On Revuelta Way

If there were ever a brick-and-mortar example of the dictum that money can't buy taste—well, not good taste—it's this newly listed mansion in lower Bel-Air, which has nearly 26,000 square feet of living space, almost all of it absolutely atrocious.

"The encrusted style" exemplified.

The living room is furnished with seating in what I like to call "the encrusted style"—a perversion of design in which every surface writhes with vermicelli-inspired curlicues and nightmarish arabesques, all of it misproportioned and slathered with a surfeit of gold leaf that would make Midas retch.

Louie the Whoie?

The seating is arranged not for conversation but for staring at one another—or perhaps for a belly-dancing exhibition.

Meanwhile, in the dining room, things are scarcely less gaud-awful.

Seats 50 oil sheiks for dinner.

"More is more."

The sickly icing on this nauseating cake is the pompous master bedroom, which has all the intimacy of Vegas casino, complete with with three hi-def TV screens.


This pile of pretense can be yours for a cool $23.9 million. Any takers?

"I'll take it!"

Crime of the Week

Behold what three-quarters of a million dollars will get you off Laurel Canyon.

2222 Ridgemont Drive.

I should say "off upper Laurel Canyon," lest we forget in which tony neighborhood we are trespassing in search of the exquisitely hideous.

Exuding all the warmth and charm of a Tulsa trailer park, this battleship-gray beauty is listed at $749,000.

Happy weekend.

Bold and Beautiful on Carolwood Drive

The January 2011 issue of Architectural Digest is out—the first edited by Margaret Russell—and it's a keeper.

The issue is getting lots of huzzahs on Curbed National, among other places, for Russell's fresh vision for what had become a terminally ossified design publication.

One of the feature stories is on a George Washington Smith–designed house (with sensitive additions by architect and G. W. Smith scholar Marc Appleton) on Carolwood Drive—the same one featured on the cover of real estate agent Jeffrey Hyland's book, The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills.

391 Carolwood Drive, Holmby Hills (photo copyright Appleton Architects).

Although the owners are unidentified in the AD story, it doesn't take Charlie Chan to snoop out that the house is owned by Bradley and Colleen Bell. Bradley Bell was the creator, with his father, William J. Bell, of the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, and also wrote many of the episodes himself. According to Wikipedia, it's "the most-watched soap in the world." In the Czech Republic, it's simply called Fabulous and Rich. Enough said?

While Hyland's book doesn't dwell on the interiors of this house, the Architectural Digest story, written by Joseph Giovannini and beautifully photographed by Erhard Pfeiffer, does. I noticed that the walls of the garden room—like the others, designed by the always inspiring Windsor Smith—are covered with silver wallpaper decorated with gouache murals by artist Scott Waterman.

Murals by Scott Waterman.

I've been a fan of Waterman's work since discovering it via the Mrs. Blandings blog several weeks ago. A couple of examples:




Waterman also does fine art, as in these examples:

Images courtesy of ScottWaterman.com.

As if that's not enough, it also turns out that the artist is an accomplished blogger whose blog, Corbu's Cave, I had visited several times previously without making the connection.

It's a small, circular world, full of wonderment.

Crime of the Week

Some disasters can't be blamed on the Bauhaus.

9824 Yoakum Drive, Beverly Hills.

This ungainly shack in nosebleed Beverly Hills was built in 1923, during Modernism's heyday, but it's about as far from Dessau as it gets.

Perhaps John Barrymore had his handyman cobble the place together as a hunting boozing lodge, as it sits in what was, at the time, a very remote area. It certainly seems better suited to weekends of heavy binging with your pals than to day-to-day living.

An "open" plan.

The interior is no less a mess than the exterior. A spiral staircase leads down to a featureless (and, from what I can tell, windowless) basement room—I'm thinking orgy parlor. A sliding vertical ladder allows access to the loft; sleepwalkers need not apply.

The rear hindquarters.

The rear is a hodgepodge of stucco, shingles and clapboard, with all the backyard charm of a well-maintained favela.

Should you care to indulge your prurient interest further, the listing is here.

A little remodel in Pasadena

This two-bedroom on Madia Street in Pasadena's Linda Vista neighborhood has just hit the listings at an optimistic $829,000.

1204 Madia Street, Pasadena

This little charmer is nothing if not cute and seems to be well laid-out in its plan, but I couldn't resist making it a bit . . . well, less ordinary.

1204 Madia Street, Pasadena (concept)

Funny how a remodel can make the spirit—and the sky—more rosy.

A jazz legacy in Beverly Hills

The Ella Fitzgerald estate on North Whitter Drive has just been listed at $14.995 million.

908 N. Whittier Drive, Beverly Hills.

Expect higher quality photos of the 5-bedroom 1929 Spanish revival house when the agent, Westside Estate Agency, adds the listing to its website.





After spending an afternoon in the backyard listening to birds, the First Lady of Jazz passed away here on June 15, 1996, at the age of 78.

Crime of the Week

Let me tell you about the nouveaux riches. They are different from you and me.

811 N. Linden Drive, Beverly Hills

I've driven by this 1988 "Tuscan-style" house in Beverly Hills many times and, admittedly, admired its commanding situation, on the raised triangular intersection of Linden and Whittier Drives.

Commanding position: the knoll at Linden and Whittier Drives.

But now that it's on the market (for $6.495 million—the listing is here), I've had a chance to see how its affluent owners (or tenants?) have been living. It's not pretty.

For starters, the entry hall is a crude, disproportionate affair that, with its tawdry furnishings, immediately sets an amateur, DIY tone and makes me suspect that the owners designed the place themselves with no input from a trained architect, much less any real knowledge of architectural precedent.

The carpeted staircase is fit for a suburban townhouse condo, and the cheap white glazed tile continues throughout major sections of the ground floor.

Drama-less DIY.

The downstairs space is confusingly laid out and contains rooms of dubious utility, not to mention appalling ugliness.

Bookless library? Knick-knack storage area? Stand-by-the-fireplace room?

Sooner or later, we run into this mysterious timber-ceilinged lair, the purpose of which can only be to further vex and annoy anyone with a love of architecture or interior design:

Office? Art studio? Torture chamber?

Continuing upstairs, the master bedroom is a vacant, ill-proportioned shell of a room with oppressively high ceilings made worse by the lack of crown molding—perhaps the most uncozy sleeping quarters I've ever seen. (I will spare you the several children's chambers.)

Wha happunnn?

And the façade, for all its imposing symmetry, is hardly more than an anemic affectation of a Tuscan villa.

Villa Pretensiosa.

The world of Tony Ashai

This current listing on Redfin introduced me to an architect I didn't know before.

11025 Anzio Road, Bel-Air.

A proper motor court, minus the Bentley.

The 19,000-square-foot Palladian-style villa, at 11025 Anzio Road in Bel-Air, is new . . . so new, in fact, that it was nothing but a construction site on the last Google Earth flyover.

The site before construction began.

But more fascinating that the impressive house (of which, let's face it, there are scads in L.A.), is the architect himself.

Thinking big: Tony Ashai.

Tony Ashai left his native Kashmir at the age of 16 to study at that unlikely outpost of Le Corbusian modernism, the Chandigarh College of Architecture in northern India. He moved to the U.S. after graduation.

In a Schwab's-drugstore-meets-Frank-Lloyd-Wright scenario, the wunderkind was "discovered" drawing a monument in downtown Buffalo, NY, by the dead of the architecture school at SUNY, who arranged a scholarship for Ashai in university's program.

M.A. in hand, Ashai decamped to New York City to work with James Barclay on the renovation of the Chrysler Building. In 1989, Ashai migrated to Southern California and joined the firm of Edward Carson Beall. Ashai opened his own firm in 1993.

Although he lives in Southern California and has an office in Torrance, Ashai seems to spend most of his time these days developing extravagant projects in the United Arab Emirates from his office in Dubai. How many of these dreams will actually be built depends on factors beyond any architect's control. But you can't blame a guy for dreaming, can you?

Ashai Towers, Jumireh Village, Dubai

This YouTube video (one of several available) shows something of Ashai's energy and visionary mindset.




I can't say I love the house on Anzio Road, especially with those dinky ridge-toppers right behind peering down on it. But, from what I know now of Tony Ashai, I do admire the man.

1920s clearance in San Marino?

Is it just me, or do there seem to be a lot of 1920s houses on the market in San Marino?

1808 St. Albans (1925, $2.375 million)

635 Winston Avenue (1930, $1.98 million, sale pending)

1740 Ramiro Road (1928, $2.19 million)

1760 Ramiro Road (1928, $2.15 million)

556 S. Berkeley (1928, $1,995 million)

I'm not sure what the comps are, but compared to the Palisades Riviera, for example, you seem to get a lot for your money here—not only space but history.

Oranges and pomegranates in Beverly Hills

Stewart and Lynda Resnick are improving their splendid and historic estate at 9481 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

9481 Sunset Boulevard from the air.

Among other details, the project involved buying the two lots adjacent to their 1929 Beaux Arts mansion (already a done deal) and installing an extensive grove of mature orange trees as well as moving the entry gates. Landscape architect Mark Rios, partner at Rios Clementi Hale Studios and A. C. Martin Visiting Professor in Architectural Design at USC, is in charge of the landscaping.

The 16,000-plus-square-foot mansion, which looks a full generation older than its official 1928 date and could be by McKim, Mead and White, was designed by architect Francis Xavier Lourdou* for Dionicio Botiller and his wife, Francisca Bernard Botiller. Francisca was the daughter of Swiss immigrant businessman Jean Bernard and Susana Machado de Bernard (as a widow, Susana built the mansion at 845 South Lake Street in the West Adams district); Dionicio was a land-owner and (later) tax collector for Beverly Hills, according to his great-great-granddaughter. (I'm still piecing together the history of this estate, so any further info would be appreciated.)

The Resnick mansion with two adjacent properties, now part of the estate.

The Resnicks recently petitioned the Beverly Hills Planning Commission for a variance that would allow them to fence the entire property with new above-code (i.e. over six-foot) fencing replicating the existing historic fence, and to bring the new fence up to the property line instead of conforming to the mandated 36-inch setback.

The original fence will be replicated and extended across the entire streetfront.

The existing 17-foot gate posts will be removed to either end of the new, expanded estate, which measures a whopping 535 feet of prime Sunset Boulevard streetfront, and will be offset into the property to allow for "stacking" of automobiles entering and leaving the property so as not to block traffic. Happily, the house will remain open to view from the street, unlike so many foliage-shrouded Beverly Hills mansions.

New west-side driveway already poured.

The variance was granted by a thrilling 3-to-1 vote (some watch college football; I watch Planning Commission hearings). The complete blow-by-blow of the November 19 session includes an appearance by the formidable and forthright Lynda Resnick (allow time to load; it's item no. 3 on the agenda).

East-side driveway under construction.

So, you're may be asking, where did the money come from?

West façade.

The Resnicks, through their holding company, Roll International, are owners of Telefora florist delivery service, the Franklin Mint, Neptune Pacific shipping line, Fiji Water, and POM pomegranate juice, among other business interests. (See this interesting story on POM from The Guardian.)



Stewart Resnick, who worked his way through UCLA by washing windows, also owns major tracts of corporate farmland in California's Central Valley, including pistachios, almonds, lemons, oranges, and—of course—pomegranates.

The couple, near billionaires who have a liberal bent in both politics and charity, have donated tens of millions to philanthropic causes, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the Renzo Piano–designed Resnick Pavilion) and funds for a psychiatric hospital at UCLA and an energy institute at Cal Tech. Lynda is an occasional blogger on The Huffington Post.

A glimpse of elegance in the orange grove.

I have been in love with this house since I first saw it, 15 years ago. I would be quite content living in the stylish penthouse with its chic black awnings.

Best little penthouse in Beverly Hills.

*Not François Debeur-Voideau as originally reported.