In the first chapter, Nick Carraway, the narrator, says that West Egg is the "less fashionable" of the two, while East Egg is populated with "white palaces [that] glittered" on the water. Nick describes Gatsby's mansion, a "colossal affair" that attempts to imitate a fancy French hotel with its tower, ivy, marble swimming pool, and massive lawn. It sounds a bit gauche compared to the home of the Buchanans. Tom and Daisy's home is "a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay." Gatsby's home is constructed to look like something it is not, just as the man himself has been. Tom and Daisy's home doesn't have to prove anything to anyone because its owners don't have to either. Further, descriptions of Tom's family as "enormously wealthy" and his "string of polo ponies" that he brought with him help to make it clear that East Egg is populated by families which possess old money, the kind of money that one inherits and for which one does not work. Gatsby has new money, money that has had to be earned and which is, therefore, less valuable in terms of status.
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