Is this the world’s most expensive home?

Towering over the city of Mumbai, located on the aptly named street Billionaires Row, this house is called Antilia. Belonging to Indian business magnate Mukesh Ambani, the home is valued at approximately $2 billion, making it the most expensive residential home on the planet (well, aside from Buckingham Palace if you’re countuing that).

Constructed in the early 2000s, it’s impressive from the outside. On the inside, however, you realize there are luxury homes, mansions and even palaces, and then there’s Antilia.

Mukesh Ambani is a wealthy man. With a reported net worth of over $90 billion, he is the richest man in Asia and is estimated to be the 13th richest person in the world. Ambani accumulated most of his money as the head of Reliance Industries, a company founded by his father and now the most valuable in India.

Ambani decided to invest a vast sum of his wealth into the construction of a super-home in the early 2000s, with work beginning on a 400,000-square-foot, 27-story property in 2002. Located on one of the most valuable roads in Mumbai, Ambani commissioned two architecture firms from America to oversee the project: Perkins & Will from Chicago and Hirsch Bedner Associates from Los Angeles.

Building Antilia took the best part of a decade. In 2012, Ambani, his wife and three children moved into the house which came with 600 staff to serve the family.

A workforce that size is just the start of Antilia’s controversial opulence. The house is set in one of the world’s most impoverished cities; Antilia has views over the Arabian Sea, but also over Mumbai’s extensive slums.

Each of the 27 floors, for example, has ultra-high ceilings and is the height of a standard two-story building. There are chandeliers throughout the building, the house includes a large ballroom of which 80% of the ceiling is adorned with crystal chandeliers.

There are nine high-speed elevators to serve different parts of the house. The bottom six floors are a garage with the capacity to hold 168 – yep, one hundred and sixty-eight – cars. Living and guest quarters start above, and amenities include multiple swimming pools, a home movie theater with a 50-person capacity, a spa, a yoga studio, a temple, a snow room and professional conference room facilities. Four floors are hanging gardens, and the building has external gardens as well.

In case the 168-car capacity garage is full (Ambani is an avid car collector) you can arrive by helicopter. The roof is a helipad equipped with its own air traffic control center.

Were a natural disaster to strike the building, Antilia has been built to survive an earthquake of up to 8 on the Richter scale.

As well as the owner of this remarkable building, Ambani is also the owner of the Mumbai Indians franchise in the Indian Premier League.

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