BE IT EVER SO HUMONGOUS : As Rich Get Richer, Homes Get Larger--What’s the Appeal?

Alexander Coler stood on what is soon to be the floor of his dining room, a room that will comfortably seat 50 with a glass floor that will look down into the indoor swimming pool below, a pool outfitted with changeable colored lights and a paddle to gracefully churn the water.

“The architect who designed this house thought this would be a nice crowning point to my career,” says Coler, a builder and developer. “But I’ve always been low-key and not ostentatious in any way. I have a helluva time convincing anybody, when you look at some of the things I’ve built,” he adds with a chuckle. “Especially this home.”

This home is a Beverly Hills mansion of about 40,000 square feet that overlooks Coldwater Canyon Park, a house that features columns of imported marble of a certain vein hand-selected from Italian quarries, carved doors from Manila, a disco, a library, two gyms, a two-lane bowling alley, servants’ apartments, a museum, huge garages and a tennis court that sits atop a greenhouse.

The mansion is unique in neither size nor opulence. The tear-down frenzy that has Los Angeles homeowners razing homes to build new ones has escalated; now mansions are being torn down to make way for mega-mansions measuring 30,000 square feet and up. Lot too small to hold something that size? Buy the house next door, tear that house down and build whatever you like.

Not every exclusive L.A. neighborhood has its own ultra-mansion--yet. But realtors and architects tracking this trend say it’s going to continue, as long as the rich get richer, which, of course, they will.

Why they’re building such enormous dwellings seems to be the question of the day. Why design a palace on a relatively small lot? How could a small family possibly use that much room? Wouldn’t they rather get out of the house once in a while and go bowling in a bowling alley?

The reasons seem to go far beyond mere economics and good investments. As one observer put it, “You don’t buy a Ferrari because it gets good gas mileage.”

“Why did the kings of France build the palaces they did?” says architect Rick Corsini of David Kellen Architect, who also teaches architectural design at Cal Poly Pomona. “You have a bourgeois culture that’s as profitable as it ever has been. We have the equivalent of the robber barons, and they’re just accumulating that wealth and looking for an expression of it. It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s just sort of resuscitated.

“In Beverly Hills,” Corsini adds, “you have modestly sized parcels of land with moderately sized houses that still command considerable prices. They’re torn down and are replaced by buildings that virtually fill the site.” (In Beverly Hills, new homes are restricted to 40% of the lot plus 1,500 square feet.)

“If you drive around, you’ll see the results, and it’s almost absurd. You see mansions that are built on the scale of an 18th-Century English country house that would be on dozens of acres of land suddenly plopped on a 100-foot-wide lot in Beverly Hills.”

Often they loom over the sizable homes nearby, incurring the wrath of neighbors who swear about what an eyesore the thing is, not to mention the dirt and noise caused by the construction.

The mansions alarm even those miles away from these pricey neighborhoods, who seethe at the juxtaposition of the outsized homes and homeless people nearby sleeping on bus benches, and at the lack of affordable housing for middle- and lower-income families.

“There is the disparity between rich and poor that this sort of thing points up,” Corsini says. “That’s something beyond the scope of the architect, it’s a problem that has to be tackled politically.”

“Clearly, it’s not like a car, where the smaller and more refined it is, the better,” says Dana Cuff, assistant professor in the schools of urban and regional planning and architecture at USC. “A big house is a clear demonstration that you’ve got a lot of money, so much so that you can build something you don’t even need.

“It also says something about society that there’s so little of the public realm that we live in. We entertain in our homes, we exercise in our homes, we have beauty salons, and those used to be public facilities.

“I think that’s sort of the sad aspect of it, that people fill their property so much that they don’t have lawns anymore; they’ve built to the maximum so the private life never comes out into the public life. It’s sort of cocooning with a gold lining.”

Cuff can understand neighbors being upset over the construction of a mansion in their neighborhood, even if the street already has a number of million-dollar homes.

“People might feel that the neighborhood is being completely ignored, if it blocks someone else’s view or it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. Plus, I don’t think people like to see that kind of change. In a neighborhood where there have been traditional kinds of houses, to see someone tear one down represents a kind of change that could put them out of their own neighborhood.”

While neighbors fume and the public is outraged at what it regards as displays of wretched excess, the owners of these homes seem to be scratching their heads wondering what all the fuss is about.

“It is a large house, but I don’t know, I can’t understand it,” says Coler, a 76-year-old commercial builder whose properties include the Anaheim Hilton and the Wilshire Estina condominium high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard.

“Aaron Spelling’s house is more overpowering than mine because it’s right on the street. I have nothing against his house, I’m not criticizing it in any way, but this house I can’t understand.”

Producer Spellings’ 56,500-square-foot manse in Holmby Hills set tongues wagging the moment he tore down the property’s existing house built in 1932 and once occupied by Bing Crosby.

One irate neighbor won an injunction against Spelling and the construction company when she tired of trucks driving over her lawn and workers leaving garbage on her property. Not yet landscaped, the towering structure across the street from Holmby Park still attracts drive-by gawkers.

Coler says his architect persuaded him to build big (the original plans were for a house half this size); the architect, Aleck Dugally, says Coler wanted something on a grander scale.

Whatever the case, Coler shows it off with great pride, pointing out the triangular bas-relief on the front of the house with frolicking nude figures of his wife and her sister, sculpted by Dugally.

Dugally offers his own explanation for the need to build big. He is working on two other homes in the 40,000-square-foot range, one with stables and its own polo field for a single client.

“What happened with King Tut? Here was a little man who had a lot of money, power, politics and sex appeal. The powerful people usually want to build a monument for themselves.

“What can they do? They can wear the best clothes, they can drive beautiful cars, they can eat the best food. But when they get older, often they can’t eat the best food, and they can’t drive so they get a car and driver. What’s left for them is their home.”

It’s free enterprise that makes building big possible, says Dugally, and that’s a trend he hopes never disappears.

John and Donna Crean of Newport Beach decided they needed a bigger house to accommodate their growing family. They are in the midst of building a compound with a 19,400-square-foot main house, a 2,000-square-foot gym, a 2,000-square-foot employees quarters and a 6,000-square-foot garage on four acres.

“We have four children that are all married, and 10 grandchildren,” Donna Crean explained. “When they come for Thanksgiving or Christmas we have to put up half the family in a hotel, and I would like to have them stay with us. We have a house now on the bay front, and my grandchildren can’t go outside and play.

“We also have friends who come and stay, and we like to entertain a lot. We thought this would be a great place to have charity groups do fund-raising affairs, and also we wanted to build it because it’s fun to build a big house.”

When the Creans razed the existing house on the new property, some outraged citizens wrote to the editor of their local paper.

“People wanted to know how could we tear that house down where there are so many homeless. That house wasn’t even fit for the homeless to live in. . . . As far as the criticism goes, it doesn’t bother me. My husband worked hard for his money, and we give half of what we earn away to charity.”

Recreational vehicle magnate John Crean says his new neighbors aren’t upset about the home, which he designed himself.

“It’s an area with large pieces of property,” he says, “and we’re probably a little bigger than most of the houses, but they’re all large homes. I’m 64 years old, and when you get that age, there are things you want to do, so you do them, what the heck, mostly for the fun of it.”

In Palos Verdes, businessman Tei-Fu Chen’s desire to build a 30,000-square-foot house for himself, his wife and their five children has neighbors and the Palos Verdes Estates planning commission in an uproar. He wants to build his dream house; they don’t want a monstrosity in the neighborhood.

While Chen’s plans conform to the city’s ordinance that a house fit on 30% plus 1,000 square feet of the lot, Palos Verdes Estates also has a “neighborhood compatibility” requirement that a new or remodeled structure should be compatible in size and design with others in the neighborhood and take into account the neighbors’ views and privacy. The planning commission will take up that issue at a meeting on Tuesday.

While the rich claim they just want a nice place to live, the public sometimes sees only a let-them-eat-cake attitude.

Architect Corsini believes that “On the one hand, a wealthy person says, ‘I’m going to work hard and accumulate money, and here’s my reward, a huge house.’ And that works just fine until it gets so big that it challenges our sense of equality and egalitarianism. Because in truth we don’t live in an egalitarian society.

“We have your average middle-class individuals, and maybe they’re happy being who they are, but they’re sold this idea through marketing that they shouldn’t be happy with who they are, they should want more things.

“Suddenly,” he adds, “it’s OK to be rich, it became OK to express yourself this way. If you think about the early Puritan capitalists, frugality and thrift went along with religious piousness, and the worst thing was to spend more than you had.

“That changed with the robber barons. Jimmy Carter conducted his affairs with that kind of modesty, but it wasn’t until the Reagan years that it was socially OK to display your wealth in an extravagant way.”

Then there’s the just-a-twinge-of-jealousy theory.

“With the people in the immediate area of one of these homes there is always an amount of awe and jealousy,” says architect Dugally. “Somebody thinks, ‘I have a $10-million house, but the person next door to me is building a $30-million house and mine seems like nothing.’ And I get calls from people all over saying, ‘How can you build a 42,000-square-foot house when there are starving people in the world?’

“It’s the have-nots who resent people spending that kind of money. Some are in awe over what they see, but the majority are resentful. I have a Rolls-Royce and my wife hates to drive it because people throw eggs at it and give her dirty looks.”

Realtors see the trend in a purely economic sense.

“The land has become so valuable that when you go to build new, it almost makes sense to build bigger, since the cost of construction is so much less than what the land is worth,” says real estate mogul Mike Glickman.

“There are a lot of features you can add, like projection rooms, exercise areas, beauty salons, suites for the teen-agers, dramatic entertaining areas.”

Bruce Nelson, a top-selling agent whose residential properties are almost always priced in the millions, says: “I said five years ago that almost every house in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air that is more than 20 or 30 years old is a candidate for a tear-down, with very few exceptions. A house done by one of our few great architects that has great bones, it will remain. But there were never that many great homes built in this area.

“As homes come on the market they are immediately snapped up and torn down. They didn’t think that was going to happen in Holmby Hills or Bel-Air, but it is now. It’s the land. The land is everything, that’s the bottom line. And location is everything. We are now up to the $5- to $5.5-million range for a prime acre in Holmby Hills. And of course, the house goes as soon as the bulldozer can be called.”

If living in a home the size of a hotel seems daunting, there are ways around that. John and Donna Crean have designed their own house-within-a-house; their first-floor bedroom suite contains a kitchen, so they don’t have to roam vast corridors to get a snack.

Alexander Coler doesn’t even plan to live in his house. He got a good deal on the property several years ago, but then decided he’d rather forsake the rat race and stay in Palm Springs, where he has one home and is building another, this one with its own golf course.