The Los Angeles Compound Fever

HOLLYWOOD

To live in Los Angeles is to tolerate much, from a local ecosystem prone to catastrophe to the adoption of the automobile as a virtual exoskeleton to the assholic hubris of all things Laker-related. Usually there’s some trend-conscious rationale for these routine affronts to dignity and reason: Between lo-cal mojitos, a diehard Angeleno will regale you with the one about how southern California is a vital new millennial portal to the Pacific Rim, say, or reprise the hoary old line about the Golden State being the experimental group in the adoption of bold new popcult trends and lifestyle formations.

It’s harder to claim such cutting-edge cachet, though, when the regional economy is looking more and more like a permanent wasteland and the barons of SoCal’s entertainment-and-tech world aren’t so much blazing forward with new models of entrepreneurial brio new as mounting a full-scale retreat into feudalism.

Such, at any rate, is the sobering brunt of a recent real-estate dispatch from the Los Angeles Times’ Lauren Beale. On the Westside of L.A., where the “ultra-high-end” propertied class clusters, Beale notes, “today’s super-wealthy, seeking ever greater privacy, are increasingly buying adjacent properties as a buffer zone around their mansions. And that’s made the compound the hottest commodity on L.A.’s high-end market.”

“We’ve never seen this much activity going on” in the compound market, reports Bel-Air Sotheby’s broker Drew Mandile. Perversely enough, it seems that the multi-estate compound is its own symptom of the relentless pursuit of status in an economy grown so otherwise sluggish that no one-including one’s erstwhile neighbors-is really around to admire your own special rage-to-accumulate. “In a class-conscious society, people find new ways to demonstrate their status,” says Elizabeth Currid, an assistant USC professor [Ed. Note: And longtime Awl pal!] who specializes in “cultural shifts among the wealthy.”

“The middle class may be able to buy Louis Vuitton bags and nice holidays,” Currid notes, “but they can’t buy two mansions in Bel-Air. This is a way the global elite differentiate themselves.”

The odd thing about this dynamic, though, is that the super wealthy are differentiating themselves to an increasingly empty house-or houses, as the case may be. Indeed, the appeal of the compound is its reassuring remoteness from prying neighborly eyes.

“If you don’t have a neighbor anymore, you create more privacy,” Kurt Rappaport, the co-founder of the Westside Estate Agency brightly reports. Of course, Beale observes, the “buffer” homes picked up by the L.A. latifundia set aren’t kept vacant. “Some house family, friends, guests or staff.” And in the sort of helpful disclaiming aside that only makes sense in Los Angeles, she adds: “But these aren’t mother-in-law cottages or little guesthouses like the one Kato Kaelin holed up in at O.J. Simpson’s old place in Brentwood: Think multimillion-dollar mansions — next door, behind or even a few doors down.”

What’s more, Beale notes, the add-on estates aren’t entirely divorced from use-value. “The adjoining properties may be used during major fundraisers or large-scale entertaining, Rappaport said, to create more parking or as a place to stage the catering during lavish events. Some buyers have been known to tear down well-known homes for more elbow room.”

That’s the story of high-end L.A. in a nutshell, really: First time tragedy, second time catering staging area.

The lebensraum initiative is spearheaded by area film-industry and financial moguls-leading compound-holders include movie chieftain Terry Semel, producer-cum-LBO king Tom Gores, and Frank McCourt, the LA Dodgers owner now in the throes of a messy divorce. But the quest for domestic privacy is also a hectic pursuit of the town’s celebrity class, so they’ve also been moving into the multi-estate market, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Ben Stiller, and Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas among the recent converts (though one can’t help suspecting that the latter couple is perhaps trying a bit too hard to advertise their need for privacy, in the same way that stars and executives on the brink of irrelevance thronged to 12-step conclaves as a relevance-sealing status move in The Player).

One of the earlier celebrity adopters, indeed, was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’d agglomerated four separate parcels, containing five homes, a pool and a tennis court, making up more than five acres in the Pacific Palisades, before unloading them in favor of a Brentwood spread. I guess that’s why John McCain earned an early Schwarzegger endorsement: Multi-home owning speaks to, um, multi-home owning.

But the McCourt fiefdom, now being carved up in divorce court, seems to be the most resplendent compound-or compound set, rather — lording over the L.A. market. When the couple pulled their Boston moving vans into Los Angeles in 2004, Beale writes, they unloaded their household into a starter estate featuring a “Palladin-style villa of 20,00 square feet as a main residence” for $25 million. By year’s end, though, they’d also scooped up a neighboring mini-mansion of 8,400 square feet for $6.5 million.” In 2005, they hopscotched over to Malibu, where a “John Lautner-designed architectural trophy home for more than $27 million” and its adjoining spread, a mere $19 million affair that nonetheless nearly doubled the McCourts’ portion of prized private beachfront from 80 to 146 feet. Maybe the Dodgers executive was already angling to acquire Manny Ramirez, and wanted to line up a secure landing port for contraband shipments of human growth hormone.

By now, of course, the market is already offering customized double-home lots for the less personally imperial, and perhaps more cost-conscious, buyer. The gated community of Beverly Park, Beale writes, now offers a “comparatively affordable two-dwelling compound with 18 bedrooms and 28 bathrooms”-evidently the Angeleno power elite has grown less continent as they’ve become more privacy-mad-all for a low, low $21.995 million. All told, there’s “more than 29,000 square feet of living space, a swimming pool, a sundeck, and a changing cabana.”

Of course, one could argue that maybe LA really is still on the socio-cultural cutting-edge, and fomenting the conditions for widespread social revolution in the bailed-out husk of the broader American political economy. After all, the city has already inaugurated its own version of Bastille Day, with the budget-mandated release of many inmates of the County Jail. The only hitch from here, though, is deciding just where to stage the Tennis Court Oath.

Chris Lehmann does okay in just one house pretty much.