Feeling flush: Golden toilet sells for millions

The golden bathroom throne is a fully functional toilet

How much pocket money would you need to save to buy a golden toilet? At £1 a week, you'd only need… about 178,000 years.

When one recently went up for auction, it sold for an eye-watering $12.1 million (£9.3m).

The spectacular loo is an artwork called America, created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who is famous for making surprising and sometimes cheeky sculptures. And yes, it's a toilet you can actually use.

Another, similar toilet first appeared at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, where more than 100,000 visitors queued for their turn on the shiny bathroom throne.

But the artwork loo became even more famous when the it was displayed at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire in 2019 and thieves stole it, wrenching it from its plumbing, and bundling it into an escape car.

The heist made headlines around the world, and two men have since been jailed.

Auctioneers Sotheby's said the buyer was a famous American brand, which was later revealed to be Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Luckily, that wasn't the only golden loo in existence. Sotheby's later revealed that the artist, Cattelan had actually created three golden toilets in 2016. A second version, weighing a massive 101.2kg of solid 18-carat gold, went up for auction in New York this week. And, in a world first, the starting bid was set by the exact price of its weight in gold - around $10 million. It received just one bid, but that was enough to sell it for a fortune.

At first the buyer stayed anonymous. Then Ripley's Believe It or Not! revealed themselves on Instagram, writing that they were "flush with excitement". Ripley's is an entertainment company known for museums full of strange and spectacular objects, from weird inventions to world records.

Now Ripley's say they are "exploring possibilities" for whether visitors might one day "take the ultimate golden seat", although "such an opportunity requires serious planning and someone brave enough to ensure everything keeps flowing in the right direction".