Beverly Hills Debates Whether Bigger Is Always Better in Mansions
Last fall, Robert and Jeri Housman moved from a 3,500-square-foot house on South Linden Drive in Beverly Hills to a 6,000-square-foot “total fixer” on a corner lot on North Bedford.
“We wanted to provide more space for our children,” said Jeri Housman. For the four children, ages 1 to 7, the Housmans got a fifth bedroom, eight bathrooms and bigger rooms throughout. For themselves, they plan to add a 2,000-square-foot, second-story master suite.
The Housmans are among a growing number of Beverly Hills home buyers who think bigger is better. Some, like the Housmans, are buying older houses and adding to them. Others, mostly developers speculating that they will find buyers, are tearing down homes and replacing them with larger models.
But apparently even in Beverly Hills, where mansions have always been part of the city’s mystique, a house can be TOO big. The 3,500- to 5,000-square-foot homes that once were considered palaces now seem like servants’ quarters, overshadowed by new houses double or even quadruple their size.
Some longtime residents don’t like it.
Considered an Intrusion
Joseph T. Zoline, who has lived in his 3,500-square-foot home on North Canon Drive for 30 years, contends that the character of his quiet neighborhood is being ruined by the intrusion of larger dwellings. On his street, two houses have been built recently. One is 7,500 square feet, the other 8,500 square feet. A 10,500-square-foot house is under construction across an alley behind his home.
Zoline gets upset when he sees lush lawns replaced by concrete driveways that lead to multiple-car garages. And he thinks the brick and stone facades and flat roofs on the new houses make the neighborhood look as if it is sprinkled with apartment buildings.
“They’re monstrosities,” Zoline said. “We must stop right now this overbuilding that is overtaking our beautiful city.”
The conflict has put Beverly Hills city officials in a quandary: How, they wonder, do you establish building controls to maintain some characteristics of the older neighborhoods while still allowing for a demand for larger homes?
Larger Than Life
“The key is to be fair,” said Meralee Goldman, chairwoman of the Planning Commission. “The greatest danger is in polarizing this. The question we have to ask is, how do we see the future of our city?”
While city officials ponder the question, the trend toward larger homes continues. And in Beverly Hills and its environs, large can mean larger than life.
National statistics define as large a home of more than 2,500 square feet, said Rick McAlexander, vice president of Landmark Designs Inc., a Eugene, Ore.-based home design firm that surveys home buyer attitudes every two years. A small house is defined as having less than 1,500 square feet, he said, and a medium house has between 1,500 and 2,500 square feet.
In the glamorous northern part of Beverly Hills, an average-size home is about 5,000 square feet and costs about $2.5 million, according to real estate experts. Generally, the new homes are far bigger.
Real estate broker Jeff Hyland once sold an 8-year-old, 8,000-square-foot house to a client who planned to tear it down and build a 10,000-to-12,000-square-foot house.
Two adjoining 25,000-square-foot houses with cantilevered tennis courts being built on a hillside overlooking Beverly Drive and Coldwater Canyon drew a flurry of complaints from neighbors.
In nearby Holmby Hills, television producer Aaron Spelling stirred up his new neighbors by building a 56,500-square-foot house on a 6-acre lot.
Various Reasons
Why such big houses?
City planners, real estate brokers and builders say an increase in personal income, a rise in property values, a change in life style that is keeping more people at home and, of course, egos that require keeping up with the Joneses work together to create the demand for palatial living quarters.
Landmark Designs’ most recent national survey, taken this year, which drew 1,500 respondents from across the country, found that people want more amenities in their homes, including guest cottages, wine cellars, libraries, offices and entertainment rooms. They also want larger kitchens, family rooms, garages and master suites.
“The master suites nowadays can take up to 25% of the entire house,” said Hyland, president of Alvarez, Hyland & Young, a real estate firm in Beverly Hills since 1976. “His and hers wardrobes, his and her bathrooms, a gym and then perhaps a den and library just off the master bedroom.”
But McAlexander said the dream houses described by respondents to his company’s survey could easily fit into 3,500 square feet.
Waste of Space
“It would be a challenge to me to design a 10,000-square-foot house and not feel that I was wasting space,” he said. “To have an entry that takes up a thousand square feet would mean walking 20 feet from the front door to any room. That makes for a grand entrance and impression, but as far as being usable, it’s beyond my conception as a designer.
“Anything 10,000 square feet or more is not a house, it’s a structure,” he said.
Builder Michael Dean, vice president of Dean Homes of Beverly Hills, disagrees. He recently completed a 9,000-square-foot home in the 700 block of North Alpine Drive and is building a 9,500-square-foot house in the same block.
Dean, whose father, Barry, began building homes in Beverly Hills and the surrounding area in 1962, said 9,000 square feet can be filled pretty quickly.
“We have bigger rooms and self-contained master suites,” he said. “We design with the idea that people will be in these homes for a long time. We make the bedrooms bigger because little children have a tendency to grow up into teen-agers and then young adults.
Buyers’ Desires
“We as builders have to address ourselves to the buyers. Here in Beverly Hills, it’s also a quality-of-life issue. Successful people want to show off their success. We are simply giving people what they want.”
To get what they want, the builders of the new homes are often taking up as much of the lot’s area as possible, leaving little room for landscaping and little space between neighbors.
City planners say this makes the houses look bulky. The bulkiness is what upsets the neighbors, who are concerned about aesthetics at the front, and interference with their own light, ventilation and privacy at the side and rear yards.
Many of the homes have multiple-car garages, often in front. The garages increase the perception of bulk, city planners say, because of the resulting increase in the amount of concrete driveway and the decrease in area that can be landscaped.
Review Procedure
In the city’s hillside area, neighbors have another worry.
“It is not only size and location but whether (a house) interferes with the view,” said Stacey Olliff, an attorney representing a group called Save Our Hills Committee.
The city has imposed a public review procedure for development in the hillsides to try to make sure that new homes do not block views and that they are compatible with homes in the area.
City officials two years ago thought they had reached an equitable solution to the overbuilding problem by limiting development to 55% of a lot.
But that didn’t satisfy either side in the dispute, and brought in another entity.
Residents in the less glitzy southside of the city--where lots are smaller and the average home takes up about 80% of its lot--complained that the limit was too restrictive and could reduce property values.
New Limits Considered
The Planning Commission is considering new height and side yard setback limits, an additional setback for the front on second stories and new limits on the total square footage of homes based on a lot’s size. The commission is expected to submit its recommendations for a new ordinance to the City Council in late July.
“The purpose is not to prevent people from securing an economic value of their property, or having a large house,” said Councilman Allan L. Alexander, a former planning commissioner. “The concern is that the homes being built are out of scale with the neighborhoods such that they have a negative impact on the values of surrounding properties.”
The Planning Commission earlier had considered architectural review as a possible solution to the bulk problem, but commissioners said it is unlikely that they will go that route because the process is so subjective. A random survey by the city planning department of 10 cities statewide found that nine review the designs of houses as part of their effort to control the impact of new houses on older neighborhoods.
In communities such as Hillsboro, San Marino, Carmel and Rolling Hills Estates, all new homes and major additions are reviewed by the city to make sure that the proposed color, materials and landscaping fit the character of existing neighborhoods.
Because of Beverly Hills’ diverse neighborhoods, the city may have to come up with separate building standards.
Unlike the north, residents in the south side--where most lots are less than 7,000-square-feet--are not as concerned with density and loss of privacy, light and ventilation.
“It’s accepted that you do not have the degree of privacy that you do in the north,” said Councilman Alexander, who lives in the southwest. “My house is three feet from the next house.”
Two residents’ groups in the south side are adamant about being able to build houses that take up at least 80% of the lot, or up to between 4,000 and 6,500 square feet.
“That would not be luxurious, but comfortable and practical,” said one south side resident.
It may be the south side, but it is still Beverly Hills.
