Space, the final frontier

Attention, status seekers. Now that you have settled into your 42-room dream house, filled it with museum-quality 18th century French antiques and surrounded it with several million dollars’ worth of shrubbery, we regret to inform you that you do not live in the manner of very important, successful people. Not unless your house sits in its own park.

It has come to this: The amount of floor space in a top-of-the-heap Bel-Air mansion is roughly equivalent to that of a supermarket.

But as the dimensions of private homes in some parts of the city have grown -- from 8,000 to 20,000 to 30,000 and even 40,000 square feet -- the lots on which they sit haven’t gotten any bigger. In the flats of Beverly Hills and north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, where 5,000-square-foot starter castles occupy lots meant for much smaller homes, people can lean out their windows and chat with neighbors, as their grandparents living in big-city tenements perhaps did. Space, not within vast closets or indoor bowling alleys but around sprawling houses, might be the last great luxury.

So, what to do when your $15-million chateau feels cramped on its two-acre lot? Buy the house next door and tear it down. Buying real estate used to be the last refuge of the colorless and risk-averse. As investors watch the stock market hemorrhage and solvency trumps a sexy financial image, land again looks like a smart buy.

Many homeowners fantasize about being able to choose their neighbors, or keep strangers at a distance from their havens. Increasingly, real estate agents say, those who can, do.

Last month, Michelle Pfeiffer and her writer-producer husband, David E. Kelley, did it on a beautiful Brentwood street. Last year, Nicolas Cage did it in Bel-Air. Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas improved the view from the library of their Hancock Park hacienda by razing the house next door.

Hollywood stars aren’t the only homeowners with a sense of manifest destiny. The former Walt Disney estate in Holmby Hills has become the domain of a Mexican businessman, who bought the house next door too. “It was a good financial opportunity,” says the owner, who requested anonymity. “Owning that lot improves my property.” Writer Stephen Bing, who would have been a relatively anonymous real estate heir had he not fathered a child with Elizabeth Hurley, paid $15 million recently for neighbor Red Buttons’ house in Bel-Air. Bing will demolish it, real estate sources say, to have more land around his home.

Since he bought Frank Lloyd Wright’s La Miniatura five years ago, David Zander, the managing partner of a music video and commercial production company, has worked to restore the Pasadena concrete-block masterpiece. “I’d like to buy the house that adjoins my lawn to try to add more privacy, more nature, more greenery,” he says, “but my neighbor has told me he intends to stay there the rest of his life, and I don’t blame him. If that lot were available, I’d be all over it. My property borders two others as well. I’m going to do my best to pick them all up if I can afford to.”

In the most desirable parts of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood and Santa Monica, the price of land -- $150 per square foot -- is higher than in Beverly Hills, where lots are typically bigger and the cost of dirt is closer to $125 a square foot. “Everyone would like to have more land,” says Isabelle Mizrahi, a Santa Monica real estate agent. “I’d say 10% of the people I work with ask if I’ll talk to their neighbors, to see if they’d be interested in selling.”

Price tag for privacy

Buying the house next door is the L.A. equivalent of a Manhattanite purchasing an adjacent apartment to expand. Yet land offers more possibilities, both practical and psychological. It provides room to grow, to put up a guesthouse or add a home office. “Everyone in this area wants big, beautiful kitchens full of professional equipment, even if all they do in them is dial for takeout,” Mizrahi says.

More land equals greater privacy. Julia Roberts recently bought a house in a densely populated area of Venice but gained seclusion by buying the lot next door. Buying contiguous lots gives owners the chance to create private compounds. The late cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and his wife acquired three homes around their house in Brentwood in the ‘50s. First, they wanted to build a tennis court. When a neighbor complained about the court’s lights, they bought his house too. Jacqueline Piatigorsky, now in her 90s, still lives on the property.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver have created a compound for their family on a private street in Pacific Palisades, where they own four houses. One has been converted into a guesthouse and gym, and the original main house has been demolished and is being rebuilt.

Even if an owner becomes only a temporary custodian of a house or lot, the purchase buys power. Being able to screen potential neighbors has great appeal to anyone who ever clashed with unpleasant ones. “I sold a house in Pacific Palisades to a movie star who lived on an adjacent property,” says Jo Wilder, who works for Coldwell Banker. “There was a common garden wall, and the buyer wanted to be able to control who would move in.” The cost of that privilege was $2.5 million.

British comedian John Cleese bought the house next to his beachfront Montecito home, then put it on the market last spring. The current asking price is $4.95 million. “I’m not just selling a house,” he says, “I’m buying a neighbor. I’m looking for a film director or maybe a scriptwriter -- someone who doesn’t have loud parties.”

Maintaining one’s view

THe desire to keep a tranquil panorama pristine burns bright among the house-proud. The owners of a cliff-side home in the Palisades bought a house just below theirs because its pitched roof marred their ocean view. They put a flat roof on the house, then leased it. Before putting the house next door up for sale, a Santa Monica Canyon dweller made a condition of purchase that no swimming pool would be put in, and no windows could be installed on the side of the house adjacent to hers.

L.A. isn’t the only place where a yen for perfection can increase the cost of shelter. Texan Kit Goldsberry took some of the fortune he made from Pace Picante Sauce and put it into a retreat nestled in a picturesque field known as Aspen Meadows. He watched a condominium project go up on a ridge overlooking his home. When the condos were less than half finished, he acquired them for $20 million and leveled them all.

“Even people with a lot of money have to be lucky,” says Crosby Doe, of Mossler, Deasy & Doe of Beverly Hills. Location may be everything, but timing counts too.

Suzanne and David Saperstein, who founded Metro Networks to provide traffic reports to radio stations, built a 45,000-square-foot limestone palace and 5,000-square-foot pool house in Holmby Hills on six contiguous lots acquired in the ‘90s. But the owner of a small, older home in the shadow of the house they named Fleur de Lys wouldn’t sell to the Houston immigrants. “I’m sure that one day Mr. Saperstein, or whoever buys that property, will acquire the house that’s surrounded by his estate,” says Loren Judd of Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills. “Does he need that extra land? No. Will he buy it if becomes available? Sure.”

In prime areas like Bel-Air, where imposing stone walls separate the more important estates, it would seem that homeowners have enough privacy and space without buying the house next door. But one definition of a privileged existence is one in which one’s wants become needs. Media magnate Jerry Perenchio has been gradually adding to the Bel-Air estate he bought in 1986 for $13.6 million. He bought the house next door the following year for $3 million, then the house on the other side for $3.6 million. With nearly 11 acres, he owns one of the largest properties in Los Angeles, but he’d like to add one more contiguous acre. It’s owned, however, by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, who aren’t selling.

The question of how much land is enough is plastic. When the developers of Beverly Park began selling lots in the gated subdivision above the Beverly Hills Hotel 15 years ago, the concept was to offer lots for mega-mansions. Five acres would be enough, they reasoned, even for a 25,000-square-foot house. Haim Saban, CEO of Fox Family Entertainment, built a home in Beverly Park on a lot he bought seven years ago. For a while, one lot was enough. Today, he owns two more.

More than just vanity

Although it would be easy to dismiss buying an extra lot or two as a game of one-upmanship among the wealthy, real estate agents warn that not buying available land adjacent to a big house can be a costly error. When the Buster Keaton estate in Beverly Hills was owned by actor James Mason and his wife, Pamela, in the 1950s, they sold off part of the generous driveway, and three houses were built on it. One became available recently, but the current estate owners didn’t grab it. The Keaton mansion is again for sale, but brokers say one reason the sellers are having difficulty making the $19.9-million deal is that prospective buyers complain about one of the houses on the old driveway that sits right next to the villa’s front gate.

A 35,000-square-foot main house, guesthouse, pool, spa and tennis court in Bel-Air has been on the market for six years. The $45-million property, built by philanthropist Iris Cantor and her late husband, Gerald, co-founder of Cantor Fitzgerald, sits on only 1.25 acres. In today’s market, a house with a more than passing resemblance to Buckingham Palace that sits on an ordinary suburban-sized lot is less desirable than it would be on a bigger piece of land.

“What makes the estates with land so valuable is they’re so rare,” says Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland in Beverly Hills. “There were great estates established here in the 1920s, but after the war, when property taxes were horrendous and it was hard to get help, owners and their heirs began selling off property. Now, people who can afford it are trying to bring the great estates back to what they were.”

In other words, some buyers satisfying their land lust claim that historic preservation is their goal. “In the 1920s, it wasn’t uncommon to find 30-, 80-, 100-acre estates,” says Doe, an architectural preservationist. “Early on, that defined the California lifestyle. Even modest people could walk out of their homes and have the privacy of open space. People with means will want to bring that back. It’s an attempt to regain paradise lost.”

Sometimes, acquiring more land can be a strike against mansionization. Michael Sant, a Venice-based architect, designed a house for a client with a lot in Santa Monica’s Rustic Canyon. When a contiguous lot became available, the client bought it. “We thought it would be nice to have a good-sized piece of land with a fairly modest building on it,” says Sant, “a 4,000-square-foot house on a double lot. The client wanted to make sure that the land and any structures on it stayed in balance. There’s always the fear of what someone might do next door. I could design a beautiful house, and one of these people with no sensitivity could come along and max out their site and build something that has no sense of proportion. That kind of thing could really ruin your day.”