Astrid Maxxim and her parents live in a mansion in Maxxim City.  It is three stories high and huge, with an observatory, a laboratory, and a music room on the unused third floor.  Only a part of the first and second floors are used, the former having a series of unused rooms where servants were once housed.

The inspiration for this mansion comes from two sources.  The first is the house that my grandparents lived in when I was born.  It was a huge, two-story house made of red brick, that had been built over a hundred years ago as a hotel.  About forty years ago, my grandparents sold it and it went through several owners.  A few years ago, it was gutted so that it could be rebuilt, but the owners apparently ran out of money.  When I visited it last, it was just an empty hulk.  The other day I looked for it on Google Earth and found only an empty lot.  I have often dreamed of this house, all the way back to when I was a kid.  Back then, in my dreams, it often appeared as being much larger than in real life.  In recent dreams, it is always in decay.

The second inspiration comes from just a few miles west of the first, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I used to live in a crappy apartment building next to the freeway in Tulsa.  This was back when I attended second grade a Paul Revere Elementary School.  Across the road from my apartment was a row of stately mansions.  A school friend of mine lived with his mother in an apartment above the garage behind one of these large, lovely homes.  I believe his grandparents lived in the big house.  I remember going inside one time and seeing a sweeping staircase like something out of Falcon Crest.  A few years ago, I took my kids on a trip through Tulsa, looking at all the places from my childhood.  The row of beautiful old mansions was gone.  Paul Revere Elementary School was gone.  The crappy apartment building I lived in– still there.