We all know the Ambanis are India’s richest family — Mukesh Ambani sits right at the top of the Forbes list with a net worth that most of us can’t even fully wrap our heads around: $9,430 crore (USD). And if that number wasn’t enough to impress you, his Mumbai residence ‘Antilia’ surely will.
Costing around $4.6 billion, Antilia isn’t just a home — it’s practically a vertical palace standing 27 floors tall. With everything high-end packed into it, you’d expect Antilia to have the fanciest air-conditioning system money can buy. But here’s where things get really interesting — it doesn’t have regular air conditioners.
No AC Units? Yes, You Read That Right.
In a country like India where most of us can’t survive summers without an AC, this might sound wild — but it’s true. Antilia doesn’t have traditional air conditioners. The mansion, instead, runs on a centralized cooling system that’s unlike anything we’ve heard of.
Forget those bulky outdoor units and remote controls. In Antilia, the temperature inside the house is not something you can manually adjust. That’s because it’s automatically controlled based on what the house needs — not what the people inside feel.
It’s All About the Marble and the Flowers
Now here comes the quirky yet mind-blowing part. The cooling system is tuned to maintain the right temperature for the marble floors and exotic flowers in the house. These luxury elements are delicate and require a specific temperature to stay in their best condition — and so, the cooling adjusts around them, not around the humans living in it.
It’s the kind of setup that screams “ultra-luxury”, but also makes you pause and think: In a home where even the temperature caters to the flowers, how different is that life from ours?
Shreya Dhanwanthary’s Cold Reality Check
Actress Shreya Dhanwanthary once shared her own surprising experience with this during a visit to Antilia. In an episode of The Love Laugh Live Show, she revealed how she felt really cold while inside the mansion. Naturally, she asked the floor manager if they could turn the temperature up a bit.
But the response she got? Something most of us would never hear in our lifetime.
“Ma’am, we are very sorry, but the flowers and the marble need the temperature to be a certain number.”
That’s when it hit her — the people come second to the ambiance. And to be fair, she wasn’t annoyed. She found it fascinating. It was a glimpse into a lifestyle so different, it almost felt unreal.