One of the mysteries of the Internet bust was: where did all that money go? If an $800 million company was worth only $50 million the next month, was there any accounting for the lost $750mm? Surely somewhere there was a G. Gordon Liddy sprawled on a saggy hotel bed, covered with dollars, kruggerands, and Flooz.

The truth is, most value simply vanished as the quaint smelling salts of earnings, transparency and viability wafted under the market’s coke-ravaged nose.

But there were a few clever souls who supplied the pickaxes and jeans to the 20th-century 49ers. Instead of Levi Strauss, this time it was the likes of Graham Kos, who gladly took all that fancy VC money from all those viral, paradigm-shifting startups in exchange for dull old real estate South of Market in San Francisco. Kos had the instinct and foresight to pick up the parcels before The Internet Changed Everything (as the powerpoint told us it would).

After the dust settled, Kos put his new fortune to work, snapping up luxury homes and turning them over to his interior-decorator wife, Shay.

The resulting collection comprises Solstice, an ultra-exclusive club limited to 42 members across five residences worth $4-6 million each, and a yacht. Locations include Cabo, Telluride, Paris, St. Barts, Napa. Additional residences are forthcoming, with Tuscany/Florence and Aspen on deck for early this year.

Our initial impression is that these are indeed unique and impressive homes, and if Kos can stick to the 42-member number, the member/property ratio is an attractive one.

Pricing is unclear—the beautiful and annoying Solstice website offers contradictory information in the linked reviews (see below). We’ve reached out to the club’s management to get some concrete answers on pricing and other terms, and we’ll provide updates here.

One essential criteria we check on all clubs is is the strength of the underlying business. With so many new clubs emerging, it’s often difficult to distinguish the fine-tuned machines from the full-throttle aspirants. Our discussion includes key parameters on the strength of their balance sheets, their ability to aborb redemptions/refunds, and their sensitivity to volatility in real estate values. The answers aren’t obvious, and they get little mention in the gorgeous brochures. Nonetheless, these are valid questions for an emerging industry, where so many operators - like Kos - hope to translate their success in other fields to this new model of hospitality.

Look for more detail on Solstice and all the clubs in our upcoming comprehensive report.

Image from http://www.lifestyled.com/.