FaliconWhile at home visiting my parents in St. Louis I was browsing through the Ladue News over breakfast; the neighborhood weekly is basically real estate porn with some articles thrown in there for shits and giggles. The LN contained a full page ad for a home for sale called Falicon Mansion, a place so insane it has its own website. After checking out the website, complete with—no joke—84 photos of the mansion, I thought it’d be fun to do a little St. Louis area vs. Brooklyn real estate comparison.

The ridiculous expense of New York City real estate is far from breaking news, but it’s quite staggering when you compare what you can get for your money in the city to what you can get elsewhere. As a renter, I always enjoy looking at real estate ads and fantasizing about someday owning a home. Home ownership is not something that’s just over the horizon for us, but it never hurts to see what’s out there.  😛

First, let’s see what Falicon Mansion is all about (exterior seen in the photo above). It’s located in Clarksville, Missouri, which is about an hour and a half drive northwest of St. Louis proper. The 11,000 square foot Neo-classical style mansion was built in the late 1800’s and sits on a 40 acre lot. That square footage is not a typo! Our current apartment is probably around 800 square feet; I cannot even imagine what I’d do with almost 15 times the amount of space we have now (nor do we need that much). The place has 19 rooms, including seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, and nine fireplaces, which I imagine came in handy before houses had heating throughout. According to the listing there is a two bedroom guesthouse and “other historic outbuildings” on the property. I’m gonna guess that the guesthouse itself is larger than my apartment!

This freakin’ side porch is giving me MAJOR house envy (photos below from the mansion’s website):

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I’m super into this living room, which is probably supposed to be called a Great Room or a Parlour or something of the sort:

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How Downton Abbey is this room? It’s so Downtown Abbey that I don’t even know what a room like this is called. The China Repository? The Pantry in Which Mr. Carson Polishes Crystal with His Eyebrows?

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This fireplace feels very Lannister, like you’d throw your gold coins into it to melt them down into the world’s most impressive gold coin, just because you can.

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This is the room where you make the children sleep when they’ve been naughty. The cradle rocks on its own at night, and a single light goes on in the upper window of the dollhouse. Tiny floorboards can also be heard creaking inside the dollhouse, and probably some crying too.

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Conveniently, some of the doorknobs do double duty as crystal balls that you can peer into and see what’s happening in other wings of the mansion. They’re like the original video monitors.

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This is where you put your crazy old uncle, who likes to hang out on the porch with a shotgun and several jugs of moonshine.

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All of that and more for the low low price of $1,100,000! Seriously, if you’re reading this please buy the mansion and invite me over so we can have mint juleps on the side porch. There are a million more photos on the website, so I encourage you to check them out.

Falicon Mansion looks like an absolute steal when you compare it to what you get for the exact same price in Park Slope. I picked Park Slope for comparison simply because I lived there for four years and it’s a nice area of Brooklyn. There’s currently a 936 square foot condo on Garfield Place listed for $1,100,000. It’s a six room apartment with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and zero outdoor space. It’s perfectly nice and bright, with brand new appliances, but man, does it seem shabby and cramped in comparison (truly, no offense to the owners—it’s not hard to look shabby next to a 19th century mansion).

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This is one of those New York apartments that has a “bedroom” that’s honestly more of a hallway. You can see that the current owners didn’t even bother with a real bed:

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The condo does have a walk-in closet, though, which is fairly rare and amazing for Brooklyn:

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For the exact same price, you could also buy a three bedroom, one bathroom attached house on 17th Street:

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Photo credit: Coldwell Banker Reliable

The interior is perfectly fine, nothing extraordinary but could be gussied up nicely:

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There’s a narrow but lovely private outdoor space:

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Photo credit: Coldwell Banker Reliable

The square footage isn’t listed, but I can’t imagine it’s more than 1,000 square feet. It’s one of those places that makes you go, “it’s cute…for Brooklyn.”

Back to St. Louis. If you have an extra $295,000 lying around you can buy this gorgeous Renaissance palazzo style manse for $1,395,000 in the city of St. Louis, right near historic Forest Park.

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This 1914 home has seven bedrooms, six full bathrooms, and one half bathroom. There’s no square footage listed but I’m gonna guess it’s around 8,000. Also? There’s A FREAKING BALLROOM on the top floor. Granted, ballrooms were actually somewhat common in homes built by St. Louis society folk back then, as they were perfect for entertaining. This mansion’s ballroom features a stage for the band and a disco ball, which is most certainly not original to the home:

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This marble and glass bathroom is all “TREAT YO SELF!”

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I am sort of in love with the foyer.

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Oh, and there’s a pool, too:

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But the most important room in this entire house is the powder room, which is wallpapered to appear as if it’s filled with many leather-bound books and smells of rich mahogany.

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Well, I hope you’ve had as much fun reading this post as I’ve had writing it. Real estate porn FTW!

This post does not contain affiliate links. Please note that I did NOT receive any compensation in exchange for promotion from any of the listing agencies.