind of elaborate swag any person worth their posh points puts in their windows. Standards, darling, should never be allowed to slip. Floors should be marbled, lights chandeliered and beds most definitely four-postered or, at the very least, sleighed. All this modern stripped-back décor might suit the nouveau riche among us, but if you want to show your old-money credentials (oh, it’s OK, no one will check) source some very rare, expensive hardwood and panel the place to within an inch of its envelope. Seriously, if money talks, mahogany positively yodels top drawer. Throw in a gilt-flecked barrel-vaulted ceiling here, a mahogany-coffered one there, and there’s really no mistaking you for someone lacking in good taste cash. Oh no, never. 

The hidden extras: Suite for the help, media room, garden pond with waterfall and, oh yes, you get to keep those magnificent drapes.