Large Houses Realm of ‘Tear-Down King’

Alan Khaderi wears a couple of hats, but the crown some bestow on him is not to his liking:

“Tear-Down King of Beverly Hills.”

The developer cringes at the words. He disassociates himself from the wave of tear-downs that prompted city zoning law changes in March. And he prefers a low profile, though he is president of the residential development arm of Columbia Savings, a company with high visibility.

Since Columbia Residential Development was formed under his leadership five years ago, it has built and sold more than $100 million in residential properties. By Khaderi’s count, this represents about 40 homes, 25 of them in Beverly Hills, most on razed-home sites.

Khaderi probably has demolished more houses in Beverly Hills than anybody else. He was a pioneer in leveling houses to build larger ones, on spec.

But he blames “other people who tried to copy our houses and overdid them or built big boxes with little landscaping” for the City Council’s action to restrict the size of homes on bigger lots in the north part of the city.

The move was partly prompted by the construction by other developers of two huge houses on a cliff above Coldwater Canyon Park, said city officials, who requested anonymity, but one added, “Columbia Savings set the tone for building the bigger houses, because they did so many.”

Khaderi noted, however, that the zoning changes “will not affect the size of our plans, because we’ve always been under the (new) allotted square footage.”

He said he doesn’t want the houses he develops to stand out because of unusual size or style but, instead, wants them to look as if they were always part of the neighborhood, he said.

He considers it a compliment when a new Columbia house is mistaken for a home that has been remodeled. He uses mature trees “to give an impression that the trees have been there for awhile,” and he has put mud between tiles to make roofs look old. He also has created weathered, monolithic-looking entries of cast concrete.

The houses have fetched base prices from $1 million to $6.5 million. Khaderi estimates that 75% of his buyers have been singles or couples, so Columbia houses have been generally designed for these markets.

A $5.9-million house he just completed in Bel-Air is typical, although it has a carport instead of the standard garage. The 6,892-square-foot house has two stories, but the master suite takes up the entire second floor.

And the house has all three ingredients Khaderi says his home buyers want: privacy, security and a good location. It is a block away from the home of President and Mrs. Reagan.

Among its other features are white oak floors, light-colored walls, large windows and many skylights--all part of Khaderi’s effort to make interiors light and bright, which he learned from veteran builder Fred Smathers, starting in 1975.

“We built quite a few homes together in Nichols Canyon,” Khaderi said. They stopped building in the early 1980s, when the economy slowed, and Khaderi resumed, with Columbia, when the market picked up again.

When he met Smathers, Khaderi was a full-time dentist with a practice in Hancock Park. “I was interested in art history and architecture when I was an undergraduate at UCLA,” Khaderi said, “but I became a dentist because my mother and father wanted me to become a dentist.”

He earned his dental degree at USC, where he was a student of Ellis Ring, another dentist who became a developer.

“He was a role model for me,” Khaderi said of the 75-year-old Ring, who developed, with his brother, more than 6,000 apartments in Los Angeles.

Now 49, Khaderi is still a dentist after 25 years, though he sees only a few patients--mainly family and friends. “It would have been very difficult for me to have given it up entirely,” he said.

As a real estate developer, Khaderi maintains unpretentious offices in the back of a Columbia Savings building in Beverly Hills. As a dentist, he shares an office with another dentist in Hancock Park.

“That makes my mother happy,” he said, “because she worked to put me through USC.”