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digg - Most unique tree house ever

The Spherical Tree House imitates sailboat construction and rigging practice. It ’s a marriage of tree house and sailboat technology. Wooden spheres are built much like a cedar strip canoe or kayak. Suspension points are similar to the chain plate attachments on a sailboat. Stairways hang from a tree much like a sailboat.

Prices start at $150,000. Your kids have to have one.

You know you dig the gadgetry. Go with your inner voice and buy it.

Haute High-Tech Homes - Forbes.com

In the digital era, products have a way of creeping into our homes month by month, whether we like it or not. DVD players, iPods, high-definition televisions–what was once the household computer is now several systems that need to be networked together, and preferably without wires.

That is particularly true for the most luxurious residences. It is no longer enough to have marble-clad bathrooms, a kitchen full of custom appliances, and foot-wide carved moldings. Now, you need a home theater that puts real cinemas to shame, flat-screen televisions that slide from view at the click of a button, and audio systems containing thousands of songs that can be instantly accessed from any room in the house.

Call us when the median price of a tri-state treehouse exceeds the national median price for a house.

Luxury Real Estate News at Hauteblog.com
In a not-too-far-off suburb of Long Island, where nothing is ever too good (or too much) for the children, some parents are spending up to $100,000 on professionally designed tree houses. There’s enough backyard building that the sub-sub-specialty has its own starchitects, each with his own style: For a young neighbor in Brookhaven named Mackenzie, Michael Ince, a wizard with recycled wood (and fiberglass, for the roof), adopted his signature Tolkeinesque style to the treetops. Donna Karan met celebrity tree-house designer Roderick Romero through a yoga instructor—he built a tree house in Tuscany with stained-glass windows for Sting, too—and ended up commissioning him to build a house for her grandson Miles in a silverleaf maple in Oyster Bay. Long Island native Pete Nelson designed a 120-square-foot tri-level tree palace on a Westchester estate for two preteen girls out of salvaged barn wood.

Pioneer releases 50-inch, 1080p PRO-FHD1 plasma - Engadget

If you like to watch high definition video– and we mean really, really like to watch it– then Pioneer has a new 50-inch plasma on the market that promises unrivaled picture quality and realism — for a pretty steep price.

Yes, yes,  and more yes.

No price has been announced, but you don’t really care about that, do you?

World’s Largest Plasma TV Goes on Sale - -

If you have been dreaming about watching that Big Game, Matsushita can make that game even bigger.

The company announced yesterday that its new 103-inch Panasonic Plasma High-Definition TV will go on sale in early 2007. The flat-screen gargantuan is the world’s largest plasma TV set, and was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year in Las Vegas.

It measures 94 inches by 55 inches and weighs a tabletop-crushing 413 lbs. As a reference, this is larger than a double-sized mattress and nearly as heavy as an upright piano. As a high-definition set, it will be able to display up to 1,920 by 1,080 pixels resolution, and has a brightness rating of 3000-1.

If you want houseguests to wonder why your CD Boombox is scuttling around the floor, here’s the product for you. It is only available in Korea (so no fear that neighbor will get one first) and only runs about a grand. Ain’t life grand?

Samsung is back with new robo-vacs - Engadget

Not only can they map out their cleaning area to optimize cleaning times, but they’ll return home to their charger when they’re getting low on juice, and can even be remotely activated for the ultimate in geeky housekeeping fun. Samsung’s vacuums, the VC-RS60 and VC-RS60H (to be honest, we don’t know the difference other than the “premium” title), run at a relatively speedy 1.3-feet per second, and can manage about an hour of work before a charge. The two models go for $936 and $1,042 respectively, with no word on availability in the States, but we think we’d be waiting for a price drop anyways.

But which pool? You do have more than one, don’t you? Or at least a pool and a pond?
Hockney Bucks - Forbes.com

Artists recently making waves in the auction world bookend the 20th century Expressionist movement. At the end of the spectrum, heralding a return to more representational art, is David Hockney (British, b. 1937). His 1966 ” The Splash,” a stylized abstraction of a pool against a modern house, made its own splash with a record price for the artist. Just shy of its high estimate, the classic California image brought $5.4 million at Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art Evening sale on June 21.

A little something to smuggle back from your next business trip to Japan.

Sony’s Vaio X, now with DTCP - Engadget

Sony just gave a little bump to their Vaio X living room PCs. The VGX-XL71S features an ISDB-T digital tuner, a pair of terrestrial analog tuners, up to 1.5TB of disk, a 2.8GHz Pentium D 920, nVIDIA GeForce 6200 graphics, a dual-layer DVD recorder, up to 2GB memory, and whole host of audio and video outs including HDMI. Notable here, is Sony’s expanding product support for DTCP-IP allowing you to pump your TeeVee recordings around your home network packaged in a delicious DRM wrapper. Coming at the end of the month for ¥214,000 (right around $1,880) to your local tech bodega in Japan.

Top 10 BBQ Grills via Gizmodo
Neatorama has a roundup of the top 10 coolest BBQ grills. Among them, The Bar-B-Q Shack that’s a BBQ and a tow-able house, A HEMI-Powered BBQ, and the Superior Welding tailgate BBQ grill for tailgate parties and steakouts stakeouts.