In Case You Missed It: Bill Gates

It was South Florida-based celebrity and society scuttlebutter Jose Lambiet of Gossip Extra who let Your Mama know that Microsoft bajillionaire Bill Gates and his equally cerebral wife Melinda recently shelled out $8,700,000 for an equestrian oriented estate in the affluent and equine oriented community of Wellington, FL.

According to Mister Lambiet, Mister and Missus Gates leased a house in Wellington for the last two seasons at a rental cost of $1.1 million but recently bit the real estate bullet and acquired a more permanent outpost in the horsey enclave where just about every body—and we mean every damn body—is involved with the horse trade(s) in one way or another.

Given that the philanthropically minded tech tycoon has a net worth commonly estimated to be well in excess of $65 billion dollars, the $8.7 million dollar purchase represents but an infinitesimal sliver of his essentially limitless riches. Most people will never even earn $8.7 million in their entire lifetime but, let's get real, butter beans, 8.7 million clams could slip out of Mister Gates pocket in a taxi cab and he'd never even miss it. Even less skin off his and his missus' financial teeth will be, as shown on the digital listing we perused, the mandatory if relatively modest $370 per quarter home owner's association dues.

Anyways, according to listing details Your Mama dug up on the internets, the boomerang-shaped 4.8 acre spread is located in the guard gated Mallet Hill development and includes an architecturally eye-brow knitting 7,234 square foot quasi-hacienda style mini-mansion with four bedrooms and four full and two half bathrooms.

There are stone tile floors throughout the high-ceilinged open-concept main living space comprised of "formal" dining area, a living room with fireplace and French doors, and a roomy center island kitchen with dining area, granite counter tops and high quality appliances. The exposed pine kitchen cabinetry lends a unexpectedly and unnecessarily—ahem—rustic, country-house aura that Your Mama doesn't quite understand since the rest of the house is an undeniably large, luxurious, and probably extremely well built but otherwise strikingly bland mock-Med macmansion.

Outdoor recreation and lounge areas include a columned loggia that overlooks a 32-foot long swimming pool and a built-in barbecue station on the patio. Broad tree-dotted lawns run up to the edge of a narrow Y-shaped canal. Equestrian facilities include several fields, pastures and pens plus a newly constructed 20 stall barn that—somewhat oddly—is "subject to HOA approval" according to listing information.

It's difficult for a jaded property gossip like Your Mama to believe that a man of Mister Gates extraordinary pecuniary prowess doesn't own a slew of high maintenance properties in every high priced nook and cranny of the world but, as far as Your Mama knows anyways, the only other property the Gates own is their technologically forward thinking 50,000+ square foot super-compound in Medina (WA) on shores of Lake Washington.

listing photos: Boca Executive Realty