My delusional dream
On days that start with me bailing out the basement, and which look like they'll end with me frantically putting reflective sheets on every window on the west side of the house (38°C predicted for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The forecast for tomorrow is "only" 34°C. And, no, we don't have air conditioning at Chateau Chaos) makes the idea of bailing out, retrenching to the country, and building a new house seem very appealing.
Something like this:
This house (#70 from The Craftsman) is, by any stretch of the imagination, a mansion. It's 3000 square feet just on the two main floors, and it's got 10(!) rooms in it. But, since it's a house from 100+ years ago, how many bathrooms does it have? One. It's got a pair of extra toilets downstairs, but if you want to take a bath you've got to go upstairs and use the single bathtub the house comes with.
Putting aside the teeny detail that it's about twice the size of a reasonable house, it does have some nice features. Note how the staircase splits into two legs, one going into the kitchen and one into the front hall? Note that there's a honest-to-god library (labelled as a "billiard room") on the ground floor. And that there are a couple of huge bedrooms that are almost designed to be hidey-holes for teenagers, who would no doubt want to retreat back into them and never emerge after being shanghaied into helping construct this ark (the really big room with a fireplace is not well suited as a bedroom, because it's right above the living room, but it would make an ideal studio space or guest room.)
Note that there's no attic shown in these plans. That's because it has to be secret, because thats where I'd have to put the portrait to keep it out of the way.
In reality, it's a little bit too big, and the dust bunny drifts would sweep aimlessly around the mess for decades until the roof collapsed into the structure. But a little bit of judicious headshrinking could collapse the rooms around the central core and give it the same feel, but in a less terrifying way to clean.