Hermès heir isn't the only one with unconventional inheritance choice

The owner of an $11 billion fashion fortune says he plans to adopt his 51-year-old gardener and make him the official heir to a portion of his riches from the Hermès dynasty, multiple outlets reported, adding Nicolas Puech to a list of the extremely wealthy making surprising decisions about where to bequeath their fortunes.

Puech, who does not have a spouse or children, plans to leave roughly half of his immense wealth and real estate portfolio to his gardener and his family, according to Swiss publication Tribune de Genève, a move that comes amid a reported rift over business decisions within the family.

Worth an estimated $11.5 billion, Puech reportedly plans to leave his gardener half of his wealth and has already given him a property in Morocco and a villa in Switzerland, worth a combined total of almost $6 million.

The move is rare for legacy wealth families—Puech is a fifth-generation heir of Thierry Hermès, who founded the luxury fashion house in 1837—but unique inheritance arrangements aren’t unheard of, even among the ultra-rich.

Who else did something similar?

In 2007, a man of noble Portuguese lineage named Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral de Camara reportedly left his bank accounts, 12-room apartment in Lisbon, house in Portugal, luxury car and two motorcycles to a group of 70 people whose names he randomly plucked from a phone book more than a decade ahead of his death.

A Canadian lawyer in the 1920s left a significant portion of his healthy estate to a trust that would be liquidated 10 years after his death and given to a Toronto woman who managed to birth the most children between 1926 and 1936—four mothers ultimately benefited from the scheme dubbed the "Great Stork Derby." Each received $110,000 (the equivalent of about $2.4 million today).

Now known as the "Dogeville Hermit,” a Wisconsin man named Archibald McArthur left just $5 each to his family members when he died in the early 1900s and left the rest of his money (about $3 million today) to a man he once befriended on a park bench.

One of the wealthiest men in Michigan did pass on his estate to his family, but not until a century after he died—Wellington Burt included a provision in the will for his $110 million fortune that didn't allow it to pass on until 21 years after the death of his last surviving grandchild, and 12 people inherited the money in 2010.

Earlier this year, a secret multimillionaire in New Hampshire decided to leave all of his wealth — $3.8 million — to the town he'd lived in for decades.