World's Most Expensive Home

Antilia

Price: $2,000,000,000

Antilia, located in Mumbai, India, is 2013’s most expensive residence. The 27 storey high mansion features pretty much anything you can think of, from a health floor and a six storey parking lot to a ballroom and a 4 storey garden. Not surprisingly, its owner, Mukesh Ambani, is the world’s fifth richest man.

The building is named after the mythical Atlantic island of Antillia. Antillia, according to Aristotle, was a huge island in the Atlantic Ocean known to the Carthaginians.

The Antilia building is situated on an ocean-facing 4,532 square metres (48,780 sq ft) plot at Altamount Road, Cumballa Hill, South Mumbai, where land prices are upward of US$10,000 per square metre. In August 2008, Altamount Road was the 10th most expensive street in the world at US$25,000/sq m (US$2,336 per sq foot).

Antilia was designed by Chicago based architects, Perkins & Will. The Australia-based construction company Leighton Holdings began constructing it. The home has 27 floors with extra-high ceilings (other buildings of equivalent height may have as many as 60 floors). The home was also designed to survive an 8-richter scale earthquake.

Indian media has frequently reported that Antilia is the world's most expensive home costing between US$1 and 2 billion. Thomas Johnson, director of marketing at architecture firm Will and Hirsch Bedner Associates that was consulted with by Reliance during building floor plan design, was cited by Forbes Magazine as estimating the cost of the residence at nearly $2 billion.In June 2008, a Reliance spokesman told The New York Times that it would cost $50–$70 million to build. Upon completion in 2010, media reports again speculated that, due to increasing land prices in the area, the tower may now be worth as much as US$1 billion.

“	It's a stupendous show of wealth, it's kind of positioning business tycoons as the new maharajah of India.	”
	— Hamish McDonald, author of Ambani & Sons: A History of the Business

Tata Group former chairman Ratan Tata has described Antilia as an example of rich Indians' lack of empathy for the poor. Tata also said: "The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him and [asking] can he make a difference. If he is not, then it's sad because this country needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have."

Some Indians are proud of the "ostentatious house", while others see it as "shameful in a nation where many children go hungry." Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, opined that "such wealth can be inconceivable" not only in Mumbai, "home to some of Asia's worst slums," but also in a nation with 42 percent of the world's underweight children younger than five. Recently Ratan Tata said that "It's sad Mukesh Ambani lives in such opulence".

Author activist Arundhati Roy questioned whether the "Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilisation" through Antilia.