An American Suburb in Paris : In the Land of Versailles and Notre Dame, Developments With Names Like ‘Beverly Hills’ Are Overtaking the Countryside. But Can the Gallic Soul Find Happiness in a California-Style Prefab Tract Home?

“Beverly Hills, bon ,” Gisele Auvray answers the telephone. A stylish brunette, Auvray has feathered hair and finely chiseled fingernails and wears suede boots in the season’s must-have color of parrot green. She works in a pastel room with white sofas and a white-tiled floor on which a dhurrie rug has been flung. Marigolds and petunias brighten an adjoining patio, Elle magazines lie on glass-topped tables and, from a portable radio, Princess Stephanie of Monaco purrs her hit, “ Flash pour l’amour, flash pour la vie. . . . “

Far from palm trees and the Pacific, the mise en scene , in a prefabricated model home in France, is conceived to advertise what is probably the most celebrated suburban life in the world. Beverly Hills--along with Bel-Air, West Wood and Riverside--is one of eight subdivisions outside Paris developed in the past year by Kaufman & Broad-France, a subsidiary of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., a Los Angeles-based tract-housing builder.

Auvray cautiously explains the subdivision’s name to a pair of prospective French clients. “It’s a California thing they came up with. It’s really Beverly Hills a Marolles-en-Brie.” The mayor of the nearby village of Marolles is unhappy about the California incursion and is quick to correct geographical gaffes. “He tells everyone we are not in California here, we are in Brie,” Auvray says.

She readily recites the sales litany of Beverly Hills en Brie. Located on the plain noted for its cheese, the subdivision is a mere 23 kilometers southeast of Paris. It is close to the commuter line, the RER, and it boasts a new shopping mall and, nearby, a prestigious chateau. The most expensive house in Beverly Hills--four bedrooms, two baths--costs 1,086,000 francs (about $155,000), which is steep for France but $20,000 less than a house in the Bel-Air development in the pricier western suburbs of Paris. To buy a house in Beverly Hills, one needs to put only 10% down; “delivery” usually occurs in two months.

One of half a dozen developments that have sprung up on the windy stretch of former farmland, Beverly Hills is surrounded by the jagged geometry of half-built houses, lolling yellow cranes, flapping flags and billboards for competing projects. Its 82 dwellings are part of a community that, when completed, will have 1,500 homes, built by various developers.

Beverly Hills is a harmonious neighborhood of children and pets, joggers and bikes, upper-middle-class incomes and compact cars. “It’s a little paradise,” says a man wearing gray sweats who is riding a bike with child and family dog in tow. Nobody seems to mind the rush-hour roar of planes overhead, surging toward their descent at Orly airport. At the mall, rousing music encourages shoppers while flashing lights lure children to the bumper cars.

“Kaufmanians, as we call them, are happy,” Auvray says.

Meanwhile, cuddled into a fold in the land, the village of Marolles, with its rose trellises and old stone walls, is as quiet as a relic, a thing of the past.

Sheathed in blue reflecting glass, the headquarters of Kaufman & Broad-France stands like a sapphire monolith in the Paris business district called La Defense. In conjunction with Kaufman & Broad’s other French subsidiary, Bati-Service, a builder of low-income housing projects, Kaufman & Broad-France is the third-largest housing-development company in the country. It has built 25 sub-divisions in the greater Paris area.

In 1965, Levitt Corp., a major U.S. home builder in the ‘50s and ‘60s, brought the concept of tract housing to France. Until then, a swelling postwar urban population had been accommodated largely through construction of low-cost apartment complexes and high-rise, ready-made cities that began to spill out onto the plains surrounding Paris. Through Levitt, for the first time, masses of people were offered the possibility of owning a home. Interior walls were made of plasterboard, roof tiles were synthetic, and the architectural grandeur that ennobled French royal palaces and seignorial chateaux was reduced to a functional rectangle of living space. But the tract-housing companies talked the right price per square meter, and they offered the overriding element lacking in many French people’s lives: le confort --modern baths, toilets and kitchens. The traditional middle-class dream of restoring an auberge , a chateau, a mill on a stream, could be replaced by a more modern, albeit more transitory, mode of life.

In 1971, Kaufman & Broad delivered its first house in France, and French developers started building their own. Following the reach of the suburban rapid transit network, businesses decentralized in the ‘70s from Paris, industrial zones grew up, and crop after crop of housing projects were set out on the fertile plains in rows of look-alike habitats.

For the French, these suburbs continue to represent an increasingly pervasive style of living--one that the recently arrived middle class prettily calls la vie en residence (residential living) and one in which “subdivision” becomes le village .

“There is a certain snob appeal,” says Kaufman & Broad-France Marketing Director Herve de la Debutrie, a crisp, starched man who has a habit of mentioning Mercedeses and the swank Avenue Foch to situate his product’s standing in the marketplace. “ Vivre a l’americaine “ is the core phrase that evokes a faraway life of ease and affluence. “The United States makes you dream, and California makes you dream even more,” says de la Debutrie. “It’s the sun, freedom, the Pacific.”

The houses boast such features as ranch-style L shapes, patios, bay windows and master bedrooms with un dressing and a private bath. But regulations, set by the company to promote neighborhood harmony, prohibit many traditional elements of French homes: kitchen gardens, laundry hanging outdoors, unleashed dogs and private, walled yards. “These are not restrictions,” de la Debutrie insists. “They are regulations established for the good of the community.”

How well the American community concept suits the French temperament is, however, a matter of contention. “People play at living the American life,” says Denis Duclos, a specialist in urban sociology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research. “But it’s an artificial game perpetuated by developers who use publicity that is oriented toward that.”

Duclos explains that the French visit their families more often than Americans do and have no need to seek social identity in religious and ethnic groups. “The community for the French is all of France,” he says. “The local community aspect of the villages is forced. There is not a spirit of community in France, and I don’t think you can create new types of social relations by imposing a new system of housing. French daily life is stronger than the developers’ ideology.”

De la Debutrie, however, puts the shoe on the other foot. Kaufmanians, he says, “have the mentality suited to this subdivision life. They are resolutely modern.”

Beatrice Brezina and Gilles Robin are typical Kaufman & Broad clients. Robin, a BMW executive, works in a nearby industrial zone and plays golf on Saturdays. Brezina, recently divorced, does not work outside the home, and she has a maid. At 40, Brezina is 10 years older than Robin, with whom she and her three children have lived for more than a year. The menage began in their Kaufman & Broad house in the Clos St. Pierre development, near the suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris. It was a ready-made answer to their needs, and they purchased it in 15 minutes.

For the Brezina clan, the house represents an entirely new way of life. For the past six years, the family had lived outside Paris in a stately Second Empire residence with marble mantles and parquet floors. The children played behind high iron gates, and Brezina entertained at large receptions for her former husband’s business associates.

There are a few regrets. The old armoires, too large for the 9x11-foot children’s rooms, had to be sold. And, Brezina comments with nostalgia, “at this time of year, we would be in Monte Carlo.”

Still, the family is enthusiastic about the Kaufmanian life. Tentatively, the children have tried going barefoot, American-style, on the carpet. And, accustomed to a more isolated life, they have taken to the concept of American neighborliness, with playmates streaming in and out.

“The children think it’s fantastic going from one house to another,” Brezina says. “They’ve never lived like that before.”

Brezina has also gotten to know her neighbors: the ones with a home on a larger-than-average lot, which the children have dubbed “Dallas,” after the TV show; and the Swiss family, so immaculate that they sweep the dust off their roof. Brezina has even asked them over for refreshments to discuss homeowner concerns.

Still, Brezina has preserved a life style that is irrevocably French. With guests invited to the traditional Sunday lunch, she has been up since 8:30 a.m., polished the silver, prepared a fish mousse and chicken in tarragon sauce, and set the table with crystal and a hand-appliqued cloth.

With Brezina’s mother visiting, there are three generations at the table, and during the meal an easy urbanity reigns. Yet, concerning the house, there’s an edge of apprehension. Nancy, 17, the oldest child, tells how the family chose the entire color scheme at the company decoration center in a matter of hours. “It was weird,” she says. She also finds it difficult to study with household noises penetrating the thin interior walls. Brezina and Robin complain that the gutters leak, the radiators don’t work (the subcontractor has gone bankrupt, they say), and special-delivery letters to Kaufman & Broad have gone unanswered. A neighbor’s roof leaks, they report, and two households have initiated lawsuits against the company.

“I wouldn’t bet on what this house will be like in 10 years,” Robin remarks.

“It corresponds to our needs at a certain moment in life,” Brezina explains.

“Yes, but I hope these villages don’t inundate France,” Robin says sharply.

Brezina agrees. “We’re not robots,” she snaps.

Regaining her cordiality, Brezina pours coffee and explains that when the children are grown, in five or six years, she and Robin hope to realize their dream: to live on Paris’ Ile St.-Louis, or, perhaps, to restore a small chateau in Perigord.

Philippe Carvaillo kicks the living-room wall of his 5-year-old Levitt house. “It’s junk!” he declares. Founder of a company supplying electronic equipment, Carvaillo has just returned from the office. He greets his wife, Vera, with “Bonjour, mon amour , “ and kisses her and his 9-year-old son, Jean-Philippe, who is in the kitchen eating dinner in his pajamas, slippers and robe. Carvaillo answers a call from a neighbor arranging a weekend golf game, then settles into an easy chair in the living room. Vera brings him a gin and tonic. Later, they will go to dinner at their regular restaurant, Le Country Club.

Mollified by the familial ambiance, Carvaillo concedes that their suburban life does have advantages. The house is sunny and well-planned, and the master bedroom offers a glimpse of the golf course. Carvaillo’s office, in a shopping center, is seven minutes away, and the supermarket is a 10-minute drive. The children bike to a swimming pool and tennis courts, and, for the adults, there is Le Country Club, which overlooks the pool.

Decorated with white wicker chairs and gay provincial prints, Le Country Club features such American touches as a salad bar and Sunday brunch. Carvaillo and Vera nod to neighbors as they enter the dining room. Ordering a bottle of light Medoc, Carvaillo reopens the subject of the house. He grew up in a 19th-Century Parisian apartment with high ceilings and thick stone walls, he says. He and Vera also lived in Paris. They shopped at local markets, took their children to city parks and went to the theater and to restaurants. But they also endured traffic, parking tickets and pollution. The solution was a move to Chevry 2, a development of several thousand houses that extends over the Plateau de Saclay southwest of Paris.

It is a pleasant, affluent life, but there are worrisome aspects. “Things are changing,” Vera says. The French “may still talk philosophy on street corners, but we’re becoming as materialistic as Americans.”

For Carvaillo, it is the uniformity imposed on their lives that rankles most. “You have a form of socialism in these projects,” he says. “They are destroying the French sense of individualism.”

What kind of house does he want? “I want a stone house with a wall around it,” he replies. “I want to be chez moi . I want to unleash my dog. And I don’t want to hear my family in the next room grilling a piece of bread.”

Early on a weekday morning, Eli Broad is breakfasting at the Bristol, one of Paris’ most elegant hotels, on the Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honore. The lobby is appointed with tapestries and marquetry consoles, and the dining room overlooks a formal garden.

Soberly suited and speaking softly and methodically, the chairman of the board of Kaufman & Broad is eating sweet rolls and complaining that French coffee is too strong. He is in town for the inauguration of the Kaufman & Broad-France offices, to be hung with a collection of paintings by California artists. A lover of contemporary art, he has completed a weeklong tour of European museums and dealers, with his private curator bird-dogging trends. “I wanted a broader life than (that of) most American businessmen, which is accruing their net income,” he says.

At 53, Broad has accrued more than 1,000 artworks in both corporate and private collections and a business empire that has provided housing for more than 175,000 families in five countries. He is equally proud of both accomplishments. “There is no higher business calling than producing a home,” he says. “It’s the backbone of a strong middle class.” When Kaufman & Broad came to France, there were no extended suburbs, he boasts. “We created a single-family-home industry, and the French followed.”

As for the long-term cultural effect of tract housing, he says: “Sociologists have written that this will be the demise of this and that, that suburbia is bland. But I have difficulty with that. I don’t know how you address the quality of life any further than in building a house.”

And lawsuits and leaking roofs? “Many French people have never bought new homes,” he says. “Some of them expect it to be a perfect product.”

At the Kaufman & Broad-France offices, Bill Langford, the only American executive in the sub sidiary and its second in command, is preparing for the reception inaugurating the building. Along with Eli Broad, guests will include U.S. Ambassador to France Joe M. Rodgers and Gerard Longuet, French minister of telecommunications.

Langford, 41, an East Coast lawyer who came to Paris 10 years ago, has taken easily to French customs. He prefers duck a l’orange to hamburgers; he likes the firm’s old Champs-Elysees offices better than its modern digs, and he recommends French construction materials--roof tiles and brick--over the shingles and wood that the American company uses.

With his family, he lives in an apartment near the Parc Monceau, one of the most gracious quarters in Paris. For weekends, he has bought and restored a 16th-Century country auberge . It was in terrible shape when he found it, he says. But in six months, he ripped away the plaster to expose the 400-year-old ceiling beams and salvaged enough hexagonal red tiles to cover the kitchen floor. He is crazy about the place, of course, and considers himself lucky to own it. “It’s the real French life,” he says.