LOS
ANGELES — At the end of a narrow, twisting side street not far from the
Hotel Bel-Air rises a knoll that until recently was largely covered
with scrub brush and Algerian ivy. Now the hilltop is sheared and
graded, girded by caissons sprouting exposed rebar. “They took 50- or
60,000 cubic yards of dirt out of the place,” said Fred Rosen, a
neighbor, glowering at the site from behind the wheel of his Cadillac
Escalade on a sunny October afternoon.
Mr.
Rosen, who used to run Ticketmaster, has lately devoted himself to the
homeowners alliance he helped form shortly after this construction
project was approved. When it is finished, a modern compound of glass
and steel will rise two stories, encompass several structures and span —
wait for it — some 90,000 square feet.
In an article titled “Here Comes L.A.'s Biggest Residence,” The Los Angeles
Business Journal announced in June that the house, conceived by Nile
Niami, a film producer turned developer, with an estimated sale price
“in the $150 million range,” will feature a cantilevered tennis court
and five swimming pools. “We’re talking 200 construction trucks a day,”
fumed Mr. Rosen. “Then multiply that by all the other giant projects.
More than a million cubic yards of this hillside have been taken out.
What happens when the next earthquake comes? How nuts is all this?”
By
“all this,” he means not just the house with five swimming pools but
the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in
the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles. Built for the most part on
spec, bestowed with names as assuming as their dimensions, these
behemoths are transforming once leafy and placid neighborhoods into
dusty enclaves carved by retaining walls and overrun by dirt haulers and
cement mixers. “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns
for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,”
Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say
hello to the gigamansion.
In
Mr. Rosen’s neighborhood, ground was recently broken on a 70,000- to
80,000-square-foot Mediterranean manse for a citizen of Qatar, while
Chateau des Fleurs, a 60,000-square-foot pile with a 40-car underground
garage, is nearing completion. Not long ago, Anthony Pritzker,
an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, built a boxy contemporary residence
for himself in Beverly Hills that covers just shy of 50,000 square
feet. And Mohamed Hadid, a prolific and high-profile developer (he has
appeared on “The Shahs of Sunset” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly
Hills”), is known for two palaces that measure 48,000 square feet each:
Le Palais in Beverly Hills, which has a swan pond and a Jacuzzi that
seats 20 people, and Le Belvédère in Bel Air, which features a Turkish
hammam and a ballroom for 250.
Why
are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they
can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have
the same fun in one half the size?” asked Jeffrey Hyland, a partner in
the Beverly Hills real estate firm Hilton & Hyland, who is
developing five 50,000-square-foot properties on the site of the old
Merv Griffin estate in Beverly Hills.
Le
Belvédère was reportedly purchased by an Indonesian buyer, and Le
Palais sold to a daughter of President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.
According to Mr. Hyland, the market for these Versailles knockoffs is
“flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people
who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global
wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is
still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the
best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at
$11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
Speculators
are tapping the demand, snapping up the best lots, bulldozing whatever
is on them and building not only domiciles but also West Coast
“lifestyles.” The particulars can seem a little puzzling to the
uninitiated. The very busy Mr. Niami (he also built the Winklevoss
twins’ perch above the Sunset Strip) constructed a 30,000-square-foot
Mediterranean-style house in Holmby Hills that locals have called the
Fendi Casa because it was filled with furniture and accessories from the
Italian fashion house.
The
residence also offered indoor and outdoor pools, commissioned artwork
by the graffiti artist Retna, and an operating room in the basement.
“It’s not like it’s set up to take out your gallbladder,” said Mark
David, a real estate columnist for Variety, who has toured the house.
“It’s for cosmetic procedures — fillers, dermabrasion, that kind of
thing.” The house sold, with all its furnishings, to an unidentified
Saudi buyer for $44 million.
A
relatively humble 23,000-square-foot modern spec house currently on the
market in Beverly Hills’s Trousdale Estates neighborhood has an
infinity pool with iPad-controlled fountains and a subterranean lounge
with floor-to-ceiling candy dispensers on one wall and mounted tequila
bottles and machine guns on another. The lounge opens onto a 16-vehicle
garage with a Bugatti Veyron revolving on a car turntable, just like at
the dealer’s. According to TMZ, Beyoncé and Jay Z looked at the property
twice. The asking price is $85 million, not including the Bugatti.
Mr.
Rosen is hardly alone in his objection to the disruptions created by
these pumped-up projects. Another house in Bel Air developed by Mr.
Hadid — a Palestinian
émigré with a flowing gray mane and a burnt sienna tan — is the scourge
of nearby residents. The 30,000-square-foot house, a modern, circular
colossus that has been nicknamed the Starship Enterprise by angry
neighbors, who include Leonard Nimoy, looms 67 feet above grade (the
height limit in Los Angeles is 36 feet). “He’s violated just about every
regulation that applies,” said Joseph Horacek, an entertainment lawyer
who lives directly below the home and has filed numerous appeals against
the project. Last month, the city revoked the developer’s permits.
Then
there’s the dream house of Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz
al-Saud. A Saudi Arabian prince and deputy foreign minister of his
country, Mr. Abdulaziz purchased a Spanish colonial residence in
Benedict Canyon from the movie producer Jon Peters, tore it down, and
submitted plans to build an 85,000-square-foot estate. Neighbors like
Michael Ovitz, a founder of the Creative Artists Agency, promptly
started a drive to stop him. (Mr. Ovitz — whose trophy house, a
contemporary villa cum art museum designed by Michael Maltzan, measures
28,000 square feet — was able to persuade the prince to downsize
slightly after pointing out that two of the structures he planned to
build looked down on his backyard.) The project remains under review by
the city.
Mr.
Ovitz calling out a neighbor for overbuilding is a little like Lady
Gaga accusing someone of overdressing. And some say that the pushback
against the prince stems less from construction concerns than from
ethnic enmity. “They don’t want a Saudi prince,” Mr. Abdulaziz’s lawyer,
Ben Reznik, told Vanity Fair, which devoted a column to the controversy.
In
a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is
hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is
accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern
home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect
of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for
Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen
cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed by the action-movie
director Michael Bay and replaced with a three-story 30,000-square-foot
dwelling with two master bedrooms and a movie-prop museum.
In
the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican
architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was
“remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house. “We’re losing a vast amount
of significant architecture and historical or contextual buildings in
our neighborhoods,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los
Angeles Conservancy.
As
the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values
soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping
up everywhere. (According to a recent account in The Los Angeles Times,
residents of McMansion-checkered North Beverly Grove have been
registering their disapproval by spray-painting construction fences and
festooning them with bags of dog feces.) City ordinances intended to
keep building sizes proportional to lot dimensions are riddled with
loopholes.
“We
weren’t even aware of how much development had been approved over the
counter,” said Mr. Koretz, who recently introduced measures to limit
exemptions, develop more proactive inspections and require environmental
review for homes over a certain size.
For
now, perhaps neighbors fed up with months of caisson drilling and acres
of green tarp should remember that things could be worse. In hilly
Trousdale Estates, out-of-control construction trucks killed two Los
Angeles police officers in eerily similar accidents this year. Another
truck in the same area struck two parked cars and flipped over, dumping
nine tons of hot asphalt onto the front lawn of Eric Kranzler, a talent
manager whose midcentury modern home was recently featured in Architectural Digest.
Such
incidents haunt Mr. Rosen, who said he gets several emails a day from
neighbors complaining about menacing trucks. Still, when it comes to the
largest residential building project in the city, he tries to maintain a
sense of humor. “I tell people we got upset about it because I didn’t
get the gift shop concession,” he said.
