The Big-Box Battle of Beverly Hills

Hamid Omrani drives up and down the southern residential streets of Beverly Hills, stopping to point out the homes he has built. His dusty Ford Explorer barely kicks into gear before he’s stopping again. On some streets he can lay claim to two or three houses per block.

The Iranian-born builder--he studied architecture and urban planning in Tehran but is not a licensed architect--parks on Foothill Road just south of Burton Way. The cream-colored two-story home on his right is much like dozens of others in the neighborhood. Its 4,500 square feet dominate its 7,500-square-foot lot, and the result is a looming vault of stucco and glass adorned by four hulking cement columns. It has all the grace of a Humvee in a wedding dress.

Twenty years ago this imposing house would have seemed out of place on a lot of its size, but today most of the homes on that block are of similar scale and design. What looks out of place now is the charming one-story Spanish-style house that remains across the street, a relic from the neighborhood’s original pre-World War II housing stock. With no established architectural style to describe them, houses such as the ones Omrani builds are derisively known in Beverly Hills as “Persian Palaces” because they are particularly popular among the Iranian-born families who make up an estimated 6,000 or more of the city’s 34,000 residents (and nearly all of Omrani’s clientele). It’s a stereotype, to be sure, but Omrani embraces the term with enthusiastic pride.

“I believe everyone has the right to have his own palace,” he says. “If you can’t afford a big palace, so we build you a smaller one.”

This particular Foothill Road palace has a flat roof, two second-floor balconies with glass French doors and 13 tall windows, most of them covered from the inside by pleated paper shades. The oversized entry doors are glass, embellished by ornate swirling brown metalwork. Thanks in part to Omrani’s coaxing, many Persians have come to consider massive concrete columns a symbol of wealth. The builder says his clients pay $1,000 to $2,000 per column, depending on their size and the amount of detail involved. This particular home has four two-story columns flanking the facade, and two more supporting a carport above the city-required driveway on the right-hand side of the house--the only feature that prevents the building from being symmetrical. The front yard features two anemic miniature palm trees and a black wrought iron gate, which is a different color and style from the metalwork on the entrance.

Inside, the five-bedroom, 5 1/2-bath house has the cavernous feel of an upscale hotel lobby. The soaring two-story entryway features a lavishly inlaid marble floor. Above the grand swirling staircase with its ornate metal banister is a circular ceiling pattern surrounded by gold-tinted skylights. Recessed lighting abounds, and even the crown moulding seems to have crown moulding. With few walls, the entire space has an open, flowing feel. The upstairs bedrooms include two with balconies over the front yard and three with balconies over the petite backyard, where Omrani has crammed a pool and spa, fire pit, wet bar, built-in grill, waterfall and a raised gazebo supported by four more columns. It doubles as a carport. The back wall of the house, made almost completely of windows, is embellished with four columns as well.

While the sight of it might thrill the owner and hundreds of would-be palace dwellers, it has mortified others in this profoundly image-conscious city. It’s not just that the new houses are bigger than their predecessors; all over the country homes are being built larger. The problem here is that a lot of people consider these houses the residential equivalent of a push-up bra--in-your-face boastful, obtrusive, even vaguely obscene. There are a lot of such houses in Beverly Hills, each one a reminder of the Persian community’s increasing influence and confidence in its adopted home.

So when the elected leaders of this unfailingly polite city this spring adopted strict new design codes to help educate and encourage the Beverly Hills home-building public on the finer points of aesthetic restraint, it was with an undeniably sticky cultural subtext. Even the code’s civil language has an unmistakable tsk-tsk tone: “Emerging trends have led some owners and developers in residential areas to disregard prevailing styles and neighborhood character in an effort to maximize development and density . . . [The trend] poses a serious danger that such overbuilding will degrade and depreciate the character, image, beauty and reputation of the City’s residential neighborhoods with adverse consequences for the quality of life of all residents.”

Under the new design rules, it would be nearly impossible to build additional homes in the style that many in the Persian community say they have come to consider their own. New homes must have what city planners call modulation--pitched roofs, courtyards or indentations, or variations to the basic box-shape of the house that can make even a large building seem less imposing.

But what then becomes of a builder such as Omrani, for whom the city’s Persian Palaces are a point of considerable pride? “I totally changed the character of the area,” boasts Omrani, who estimates that he has placed close to 1,000 of his signature columns on residences around Beverly Hills. “It is a symbol of wealth. How many columns do you have? They love it.”

Omrani returns to the Ford SUV he uses for visiting construction sites and drives just one block south, where he has two more projects in various stages of construction. He pauses forlornly before one. This, Omrani says, was one of the last such homes he was able to squeeze through the city’s planning process before the new law slammed the door on his signature designs.

Omrani fled iran to escape the islamic revolution in 1980, five years after he had completed his studies. He settled in Southern California, as did tens of thousands of Iranians in the decades that followed, most of them Jews such as himself. He has not returned to his native country since, but the memory of Iran’s rich architectural heritage is a constant refrain in his work. In particular, Omrani says he was influenced by a palace in the ancient Iranian city of Isfahan called the Chehel-Souton, which means “40 columns,” although the building’s 20 columns look like 40 only because they’re reflected in a pool of water.

Omrani is by no means the only one building big-box houses in Southern California. Competitors and imitators abound from a variety of countries and backgrounds, some of them far less capable than Omrani. But in Beverly Hills, at least, he is the most prolific. Through his Wilshire Boulevard design firm Omrani & Associates, as well as his building firm, Omrani Construction Co., the 52-year-old claims to have built or dramatically remodeled more than 100 houses in the city, half of them in the last five years. Although his creative passions are primarily for building hillside residences, the seemingly insatiable demand for Persian-inspired California mini-palaces like the one on Foothill Road has made them a staple of his recent work. His handiwork is particularly abundant in the city’s neighborhood south of Santa Monica Boulevard and east of Beverly Drive, still considered the land of so-called “starter homes” in Beverly Hills--this even though a single-family house now is nearly impossible to find for less than a million dollars, and Omrani says it costs about a million more to tear one down and build a new house.

At those prices, today’s Beverly Hills home buyers are less likely to be satisfied living in a little old house with a big backyard. In some of the city’s southern neighborhoods, it goes almost without saying that the sale of an older, single-story house will be followed by an army of tear-down workers and equipment. The historically low interest rates that have fueled the recent white-hot California real estate market also spurred the home-building business in Beverly Hills to unprecedented levels. The city’s Planning and Community Development Department determined last year, for example, that nearly 70% of the single-family homes between Wilshire Boulevard and Burton Way had either been torn down or drastically remodeled since those neighborhoods were established in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“At a million dollars just for the lot, nothing is worth saving,” says West Hollywood developer Abi Kamara, who builds spec homes and condominiums in Beverly Hills. “Nobody will pay a million-plus dollars and live in a dump.”

It took beverly hills 20 years to admit it had a problem, even as other cities such as Santa Monica, San Marino and Pacific Grove took aggressive steps to preserve their architectural heritages. In Santa Monica, for example, an interim ordinance enacted last year places stricter size limits on single-family homes in two parts of the city while requiring increased setbacks to keep newer homes from overwhelming their neighbors. In contrast, the new guidelines in Beverly Hills are intended to control the style of new buildings, but don’t place new limits on size. Remember, conspicuous wealth isn’t exactly considered a crime in this city.

But hulking, symmetrical stucco boxes with the presence of an IKEA store were towering over more and more neighborhood homes, their builders showing little regard for the prevailing medley of traditional architectural styles that once made the city’s more modest neighborhoods so whimsical.

Eventually, people started to talk. What they said wasn’t always nice. Some insiders adopted the jocular phrase “Canadians” so they could discuss their Persian neighbors in public without offending. And when the city conducted a survey last year as part of a general plan update, it found that residents were screaming for some sort of design-review process to keep the building frenzy in check.

Meanwhile, when the Los Angeles Conservancy issued its first ever preservation report card in November, the organization slammed Beverly Hills with a “D” grade. (Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Pasadena, South Pasadena, Long Beach and Whittier were awarded “A”s, and Los Angeles scored a “B-plus.”) The rating itself garnered little notice from the city’s residents, but it gave the council additional political cover to make a move that everyone knew would be seen by some as anti-Persian. With the backing of the city’s first Iranian-born council member, Jimmy Delshad, who was elected a year ago, officials finally sprang into action.

But as word spread about the impending design code changes, the city’s Planning and Community Development Department received a rash of new building permit applications from a familiar cadre of builders and developers. Omrani in particular says he rushed to push through as many new projects as he could before the rules were expected to take effect. The council responded in kind, bypassing the usual legislative process and enacting an ordinance in March that slammed the new design rules into place almost immediately. The move sent Omrani and a handful of others back to the drawing board on about a dozen pending projects.

Currently, the design ordinance covers the neighborhoods south of Santa Monica Boulevard, which is by comparison the most modest section of this 5.69-square-mile city. It’s there, where the lot sizes are relatively small, that the palaces look most monstrous. Now a similar set of rules is in the works for the northern portion of the city as well, where lot sizes are significantly larger but building styles are no more restrained.

These new houses had a lot in common: flat rooflines, huge windows and two-story entryways. Most offered little in the way of landscaping, unless you counted the phalanx of towering columns out front or the coterie of luxury cars and SUVs parked on a pad of cement where the front lawn used to be.

“Every time I see the worst one, another one pops up that is even worse,” says interior designer Marilyn Weiss, who served on a subcommittee that developed the new design ordinance for the City Council and completed a six-year term on the architectural commission that oversees commercial and multifamily residential building in Beverly Hills. While she supports the right to build homes according to personal style, she says homeowners need to respect their neighbors on issues of “scale, mass and bulk.”

Eliza Eliasnik, on the other hand, couldn’t be more pleased with the five-bedroom, six-bath house that Omrani built for her family four years ago on Maple Drive just north of Wilshire. It has four columns out front, four in the back and another eight inside. Eliasnik had lived in the property’s original house since 1993, when she and her husband bought it for $565,000. “It was nothing; it had one bathroom,” she recalls.

Her new palace, built when she and her husband refinanced the original property, is a dream come true. “I feel like the queen of Maple Drive,” she says. She says it has been a welcoming place to raise a family after the heartbreak of fleeing Iran, and suggests that perhaps people don’t like houses like hers because they don’t understand them.

“I have three kids. My husband has five brothers and two sisters. I have two sisters and three brothers. Every Friday night on Shabbat we are together, more than 50 people. With a smaller house it’s impossible. Jewish Persian people are always together, and they are not like American people that are only together on Thanksgiving.”

Council member Steve Webb, who campaigned last year promising to rein in oversized homes, insists that the city is not trying to keep people from building the larger houses that many homeowners have come to expect (see sidebar). “I think we will get better quality homes and better designed homes out of this,” says council member Delshad, whose election to the city leadership has been a source of great pride to the city’s Persian community.

Beverly Hills Mayor Mark Egerman says he reluctantly supported the permanent design ordinance, but he was the only one to oppose hurried efforts to pass the emergency measure. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” he says. “I don’t believe anyone builds an ugly home on purpose.”

Now Omrani and a coterie of other Iranian-born builders, homeowners and developers claim that their cultural and artistic freedom is under siege.

“Anybody can tell which houses are owned by Persians. Whether they are small houses or big houses, they are all the same,” says Bijan Dardashti, a Persian competitor of Omrani who also designs boxy-style houses in Beverly Hills. He wonders if the City Council’s concerns are more cultural than architectural.

Developer Kamran Younai, who employs Omrani to design and build most of the houses he and his father Albert undertake in Beverly Hills, wonders why the city should be able to dictate the style of house that people build. “For every brand new house we build, there’s 80 people who can buy this house in a month,” says Younai. “There’s three people with all-cash offers who are willing to buy it the day you finish it.”

Omrani takes it all personally. “What’s the goal of this design rule? So they can push you into the corner. It’s against your style, your culture, your lifestyle,” he says. “I am target number one, I will tell you that.”

Council members Webb and Delshad and Mayor Egerman insist that the new design code is not meant to single out the city’s Persians, and even prominent Iranian-American residents bristle at the suggestion that the stereotypical Persian Palace is in any way distinctly Persian. “I wouldn’t dignify that,” says Hamid Gabbay, an Iranian-born architect who served on a committee that helped develop the city’s new style guidelines and also is a former chair of the city’s arts and planning commissions. He says the council’s motivations are removed from its relationship with the Iranian-American community in Beverly Hills, and the style of housing in question “has nothing to do with Persian architecture.”

“The reason you can’t find the boxes or the columns” in the city’s new style catalog “is because there is not such a thing as that style,” Gabbay says. “The roof is Mediterranean ceramic, the capitals are Corinthian, the body of the columns are Tuscan and the windows could be aluminum. It really is a joke.”

Omrani is not laughing as he sits in his office, fretting over the new design rules and explaining his vision for a more cultured, truly modern Beverly Hills. Covering the expansive wall behind him is a color rendering of his dream project--a blocks-long redesign of the urban vortex of Beverly Hills, the maddening tangle of traffic lights at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. Omrani envisions a labyrinth of raised pedestrian walkways connecting the buildings in a kind of Jetsons-meets-ancient-Persia streetscape. At the center, 23 stories above the intersection, seven hulking columns support a circular museum of the arts. It’s a Persian Palace of truly palatial dimensions.

In the meantime, Omrani scribbles impatiently on a yellow pad, attempting to demonstrate the futility of trying to build a suitable mini-palace within the new residential design limits. “How can I design with this Mickey Mouse shape? They like the house to be cut like that, but then what can you do inside?”

The answer may come from Omrani’s clients. Several Persian developers and realtors in Beverly Hills suggest that the stereotypical Persian Palace may be going out of style among the city’s younger, more assimilated generation of Iranians. “My younger clients say, ‘I don’t want something that screams, ‘I am Persian,’ ” says designer Dardashti.

For his part, Omrani makes his own home outside of Beverly Hills, in part because there is more artistic freedom in neighboring Los Angeles. He is building his own dream palace in Doheny Estates, a community north of Sunset Boulevard. It’s going to be a 7,508-square-foot house shaped like a boat and surrounded by water. It will, he says, have lots and lots of columns.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Swimmin’ Pools, Movie Stars, Home-Design Regs

Under the City of Beverly Hills’ new design codes, home builders face a three-tiered process intended to assist them in keeping their more grandiose impulses in check.

If a proposed house adheres to one of 22 pre-established styles, it can still be built to the maximum allowable size for a single-family home in Beverly Hills, which is 40% of the size of the lot, plus 1,500 square feet. (By that equation, a house on a 50-by-150-foot lot such as Eliza Eliasnik’s could still be 4,500 square feet, as hers is, but it would have to be shaped differently.)

The accepted styles fit into five broad categories: American Colonial, Rural European Revival, Spanish Colonial, Contemporary and Period Revival, as well as additional styles that aren’t easily categorized, such as Craftsman, Bungalow and Art Deco. Their particular features are laid out in painstaking detail in the city’s new 125-page style catalog.

To veer from the prescribed styles, however, a home may not be built larger than 40% of the size of the lot without meeting certain additional criteria. Under this second tier of scrutiny, a set of rewards and incentives has been put in place to help make a structure seem less imposing. Builders can win back additional square footage by incorporating certain modulating features and “neighborly amenities.”

For example, adding a courtyard or setting the second story back from the front of the house can earn a builder an additional 500 square feet each. A sloped roof is worth an additional 300 square feet, as is the use of mature landscaping. But if a builder objects to those so-called modulating features, then his or her plans must gain the approval of a newly established design review commission, which will be made up of citizens and at least one architect.

The application deadline for that five-member commission was May 31, with final selection of its members expected sometime this month. -- K.A.