BIG : Trends: The wealthy are flocking to build their castles on large lots : in Ventura County, where there are no size restrictions. Some find : the ‘mansionization’ obscene; others say it will raise property values.

Ivan Liska, do you really need 8,200 square feet, 12 sinks and nine toilets in that house you’re building in Somis?

“We don’t necessarily need it this big,” Liska said, “but it suits the neighborhood. . . . It’s basically an investment--the right property, the right house.”

George Muna, is a 2,000-square-foot living room and 2,000 more square feet of covered patio space absolutely necessary in your new place off Santa Rosa Road?

“We entertain a lot,” Muna said, “and we like to have a large entertainment area.” He also has about 1,500 square feet of master bedroom, 7,076 square feet of house altogether and absolute confidence that “there’s a better market for larger homes.”

And you, Larry and Maj Hagman, what are you going to do in Ojai with 16,961 square feet of house, a helipad and a 30-some-foot-tall observation tower? The “Dallas” actor and his wife, who live with their two children in Malibu Colony, declined to be interviewed for this story. But their taste in housing puts them in the company of dozens of ambitious builders who have set to house-raising in Ventura County in the last two years. Big is in, and even bigger is even better. Even if there is no particular use for the space, as some homeowners readily admit, that square footage may mean more profit when the house is sold.

“Everyone likes footage . It’s the No. 1 priority,” said Mark Sutter, an Encino architect and contractor now at work on a 12,000-square-foot family home off Los Angeles Avenue near Somis.

“These large homes are essentially ego homes. Nobody needs to live in 12,000 square feet,” Sutter said. “But with any affluent person, it’s always in the back of the mind. Wouldn’t you like to design your own house? Sometimes I put it into this analogy: ‘Wouldn’t you rather have your own child than adopt?’ ”

Signs of “mansionization” have been showing up throughout Southern California in recent years, often linked to the arrival of money-toting emigres from Los Angeles. When enormous houses began to show up on not-so-big lots in Beverly Hills, Glendale, San Marino and La Canada Flintridge over the last two years, local governments responded with restrictions limiting the house-to-lot square-footage ratio.

But in largely rural Ventura County the lots are larger, and local governments, busy with broader growth issues, have erected no barriers to bigness. And so, following the path of least resistance, the mansion-builders have come.

County officials say they keep no specific statistics on oversize homes, but the trend, they agree, is evident on the hillsides of Ojai, the banks of Lake Sherwood and along Santa Rosa Road near Camarillo.

“When I first started in this business, in the late ‘70s, it seemed to me that the largest homes out there were pushing 3,000 square feet,” said John Herrick, president of the Ventura Board of Realtors.

“I think it’s good for the county that we’re getting high-income people--more professionals. . . . I think that’s a better mix than a bunch of blue-collar folks all over the place.”

The big new houses might be less imposing if they were accompanied by mature trees, as they are in well-to-do communities such as Montecito to the north. Instead, many of the new homes sit alongside bare fields or atop stark ridges.

“The cost of the land has become so steep that people really have to maximize the use of the property,” said Nancy Francis, manager of residential development for Ventura County. “You have to have some way to get back the cost of the land, so you put a great big house on it. . . .

“Right now, big houses seem to be what the market wants, so that’s what builders are building. . . . That’s what people are moving away from Los Angeles for. They’ve not moving to live in condos.”

Bill Windroth, Ventura County’s top building official, remembers one 6,000-square-foot plan that crossed his desk in late March. The 6,000 figure was for the main house alone. Then there was the servant’s residence, which, Windroth said dryly, “was somewhat larger than my house.”

If the county’s builders follow through on the permit applications they’ve filed in recent months, plenty more houses like that one will soon be rising: There’s one for 6,213 square feet in Ojai; another for 6,623 square feet in Oak View; and, elsewhere in the same community, a 10,006-square-foot project with nine toilets. On Los Angeles Avenue near Somis, upon a 12-acre agricultural lot, Mark Sutter’s 12,000-square-foot house and seven-car garage design is a year away from completion.

“They’re not really into the agricultural end of it,” said Sutter of the owners. “They just said, ‘We found a lot we like,’ and it happens to be in an agricultural area.’ ”

“The people come in,” said Camarillo architect Robert W. Lee, “and they want a 4,000-, 5,000-, 6,000-square-foot house. They’re not concerned about cost too much. Design is the thing we talk about, and location. . . . We don’t even talk about water conservation. We talk about the amenities of a house, like circulating hot water, heaters and air-conditioning units.”

He doesn’t talk much about water conservation, he added quickly, “because I do it automatically” in planning. Lee--whose own home is just over 4,000 square feet--also argues that inside-the-house water use varies little between large and small places.

Liska, a general contractor who does most of his work in Los Angeles, is building his 8,200-square-foot mansion for himself, his wife and their three children. Building a home this size, he said, “is always a gamble in the beginning. But now it looks like everyone else is doing the same thing.”

Muna, who makes his living speculating in real estate, offers a similar explanation for his new home.

“If we want to sell it in the future,” he said, “there’s a better market for larger homes.” And to make his new home even more attractive to future potential buyers, Mura said, he was careful to make the house visible from a distance.

“I considered the location, No. 1. It’s 6 1/2 acres and we have a 360-degree view. We’re sitting on a knoll. . . . It’s visible from everywhere you drive around. All the surrounding roads. It’s Mediterranean style.”

Muna’s wife, Doris, meanwhile, is marketing luxury homes in the Camelot subdivision along Santa Rosa Road--59 lots, each at least one acre, each house at least 3,600 square feet. Prices begin at $375,000 for a bare lot and $800,000 for a house on a lot.

Farther south, Murdock Residential Development intends next month to start building the first luxury units in a massive project at Lake Sherwood near Thousand Oaks. Murdock intends to put as many as 630 large houses and condominiums on 1,900 acres.

The Murdock project begins with about two-dozen houses of 3,200 square feet each. Then there are the big houses--customized homes that Trotter said will in many cases exceed 5,000 square feet, and may occasionally reach 10,000. Trotter said he expects the lots to be commensurately large, from three-quarters of an acre to 20 acres.

“A lot of it might be natural rock and scrub,” said Murdock President Don Trotter, wary of criticism over water consumption. “We’re not talking about two acres of landscaping.”

Houses such as those and his own, Muna said, “will increase the value of the whole area. I’m putting in four acres of citrus and avocados. That makes it clear, makes it greener. We’re not going with high-density. That’s a big plus for the area.”

The idea of building an enormous house in Ventura County is hardly novel. That’s particularly clear in Santa Paula, where Realtors Edwin Nutt and Associates are offering for sale the historic Faulkner House, an 8,000-square-foot Queen Anne Victorian home on 27 acres of agricultural land.

The house, with hardwood paneling, stained glass windows, hand-painted ceilings and a private narrow-gauge railroad, was built in 1894. Asking price: $3 million.

Nutt and Associates agent Joe Wigert, who is handling the Faulkner House, usually handles agricultural properties. But he, too, has seen the writing on the broad new walls rising around the countryside.

“There’s more interest in large homes. No question,” he said. Having already found “serious interest” in the Faulkner House, he expects the sale to be much easier than it would have been a decade ago. The same, he suggested, holds true for new big houses.

“But people who can afford it have always made statements with their homes. I think maybe we went through a period where it was a little quieter, but it’s coming back,” Wigert said. “My dog wants a bigger house.”

Big houses cost more to heat and cool. If they’re more than 5,000 square feet, the county requires an interior sprinkler system, which adds substantially to building costs. And when big houses are set on big lots with elaborate yards, they may use large amounts of water--perhaps this area’s most precious commodity at the moment.

But then, building officials and architects say, the whole idea behind some big houses is conspicuous consumption--even in a county where a homeowner’s castle may rise among trees that shelter transients or a barn that houses farm workers.

“Some of these things are obscene,” said Bill Windroth, “when you look at it from that point of view.”

They don’t look too good from Russ Baggerly’s point of view, either. Baggerly, a board member of the county’s Environmental Coalition, said he began to notice the proliferation of oversized homes about three years ago. He blames it squarely on the migration of Angelenos.

“The people who are moving in here have a different sense of place than the people who have lived here for some time,” he said. “When they see traffic at Highway 101 and Victoria, they think it’s pretty bad, but it’s not like anything they came from. Whereas we think ‘It’s Los Angeles .’ . . . It’s part of the way that Southern California has continued to destroy itself.”

But might destruction, like beauty, be in the eye of the beholder?

“One big house,” said Board of Realtors President Herrick, “is less of a drain on the ecology than five or six houses on the same parcel--a lot less people, a lot less use of energy resources and things like that. And a lot of these people are using solar, and a lot of more efficient energy than what they’re putting in some of these cheap tract homes.”

And in the time it takes to couch these arguments, it may well be that someone else has begun to pour another 6,000-square-foot foundation.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately,” said David Sargeant, a member of the city of Ventura’s architectural review board and an architect with Rasmussen & Associates. “It’s a symptom of the same factor that has been affecting all of Southern California: the amazing mobility of the automobile that makes it possible for somebody to live in Ventura County and work in Los Angeles. . . .

“If I had to predict, I would guess that in a lot of communities, people are getting a lot more sensitive to how new buildings can change the way a place looks. And it can be for better or worse.”

Big Ideas

‘These large homes are essentially ego homes.’

Mark Sutter, architect and contractor

‘It’s basically an investment--the right property, the right house.’

Ivan Liska of Somis

‘Right now, big houses seem to be what the market wants.’

Nancy Francis, county official

ON THE COVER

This new house near Somis is 12,000 square feet and has seven garages.