Million-Dollar "Birthday Cakes"

By NANCY GIBBS

For the privilege of demolishing Bing Crosby's vintage Holmby Hills mansion, television producer Aaron Spelling paid $10.25 million in cash. The bowling- alley-equipped, stadium-size French manor Spelling is building in its place will cost him about $30 million more. Just to the east, in Beverly Hills, a Japanese surgeon has dismantled Ronald Reagan's former bungalow, donated the pieces to charity and erected a Moroccan palace with five domes, an art gallery, ten baths and two reflecting pools. "We would have liked larger reflecting pools, like the Taj Mahal," explains general contractor David Conrad, whose desk is a marble slab that was once Reagan's shower, "but the street got in the way."

In the platinum ZIP codes of Holmby Hills, Bel Air and Beverly Hills, the noise of wretched excess is everywhere. "Teardowns" are transforming the shape of some of the most voluptuous real estate in the U.S. Down tree-lined boulevards, the murmur of nannies cooing into baby carriages and gardeners snipping the gardenias is drowned out by earthmoving, sawing, hammering, and the cursing of drivers trying to park beside a line of lunch wagons, cement mixers and Porta Pottis. To date, hundreds of older homes in the area have been destroyed for the simple reason that the original "dungalows" were worth so much less than the land underneath them. Palatial homes whose scale is limited only by the owners' taste and imagination are rising in their place. Typically, the latter far exceeds the former.

Of course, not everyone who buys a dwelling in the gilded neighborhoods of Los Angeles means to reduce it to rubble and build from scratch. But even those well-intentioned souls who hope to expand or restore an old house find that remodeling can be much more expensive than wrecking it and starting over. Anyway, in most cases the existing homes bear no resemblance to the sugarplums dancing in many Hollywood heads. Many of the mansions under construction, ornate stone boxes known among architects as "birthday cakes," average roughly 10,000 sq. ft.; the typical American home is 2,000 sq. ft. Among the popular features are recording studios, tanning parlors, servants' quarters, double kitchens (one for catering) and motorized chandeliers. Outside, there are polo fields, putting greens, petting zoos, heliports, waterfalls and, in the case of one father of young children, a miniature railroad circling the house.

Such follies can cost homeowners roughly $400 to $500 a sq. ft., plus an estimated $3 million an acre for the land. "Landscaping can be millions of dollars," says Beverly Hills real estate broker Bruce Nelson, who turned over roughly $100 million in land and houses last year. "You can spend half a million on a chandelier without batting an eye."

Well, not everyone can. In addition to show-business types, many of the buyers are youthful entrepreneurs who started out in their garages and now control high-tech companies worth tens of millions of dollars. The rest of the money comes from overseas. "I've sold houses to the royal family of Saudi Arabia," says Nelson, who glides around town in a yellow Rolls-Royce Corniche. "Also to the emissary for the Sultan of Brunei, two crown princes in Europe and three Japanese billionaires whose names I can't pronounce." Many foreign buyers are looking for a stable investment, since California seems an unlikely candidate for revolution, and, to the Japanese especially, the land seems cheap compared with Tokyo.

Many residents mourn the passing of historic homes like Crosby's. Among the homes that have vanished or will soon vanish are those that once belonged to Ray Milland, Jeanette MacDonald, James Coburn and Jack Benny. "We're losing a great deal as a culture," says Alan Bergman of the Los Angeles-based Victorian Register, a real estate agency that specializes in vintage homes. "We're losing our heritage, the tolerance for things that are different."

Others are beside themselves about what is being built in their place. "They're garbage," says architect Kevin Cozen. "These houses look like somebody stood there with a bag of frosting and just splattered it wherever they felt like it." The effect, not surprisingly, is that of a stage set. "I think the Spelling house is a joke," Cozen adds. "It's not a French manor. This is America in 1989. Someone like Aaron Spelling should be helping humanity by having people design things that will move the culture forward."

But sentimentality will not halt the teardown trend. "Not in this town," snorts broker Elaine Young. "Not when you can make $2 million or $3 million." Nor is community spirit likely to prevail. "I like privacy," says one Beverly Hills homeowner, holding his mobile phone and surveying his 30,000-sq.-ft. mansion. "I hear that the people who live down the road are getting a divorce," he advises broker Nelson. "You should look into it. I'll buy it and tear it down. I don't like having a house there."

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles