Highland Park mansion featured on HGTV

The home owned by Gerald and Kelli Ford features a Turkish spa in the basement.

I am very curious as to why designer Kelli Ford, the gorgeous Dallas, Texas-based designer wife of banker billionaire Gerald Ford, who lives over there at 6601 Turtle Creek in the Honeypot of Highland Park, would be all so eager to showcase what lurks below the Ford household: an orgasmic 25,000-square-foot Turkish bath with a 12-person cedar sauna, an immsersion pool, a deluxe wine room, and a home theater. Right there on Turtle Creek!

“It’s not really a pool to jump in and do laps, it’s a pool to relax and hang out in,” Kelli Ford told HGTV, who featured the fancy basement on a recent episode of Million Dollar Rooms.

We totally get it. Not only is the 2,000-square-foot Turkish bath space inspired by the Roman Pool at the Hearst Castle in California, one of my very fave pools in the world, it has walls covered in custom-made blue and gold tile mosaics that Ford created with her cute sister and designing partner Kristen Fitzgibbons. Texas limestone covers the floors and runs up columns in the room. Intricate chandeliers were made to Ford’s specifications in Syria. In case you are wondering how they change those chandelier lightbulbs without getting wet or electrocuted, waterproof ladders were designed to be placed in the pool to change out the bulbs.

The Ford home is a 25,791 square foot solid masonry manse built in 2006 with six bedrooms, 10 full and six half baths — perfectly conforming to my ratios of two baths plus for every bedroom – three stories, an elevator or two, and gorgeous design.

So why spill the beans now? Surely there’s no contest to keep up with Richard Malouf and his 30,000 square foot mansion with soon-to-be water park behind it on Strait Lane. Anything to do with photographer Kelly Kleins’ new book POOLS: REFLECTIONS? Or are the Fords about to put their home on the market … by chance? I doubt it, but if they did, this one would sure break all sales records in Dallas.