Stein-Brief, Flush From Resort Coup, Plans Grand Headquarters

David Stein won’t say how much he actually made when--with Hawaii resort developer Christopher B. Hemmeter--he sold 232 acres of prime property in Dana Point for a cool $132 million in July, nearly four times what was paid for it two years before.

But you can be sure that his development firm, Stein-Brief Group, can afford an extra print or two and some house plants to gussie up its unassuming offices in a small Dana Point shopping center.

In fact, the firm is doing well enough that it plans to build a new headquarters in Dana Point and has hired the firm of popular architect Helmut Jahn in Chicago to design it.

Stein and Hemmeter got cash on the barrel head for the land, according to people familiar with the deal, which leaves the two developers breathing a little easier these days. That’s because the buyer was Qintex, an Australian hotel and television conglomerate that has taken a financial beating in the months after the purchase was announced in July.

Since a $1.5-billion deal to buy the MGM/UA film studios fell apart, Qintex has seen its U.S. movie subsidiary declare bankruptcy and announced a major restructuring and the sale of its three resorts, two in Australia and one in Hawaii. The company says the Dana Point resort is now its top priority.

But that is water over the dam for Stein-Brief, which has turned its attention to building a new headquarters with the profits from the Qintex deal. And the new Stein-Brief building promises to have one of the most distinguished architectural pedigrees in the county.

Jahn’s commissions normally run to huge office towers--he is said to have a thing for monumental designs on towering buildings--and he doesn’t ordinarily do small office buildings in small towns. But he and Stein are friends and skiing partners, and Stein said he talked Jahn into taking the job.

“I told Barry (Brief, Stein’s publicity-shy partner) we’re going to be living with this building a long time, and we might as well make a statement even if it costs an extra million dollars to do it,” Stein says.

The 27,000-square-foot, two-story building will be built at the corner of Coast Highway and Ritz-Carlton Drive on the ocean side. The proposed design goes before the Dana Point Planning Commission on Nov. 7.

Jahn was once described by an architecture critic as “the architectural equivalent of Wagner played on a synthesizer full blast” and is sometimes characterized by his peers as “Flash Gordon.” He specializes in combining a modern look--glass or granite facades, for instance--with traditional skyscraper lines. He has designed the tallest building in Philadelphia and the tallest one in Europe.

The Stein-Brief building will have an exposed steel frame with sides of teak and clear glass. Jahn’s firm, Murphy/Jahn, says the structure is one of the smallest it has ever designed. Martin Wolf, the firm’s senior vice president, said the building also is “very modest” in its styling by Murphy/Jahn standards.

“Our buildings usually tend to draw a hell of a lot of attention to themselves at the request, of course, of the owners,” Wolf said.

If Jahn seems like the sort of architect who would be hired by a big-city developer with an eye on his image, you’re right. In fact, Jahn once worked for Donald Trump.

But in some ways it is not surprising that he is designing a building for Stein either. Stein, 41, doesn’t quite fit the staid mold of Orange County developers. He is an activist Democrat in a Republican county and a fan of blues singer B.B. King in Neil Diamond territory.

His unorthodox style has also landed him in hot water. There’s an ongoing beef with the Federal Elections Commission, which is investigating political contributions Stein raised for former presidential candidate Gary Hart. And Stein-Brief defaulted at one point on the loan it used to buy the Dana Point property back in 1983. The loan was refinanced and Stein now blames his partner in the deal, Beverly Hills Savings & Loan Assn. of Mission Viejo, which had been seized by federal regulators.

Although the 232-acre hotel site was Stein-Brief’s largest single holding in Dana Point, Stein says the company still has 19 oceanfront lots there--about $40 million worth of land--that it is selling to wealthy individuals as home sites.

Flush from the sale of the hotel land--Stein-Brief and Hemmeter split the profits from the Qintex sale equally--Stein-Brief is looking for another hotel deal. The sales price was $100 million more than the developers paid for the property in 1987.

The sale to Qintex was not, incidentally, the first time Stein-Brief had bought and developed land for a hotel only to have someone come along and offer an irresistible price. A similar incident happened in the resort town of Palm Desert a few years back, Stein says.

Despite the profits, does he regret not being able to build the hotel?

“Sometimes I daydream about what it would have been like to sit around the hotel pool with a drink in my hand,” Stein says. “We’ve been involved in the hotel business for eight years, and we’ve yet to build one.”