Designed by an Italian furniture company Boca Do Lobo, this safe is a gaudy mess that somehow appeals. I can’t really explain it but there is something comical about this object that holds such serious and expensive belongings. It may have something to do with the fact the cabinet is embellished to appear busted or cracked.
Journalist Stephen Bayley wrote of the Richard Rogers’ building, Number One Hyde Park, the super-rich mistake opulence for beauty.
“Great affluence doesn’t lead to great taste, as the world’s most expensive apartment demonstrates. The very rich are different from you and me: they have more money and less taste. At some point on the road to great wealth, a Mephistophelian bargain is struck, and a tragedy of unlimited tacky possibilities unfolds. You acquire the benefit of riches, but the cost is a deadly corrosion of common sense and sound judgment. The result is Number One Hyde Park, London: a dysfunctional spectacle of lustrous high-net-worth narcissism whose luxury bleakness mocks the credulous nouveau rubes being hot-stone massaged and Blumenthal-fed behind their armoured-glass blast screens. It’s a horrible oligarchy of plush.”
This article resonates in this piece of furniture, there is no doubt that a safe is a thing of wealth, anyone who needs a safe is keeping expensive things or guns. The Millionaire safe accentuates this wealth and wraps it in gold and then calls it “Millionaire”. The simplest analogy is to keep your money in a folded clip and ensuring the highest notes are on the outside… not cool.
Millionaire is constructed in Mahogany then lined with polished brass sheets in a gold coated finish, I really don’t even know what that means. Silver plated wheels and turned brass cogs meaning that other than having a few keyed locks and a combination to open the cabinet it’s simply a locking cabinet rather than a real safe. It weighs 268kg and is 800w x 650d x 1510mm high and cost approx. $25K + shipping from Italy.
I love it and I hate it, I hate myself for loving it.
