Lifestyles of the rich and insulated?

I’m beginning to believe that you write about homes like that of Brian and Gigi Grazer [“The High Life Without Airs,” May 26] in order to give your readers a good belly laugh every Thursday. How on earth can you classify a home with an 11,000-square-foot addition on a four-acre parcel in Pacific Palisades as “rich,” but not “showy”? Are show-biz people so insulated from real life that they actually believe that this addition is only making a house “comfortable,” and that it doesn’t count as conspicuous consumption?

As one of my co-workers put it, “If they are down to earth, where does that leave the rest of us?”

Wake up, L.A. Times. Your average reader lives in a 3/2, 1,800-square-foot house for which he paid way too much money and is trying to figure out a way to update and remodel that doesn’t involve $30,000 caissons. Sheesh, get real, will ya?

Susan S. Vignale

Pasadena

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I found it impossible not to laugh out loud at the hypocrisy of the cover article of the Home section. Can you say “cliffside compound” out loud and believe you are not putting on airs? How much did Gigi Grazer pay for this fawning faux article?

A.L. “Bud” Byrnes III

Encino

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When I read Mimi Avins’ article, I had to check the date to make sure it wasn’t April Fools’ Day. What a joke. The article reports that the Grazers didn’t buy a $500,000 table. How restrained of them. I guess this is Hollywood, the land of make-believe, and trying to make people believe the ridiculous. Why not just portray the “compound” as the massive, expensive mansion that it really is? I guess that story would be better suited for reality TV.

Jill Lurie

Los Angeles

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Why do the Grazers permit their son to jump all over the living room furniture?

Toby Horn

Los Angeles