clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Peter Thiel’s decor reportedly includes pictures poking out onto windows

New, 5 comments

Or so suggests the New Yorker

Peter Thiel speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Peter Thiel speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

Last Saturday, a smattering of people gathered in front of controversial figure Peter Thiel’s Billionaire’s Row mansion to protest his company, Palantir Technologies, an outfit that produces software that could help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) roundup undocumented immigrants.

Thiel has been public about his involvement with the Trump administration, hence the protest by a group that, according to Anna Wiener’s article in The New Yorker, included tech workers, attorneys, and anti-surveillance activists.

Wiener’s piece on the rally also features the following tidbit about Thiel’s home and, more importantly, his home’s decor.

Thiel’s address is not publicly listed, but Sonja Trauss, a Bay Area housing activist who, together with her colleague Laura Foote Clark, had organized the protest, was fairly certain that she had it right. “He lived there as of September 26th,” she said. Last fall, Thiel invited Trauss for breakfast to discuss local housing policy. Trauss recalled that she ate oatmeal, that Thiel had “some little quiches with a salad,” and that she had been struck by the house’s interior décor; the walls were gray with white molding, and pictures—“cityscapes, countryscapes, inoffensive stuff”—were hung in odd locations. “Places where you don’t put a picture, like too close to a ceiling or poking onto the window,” she said. “I just imagined the interior decorator being, like, ‘Peter, I have a vision.’ ”

Pictures poking onto the window? That’s enough to fray the nerves of any decor-savvy soul. (And, Peter, if you’re reading this, your neighbor Ann Getty is an interior designer who knows her way around a bolt of fabric. If you’ve ever wanted to live inside a Fabergé egg, she’s your woman.)

Also of note in the article:

“Do you think [Thiel] has fun in this house?” one software engineer asked, peering up at the mansion, which another of the protesters described as “neo-Bavarian.”

From the looks of the home, it appears to be a riff on Tudor, perhaps? Behold:

In May of 2015, Thiel put his gargantuan Cow Hollow home on the market for a cool $9,250,000, cutting its price by $1.2 million in September. It too featured gray walls and white molding.