L.A.’s love-hate relationship with flashy homes
From Millionaire’s Row in the 1900s to ‘The One’ today, city loves to gawk at and fight about real estate.
So you’re going to a dinner party, or a birthday fete. Once everyone has compared vaccination sagas, what’s the table talk? The weather, so perpetually pleasant, can’t carry you for 30 seconds.
You steer clear of religion and politics — especially politics, lest you wind up with full-throated, cross-table shouting matches.
So where, inevitably, does the conversation gravitate?
Real estate.
For almost 150 years, it’s been Angelenos’ universal Topic A. Buying it, selling it, looking at it, yearning over it — a pastime, a hobby and a preoccupation, and everyone has a story to tell. It’s a genre in reality TV. It was the founding impetus for our oncevast streetcar system, built at the outset not to carry people to where they wanted to go, but to where its real estate mogul-creator wanted them to go to buy his property.
To live in Southern California without owning the walls around you is to feel, however slightly, short-stinted, cheated of its illusive promise of even a modest house for people of modest dreams and means.
There are places in the country, in the state, where “million-dollar house” still sounds like a lotteryticket fever dream, but L.A. isn’t one of them. Today, what was once a working family’s dream home, like the two-bedroom houses in the planned postwar city of Lakewood, is now a “starter” house, priced at a lunatic $700,000 for under 900 square feet.
And what was in the 1950s and ’60s a stylish, upper-middle-class house in a beautiful banlieue like Pacific Palisades or Brentwood, a well-windowed, one-story place of three or four bedrooms, harmoniously set in a ramble of lawn, and maybe adorned with a swimming pool, is now sale-priced in the millions as a fixer-upper or a teardown.
We’ve been forced to work up a new vocabulary for grandiose new places: one is “McMansion.” It was dreamed up in the 1980s, the decade
of big hair, big shoulders and big movies, and it means any big, gaudy, prefab-looking house built practically lot line to lot line, topheavy on its modest footprint of land. It was not a term of admiration.
“Mega-mansion” distinguishes a place from the merely large, or from the upstart McMansion. It’s a place running above, oh, 12,000 or 15,000 square feet. In the past, a house that big would have been called an estate, because it would have been set amid grounds, plural, gardens, plural, and doubledigit acreage.
Estates were the “mega” of their day, when L.A. land was cheaper and more abundant, and people didn’t seem to need two bathrooms for every butt in residence.
The most famous estate west of the Potomac, with the maybeexception of Hearst Castle, was Pickfair, in Beverly Hills, the home of two of the most famous people in the world: silent-film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.
Save for its price and scale, the story arc of Pickfair’s life and death is typical L.A. Before World War I, it was a hunting lodge and land bought for $3,000. A year after the war, it was the $35,000 home of Hollywood’s First Couple, growing from half a dozen rooms to more than three dozen, and plural stables, servants’ rooms, tennis courts, garages. After Pickford died, in 1979, it sat unsold, too small and pokey for modern celebrities. Lakers owner Jerry Buss bought it and fixed it up; Pia Zadora and her husband bought it and knocked it down.
Beverly Hills was still a wilderness when Pasadena’s “Millionaires’
Row,” on wide, leafy Orange Grove Boulevard, was set with so many stately homes that in September 1914, at the request of august residents like Mrs. Montgomery Ward, Pasadena banned double-decker tour buses from making slow drive-bys.
Thirty years later, these showplaces were white elephants, and the heirs of those monarchs of industry were begging Pasadena to rezone the street for apartments.
We’ve been conditioned to think of L.A. real estate as endlessly more valuable. That’s fine if you’ve already got some, but if you’re trying to buy your first house, that seems like the “Through the Looking Glass” promise of jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today.
Long ago, though, Los Angeles had more land than takers. At one point in the 1860s, land around where MacArthur Park now stands was offered at a public sale for 25 cents an acre, and no one bought it — too far out of town.
The ease of new transcontinental train travel brought thousands of prospective Angelenos here. They were met at the train stations by salesmen flogging lots in what were sometimes to be found in phantom towns that didn’t exist and never would. Yet people bought and bought and bought, and in a matter of months, or weeks, an acre of land might go from $10 to $100 to 15 times that. In 1887, land sales transactions in L.A. County totaled $100 million.
After about 30 months, the bubble popped and the land values deflated. L.A.’s appetite for land paused for breath, but it wasn’t sated.
So we come to that third new vocabulary word: the “giga-mansion.” Because it turned out that there was something more mammoth than “mega.”
In the late 1980s, the building saga of TV mogul Aaron Spelling’s new 56,500-square-foot giga-mansion in Holmby Hills was followed like the soap opera it was. “Candy Land,” people called it, for Spelling’s wife’s name.
It represented everything that fascinated and repelled and attracted people about L.A. “People do not want to live in tight spaces,” developer Brian Adler told The Times back then. “There’s a real trend right now: ‘Give me room.’ ”
Yet on her “90210MG” podcast this year, the Spellings’ daughter, Tori, told listeners that “We literally as a family spent the time in the kitchen, my mom’s office that we all congregated in, and our bedrooms. And that was it.”
The place had a bowling alley, a doll museum room, a barber shop, and a gift-wrap room. Thereafter, it was as if the super-rich needed to find crazy stuff to spend their house-money on: a full-sized basketball court, aquarium walls, sunken tennis courts so the wind wouldn’t send a serve veering off the court, room-sized closets with windows to see colors in natural light. Elevators, waterfalls, mechanical bulls, tanning rooms, cigar rooms, rock-climbing walls. A helipad? Why not?
Prices rose, yes, but so did neighborhood momentum against these giant edifices jutting up in their midst.
Perhaps the most famous warrior in these fights was Oscarwinning actor Jack Lemmon. Of the 8,000 people in Beverly Hills who signed a petition in 1993 against the construction-site work and tree-cutting for a five-story, 18-bedroom, 46,000-square-foot house on Lemmon’s narrow, hairpin road (and that was its scaledback size), he was the most persistent.
Lemmon told The Times in 1993 about “fortresses stuck among the neighborhood.” He’d lived on the street for more than 30 years, in a 1936 house whose 6,000 square feet and cozy rooms and covered patios resembled a 1936 rich man’s idea of a big house, not a 1993 version.
Prices of these humongous houses didn’t creep up. They leaped. Real estate writers had hardly hit the “send” key on a story about “record price for a house” when some other sale could follow on to top it. The 2019 record price of $150 million that one of the Murdoch sons paid for the “Beverly Hillbillies” mansion in Beverly Hills was topped two years later for the $177 million that a venture capitalist forked over for a Malibu spread. The sale of one single mega-house easily topped the $100 million in total land sales recorded in L.A. County in 1887.
It’s impossible to write about these staggeringly absurd home prices without pointing out the unlovely truth that Los Angeles is also where tens of thousands of people have no home at all, and many thousands more strive like mad to keep theirs — all in one of the most ridiculously unaffordable cities in the world.
All right, then. Now, here is some guilt-free schadenfreude for you, instances when high-flyers have taken an Icarus nosedive.
“The Mountain,” 157 hilltop acres in Beverly Hills, bigger than the Los Angeles County Arboretum. Through many hands and debts, the property, once priced at a billion dollars, was sold in 2019 at a federal foreclosure auction in Pomona for a pocket-change $100,000 to the estate trust of a much earlier owner. (If you’re kicking yourself for not being there to bid, don’t — it came with $200 million in strings attached from debts owed to the same previous owner.)
“The One” is a massive BelAir spec house whose dream price shriveled from a half-billion-dollar ballyhoo to a $259-million asking price to last month’s bankruptcy auction bargain of $141 million. A fast-fashion mogul bought the 105,000-square-foot house, which is technically still a fixer-upper after almost 10 years of work.
This month, the man who built an ill-starred Bel-Air house the neighbors named, and not flatteringly, the “Starship Enterprise,” took a guillotine-sized haircut on 66 acres that he had priced at $130 million. They went for $35 million at a bankruptcy auction. Mohamed Hadid’s contumacious construction of the 30,000-square-foot house violated so many city building regs, like size and height, that in December 2019, a judge agreed with neighbors that it constituted a danger to the public and had to be torn down. The “Enterprise” was priced last year at $8.5 million but sold for $5 million to a development company that, per the judge’s order, is taking the place back to the ground.