Think of all the simply millions of people who, tired of their cramped, shabby quarters, dream of living in an expensive luxury house, only to discover that they already are.
The dizzying upward zoom of American real estate values is now a most familiar syndrome. My charming Chicago friend Marvelous Carolyn of Clark Street was lamenting to me the other day that townhouse pieds a terre in not- all-that-chic reaches of the not-so-Near North Side are now fetching prices of $400,000 to $500,000.
I shared her dismay, but with some bemusement. Similar townhouses similarly situated in Washington, D.C., are now selling for $1 million or more. My own circumspect abode in Washington`s Virginia suburbs has not only doubled in value in the last four years, but is now worth precisely twice what school counselors told us we would likely earn in OUR ENTIRE WORKING LIVES back when I went to college.
In New York, of course, a mere million has become a fairly standard base price for the most modest of apartments. In some areas of the Fun Apple`s ultrachic Upper East Side, you can expect to pay a million per bedroom (and many millions more if you furnish the bedroom with one of those flashy Second Wives now so de rigueur in Nouvelle Society). But whether in trendy Chicago, verdant Virginia or gold-plated Gotham, it`s only the real estate values that succumb to madness. The real estate itself stays largely the same.
River House is still River House, don`t you know; Gloria Vanderbilt still can`t get in and neighbors are so wonderfully glad that John and (former Chicago stewardess) Susan Gutfreund have moved out. Even the newest high-rises much resemble the old. Some even have gargoyles.
The walls have eras
The Nouveaux Riches certainly can show they`ve arrived by moving into the buildings that already harbor Jackie O. and Brooke Astor, but if they wish to make a personal real estate statement beyond that (”Look Ma, I`m Rich!”)
they must confine themselves to leathering their walls or cramming their dens with Delacroix (”Look Ma, A Dellycroycks!”).
Here in La-La Land, however-especially in the appallingly pastel reaches one sees driving along that Yellow Brick Road called Sunset Boulevard up into the demented fantasyland of Bel-Air-there is no such circumspection and restraint. Not since Atilla the Hun reached Paris at the beginning of the 5th Century has so much money and so much bad taste been concentrated in the hands of people so fiendishly, devouringly hungry for real estate.
So desperate are the movie millionaires for personal statements that there is now immense dissatisfaction with the grand, ghastly grotesques that already dot (dot?) the landscape. People with something to say about themselves want far grander, more ghastly grotesques.
Los Angeles has entered the era of the ”knockdown”-and let me make it excruciatingly clear that the term has absolutely nothing to do with price. People are buying up perfectly comfortable $5 million, $6 million and $7 million properties simply for the addresses, then demolishing the perfectly serviceable 20-room houses on them to put up something that more adequately expresses what the new owners are all about.
Chateau-my-gosh
Certainly the most egregious example of the knockdown fad involves schlock TV series mogul Aaron Spelling and his jangly wife Candy (if the Brazilian national debt were jewelry, she`d wear it). They bought up the perfectly lovely $5 million Bing Crosby place, smashed it into little pieces and on its site are erecting a 56,000-square-foot, $52 million manor house that is enabling Candy to say, ”Finally, I`m going to get the `Gone With the Wind` double staircase I`ve always wanted.” The poor dear, having to do without for so long.
The Spellings have designed this extraordinary hulk to resemble a French chateau, but as L.A. Magazine recently noted, it more resembles one of the tackier Marriott Hotels-if not one of the attractions at Busch Gardens.
If this seems beyond your comprehension, bear in mind that La-La Land has achieved a state of exhibitionist dementia in which people are more than willing to pay $2,000 to have their automotive personal statements washed, waxed, polished and ”ultra-detailed” at Bill Larzelere`s car wash to the stars. (To be sure, he counts few Hyundai owners among his clients. They`d have to leave their cars there as payment for his bill.)
Pity poor Nancy Reagan. Chere Nancy came back from Washington to a Bel-Air St. Cloud Drive address that showed that she and Ron had finally arrived among the people they`d long admired most-only to realize that the three-bedroom, $2.5 million, 7,000-square-foot rambler their rich friends acquired for them is a mere dwarf. Their nearest neighbor, a sports promoter, occupies a four-story, $20 million Frenchesque chateau. Chere Nancy`s ranch-style rambler (and, my, how she hates that term) has no staircase at all, let alone a ”Gone With the Wind” one.
Talk to me, baby
But Hollywood`s glitzoids are not depending on mere gargantuan bulk and hulk to thrill their neighbors. There`s a new move to fantastically gadgetized houses.
Santa Monica builder Dennis Michael Nouri has a house that`s also a mere 7,500 square feet in size, BUT IT`S ENTIRELY VOICE-ACTUATED! He can dial the telephone, turn on and off lights and summon the police, just by talking to his house!
Where will it all end? The huge, Spellingesque, 100-room-plus mansions of all those 19th Century robber barons at Newport and elsewhere have all been turned into nunneries or museums or have been demolished to make room for tacky condos. The Spellingesque palaces of the Bourbons and Romanoffs are still standing, though the Bourbons and Romanoffs decidedly are not.
The way network television is declining, Aaron and Candy may well end up having to convert their place into a hotel.
As for the gadgetized houses, I can only think of the movie ”2001: A Space Oddysey” and fear for their owners. If things go wrong in super-automated, voice-actuated houses the way they do in my non-verbal one, I would not be surprised to hear of a homeowner who got into an argument with his house and ended up devoured by his own microwave. –
