Wondering what rich people do when their kids are over active and it’s too cold to go outside? Well, this story provides some answers we’d never have come up with on our own. People are building indoor playgrounds. Yes, slides connecting two apartments in Manhattan at a nominal cost of $40k or what about another one in Indiana, which was roughly $150,000. Though when your house is $10 million what’s a $150k for a slide, right?
The slide took 18 months to create and install. “Given how much joy it has brought to my children, their friends… I’d say it was well worth it,” says Mr. Jones.
Minneapolis-based home builder Steve Kuhl has built slides in two homes. One was his own: a yellow-and-orange plastic chute installed in his $1.3-million house at an estimated cost of between $8,000 to $9,000.
Mr. Kuhl used 3-D rendering computer software to model how the 22-foot slide would fit. He then had the slide shipped and installed from a manufacturer of playground equipment in South Carolina—a process that took just several days. Accessed through a hidden door in the cabinet, the slide goes from the mudroom to the basement.
Mr. Kuhl’s primary reason for installing the slide was to surprise his two children. It also appealed to him because it provides his children, ages 2 and 4, with a source of exercise. “If they want to do it again, they have to climb the stairs,” he says.
John and September Higham with daughter Katrina, 21, and son Jordan, 18, in their Mountain View, Calif. home. Photo: Vivian Johnson for The Wall Street Journal
Scott Jones is a kid at heart—with kids of his own. So when he remodeled his home in Carmel, Ind., he looked for a playful addition that would appeal to children of all ages. His solution: a 28-foot mahogany slide that descends into the great room of his house.
“I like everyone to have fun,” says Mr. Jones, a 54-year-old entrepreneur who says the slide consumed about $150,000 of his roughly $10 million remodeling budget. “The slide brings that out.”
It’s brazenly impractical, and as one owner found out, perhaps not the best feature for resale value. Still, builders and architects say a handful of determined luxury homeowners have successfully installed slides in their own abodes.
The owners say they’d do it again. Mr. Jones, whose home also includes a two-story indoor treehouse and a secret bookcase that connects a few bedrooms, says grown guests will often get on the slide to zoom downstairs. He once had a visitor in her 90s take a turn. “She had a dress on and said, ‘I’m too old to care,’” he says.
