CTroyMathis
05-20-2003, 04:23 PM
Mansionization!
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Big, Big House
Billionaire Rafik Hariri Wants to Build a 103,667-Square-Foot House in Washington. That's a Very . . .
By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 17, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62133-2003May15.html
Think Buckingham Palace or Versailles. Then imagine it in Northwest Washington.
That's something like what a Lebanese billionaire is now mulling over for the Foxhall neighborhood -- a 103,667-square-foot house that would be one of the largest ever built in the United States, about 50 times bigger than the average American home.
Okay, it's not the biggest residence in the world, according to the latest edition of Guinness World Records. That's a sprawling palace owned by the Sultan of Brunei -- a 2.1 million-square-foot house with 257 bathrooms.
And it's not Biltmore, the 19th-century Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville, N.C., which at about 170,000 square feet is the largest U.S. house ever built. Its 250 rooms have 65 fireplaces. These days, it's a museum, not a home, though it's still owned by the family.
But hey, we're still talking a really, really, really big house in our back yard.
For comparison's sake, Guinness reports that the largest residence in Hollywood, which has plenty of big, ostentatious houses, is only about a third as big. That's TV producer Aaron Spelling's 35,600-square-foot house, dubbed "The Manor." Bill and Melinda Gates's house outside of Seattle is 65,000 square feet by some measures. And the White House comes in at about 55,000 square feet.
Humongous private houses are no rarity in Washington and its suburbs, but if this one is ever built, it would dwarf anything that's here now.
A company representing Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, one of the world's richest men, this spring filed an application for a permit to build a single-family residence with the square footage of an office building at 2101 Foxhall Rd. NW.
The permit application said the house would be built on a 16.2-acre tract that Hariri bought in 1987 for $13 million through a corporation named Raha III Inc. About a year after the purchase, he razed a 26-room mansion built there in 1929 by Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, the wealthy art patrons who founded the Phillips Collection museum near Dupont Circle.
Rafic A. Bizri, a spokesman for Raha III, said the company was considering different options for the vacant land. He said the residence described in the permit application, which came with detailed building plans, was just one of the options under review.
But it seems Hariri has been thinking about a Washington palace for a long time.
Gopal Ahluwalia, head of research at the National Association of Homebuilders, said a local architectural firm contacted him about 10 years ago, saying it had been commissioned to design a house of that size on that lot. The firm asked Ahluwalia if he could find houses of a similar size built in this country and if he could arrange visits to them.
"All I could find that even approached that size was two houses in California, one 60,000 square feet and the other 80,000 square feet, both owned by people in the entertainment business," Ahluwalia said. "I told them that there were a lot of big old castles in England to look at. But they wanted a modern house."
Ahluwalia said the firm told him at the time that Hariri was planning to spend $45 million on the house, which would include a huge heated and air-conditioned garage. Everything would be constructed with the best and most expensive building materials in the world. (Think Carrara marble for the driveway.) On the permit application filed recently, the building costs were estimated at $25 million.
"I asked them if they were planning gold doorknobs," Ahluwalia said. "They were talking about a master bedroom the size of a football field. I asked the architect, 'What happens in the middle of the night when the guy has to go to the bathroom? He'll miss it.' The architect said he wouldn't tell the owner that because then he'll want an escalator put in." Ahluwalia said he never heard from the firm again.
Robert N. Stockwell, an associate with WDG Architecture in the District, the architects named in the new permit application, said "there was no imminent plan" to start construction and that the proposed structure may never be built. Nonetheless, the permit did say that the builders want to start construction as soon as possible and projects completion for 2004.
Stockwell said, however, that his firm had submitted the same project to the city two times before and that it was approved in 1997. He declined to discuss details of the proposed residence.
Do people really continue to submit plans when they have no intention of building? Well, sometimes rich folks do change their minds. For example, Hariri's site is practically next door to a tract where local philanthropist Betty Brown Casey has proposed building a mayoral mansion for the District. Before Casey bought the land in 2001, it was owned by a member of the Qatar royal family who once had plans to upgrade and move into the old 12,500-square-foot mansion there, but never followed through.
When Hariri bought the Foxhall land, he paid the highest residential sales price ever in the city at the time. If he builds the house he's proposing, whether it costs $25 million or $45 million, it will be the most expensive home ever built in the Washington area.
And we're no slackers here when it comes to monster houses.
Four out of the top five big-house communities in the country are in the Washington suburbs, according to figures from the 2000 census. Travilah and Darnestown in Montgomery County come in first and second respectively. In Fairfax County, Wolf Trap comes in third in the country and Great Falls is fifth. (The others in the top 10 are near Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Cincinnati.)
That ranking is based on the percentage of homes with nine or more rooms; unfinished basements, bathrooms and utility rooms don't count.
"We just love big houses here in the Washington area," said Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Polytechnic University in Alexandria. "It's the richest region in the country if you look at household income. And although housing is expensive here, it's still a relative bargain compared to some other cities in the country, like New York, Los Angeles or Boston. All that creates the perfect storm for monster homes."
An analysis of property records in the area shows that the biggest privately owned house listed in the public record around Washington is in Upper Marlboro in Prince George's County -- a 25,730-square-foot estate owned by Rollie and Dorothy Washington. Rollie Washington, for many years a District government contractor, was in the spotlight in 1999 when the city evacuated two of his group homes for the mentally retarded following a Washington Post investigation of abuse and neglect in the group home system. Following close behind is a 25,186-square-foot home in Bethesda owned by Pakistani entrepreneur Rashid Chaudary, whose Illinois-based Raani Corp., one of the biggest Asian-American-owned manufacturers in the country, makes cosmetics and toiletries. Third comes Sharon Rockefeller's 22,652-square-foot estate in Northwest Washington. And in fourth and fifth places are mega-homes in Potomac and on Rock Creek Drive in the District. These rankings don't take into account a handful of very big house-like buildings in the District owned by foreign governments for use as embassies.
Tech tycoon Jim Kimsey's new digs overlooking the Potomac River in McLean might be substantially bigger than any of the other private houses, though. Kimsey's estate is not yet listed in the property tax records because it was only recently finished. Builders estimate it could be as big as 35,000 square feet.
Those who have seen it -- about 300 people were recently at a party there where the Beach Boys provided the entertainment -- say it has at least a 25-car heated garage, a guest house that's connected to the main house through the garage, a huge tennis complex with a viewing area for watching games on sunny afternoons, and several separate wings, all with dramatic views of the Potomac below.
Kimsey's place is certainly the largest house in Northern Virginia, real estate agents and builders say.
The largest house previously on the Fairfax tax rolls is Merrywood, the childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, just up the street from Kimsey. It's a paltry 17,254 square feet.
The world's biggest residences, such as Buckingham Palace, house more than just a nuclear family. For instance, of the London palace's 450 rooms, 188 are for staff -- a place that large takes a lot of cleaning. Some of Washington's monster houses, however, are occupied by just one couple, or even by one person, builders and designers say.
Dee Thornton, an interior designer at Houseworks Interiors in Alexandria who's worked on several mega-houses, says she bid on one job where a single woman was rattling around in a 10,000-square-foot house all by her lonesome.
Ted Visnic, president of custom builder Mitchell, Best & Visnic, said he has built several large mansions just for empty-nester couples.
"It's people who like art, people who like to entertain," he said.
American homes have been swelling over the last decade even as the size of American households has shrunk. The average new American home measured 2,324 square feet in 2002, up from 1,900 square feet 10 years ago, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.
New home sizes seem to be stabilizing now, however. In 2001, the average sized new home was four square feet larger than in 2002. The average existing American home is on the low side of 2,000 square feet.
"People who have these large homes don't use most of the house," said Ahluwalia of the homebuilders group. "Most people use the master bedroom, the kitchen, the family room and the dining room. Beyond that, it's extremely limited."
So how do these wealthy people fill up these monster houses?
Mega-houses here can have indoor swimming pools and cabanas, gyms rather than just exercise rooms, wrapping rooms, golf-club-swinging rooms, tennis-ball-hitting rooms, indoor basketball courts -- with each room the size of a normal house, high-end real estate agents report.
And then there are the fantasies.
Custom builder Visnic said the most unusual room he has ever designed in a local mega-mansion was a German-style beer hall for an Austrian owner who was nostalgic for his childhood home in the foothills of the Alps.
"We blew up this photograph of the Alps, put it in a glassed window frame, so one wall of the room was mountains," he said. "You could sit at the table in the room, drink a beer and look through the window and see the Alps. We put silk flowers between the glass and the Alps on the other side, so it looked like the flowers were in a field with the mountains in the background."
Adjacent to the Tyrolean-style room with dark pine paneling and pine floors was a long brick hallway that led to a wine cellar that housed 3,000 bottles.
A beer hall or two is, of course, just a bagatelle compared with the over-the-top indulgences of some of history's more extravagant homes -- Versailles has 2,153 windows and 67 staircases.
Visnic said he has also built cobble-stoned villages in sprawling basements with faux streetscapes. The homeowner then strolls down the fake street, stopping into the pub or the cafe, just like at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. One Visnic house also had a room that housed a full-sized Piper plane.
Custom builder Jim Gibson of Gibson Builders LLC in Washington, who has built several over-sized houses, says he's getting more requests for safe rooms hidden within the house that can protect a homeowner not only from a bullet from a .44 magnum, but also from biological attacks.
"You can live in these safe rooms for up to a week," Gibson said. "They've got fully stocked kitchens, beds for the family and a full filtration system where air doesn't need to be brought in from the outside."
Gibson said he built a room in a house owned by tennis enthusiasts: It featured a hitting area flanked on one side by a big grandstand filled with fans and a referee faux-painted on the wall. On the other side was a plexiglass window with a seating area behind it where the parents could sit and watch their kids, who were ranked tennis players, practice their serves.
Anita Tauber, an agent at Long & Foster Real Estate Inc., says she has a home on the market now in Potomac where the basement alone is twice as big as an average house. "It's a world unto itself," she said. "There's the poker room, the pool table room, the exercise room, the movie room, the wine cellar with 1,800 bottles and the ballroom with the dance floor and the grand piano." All that is in addition to all the regular areas most of us have in our basements. (Spare bedroom, maybe? Laundry room?)
Super-sized houses cry out for super-sized furniture, decorators say.
"You need big lamps, big art, big furniture, big chandeliers, big coffee tables, big everything, to bring these homes down to a human scale," designer Thornton said. "Little knickknacks just don't do it." She said huge wall tapestries to cover huge walls have come back into vogue.
And manufacturers have responded to the need for big stuff to put in big houses. "Many manufacturers are making large-scale pieces now," said Thornton, "like sofas that are 10 feet long and 45 inches deep."
So what could Hariri possibly put in his proposed house/castle?
"He'll have everything you could ever think of," guessed researcher Ahluwalia. "Instead of an exercise room, he'll have an entire gym. Instead of a media room, he'll have a full-sized movie theater. Instead of a garage, he'll have a parking garage. He won't be building a house. He'll be building a community."
But what the heck for?
"It doesn't have anything to do with reality," speculated one local real estate agent who has handled lots of big houses. "You're dealing with somebody who has billions of dollars and is going to build a tribute to himself."
Database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.
__________________________________________________
Big, Big House
Billionaire Rafik Hariri Wants to Build a 103,667-Square-Foot House in Washington. That's a Very . . .
By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 17, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62133-2003May15.html
Think Buckingham Palace or Versailles. Then imagine it in Northwest Washington.
That's something like what a Lebanese billionaire is now mulling over for the Foxhall neighborhood -- a 103,667-square-foot house that would be one of the largest ever built in the United States, about 50 times bigger than the average American home.
Okay, it's not the biggest residence in the world, according to the latest edition of Guinness World Records. That's a sprawling palace owned by the Sultan of Brunei -- a 2.1 million-square-foot house with 257 bathrooms.
And it's not Biltmore, the 19th-century Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville, N.C., which at about 170,000 square feet is the largest U.S. house ever built. Its 250 rooms have 65 fireplaces. These days, it's a museum, not a home, though it's still owned by the family.
But hey, we're still talking a really, really, really big house in our back yard.
For comparison's sake, Guinness reports that the largest residence in Hollywood, which has plenty of big, ostentatious houses, is only about a third as big. That's TV producer Aaron Spelling's 35,600-square-foot house, dubbed "The Manor." Bill and Melinda Gates's house outside of Seattle is 65,000 square feet by some measures. And the White House comes in at about 55,000 square feet.
Humongous private houses are no rarity in Washington and its suburbs, but if this one is ever built, it would dwarf anything that's here now.
A company representing Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, one of the world's richest men, this spring filed an application for a permit to build a single-family residence with the square footage of an office building at 2101 Foxhall Rd. NW.
The permit application said the house would be built on a 16.2-acre tract that Hariri bought in 1987 for $13 million through a corporation named Raha III Inc. About a year after the purchase, he razed a 26-room mansion built there in 1929 by Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, the wealthy art patrons who founded the Phillips Collection museum near Dupont Circle.
Rafic A. Bizri, a spokesman for Raha III, said the company was considering different options for the vacant land. He said the residence described in the permit application, which came with detailed building plans, was just one of the options under review.
But it seems Hariri has been thinking about a Washington palace for a long time.
Gopal Ahluwalia, head of research at the National Association of Homebuilders, said a local architectural firm contacted him about 10 years ago, saying it had been commissioned to design a house of that size on that lot. The firm asked Ahluwalia if he could find houses of a similar size built in this country and if he could arrange visits to them.
"All I could find that even approached that size was two houses in California, one 60,000 square feet and the other 80,000 square feet, both owned by people in the entertainment business," Ahluwalia said. "I told them that there were a lot of big old castles in England to look at. But they wanted a modern house."
Ahluwalia said the firm told him at the time that Hariri was planning to spend $45 million on the house, which would include a huge heated and air-conditioned garage. Everything would be constructed with the best and most expensive building materials in the world. (Think Carrara marble for the driveway.) On the permit application filed recently, the building costs were estimated at $25 million.
"I asked them if they were planning gold doorknobs," Ahluwalia said. "They were talking about a master bedroom the size of a football field. I asked the architect, 'What happens in the middle of the night when the guy has to go to the bathroom? He'll miss it.' The architect said he wouldn't tell the owner that because then he'll want an escalator put in." Ahluwalia said he never heard from the firm again.
Robert N. Stockwell, an associate with WDG Architecture in the District, the architects named in the new permit application, said "there was no imminent plan" to start construction and that the proposed structure may never be built. Nonetheless, the permit did say that the builders want to start construction as soon as possible and projects completion for 2004.
Stockwell said, however, that his firm had submitted the same project to the city two times before and that it was approved in 1997. He declined to discuss details of the proposed residence.
Do people really continue to submit plans when they have no intention of building? Well, sometimes rich folks do change their minds. For example, Hariri's site is practically next door to a tract where local philanthropist Betty Brown Casey has proposed building a mayoral mansion for the District. Before Casey bought the land in 2001, it was owned by a member of the Qatar royal family who once had plans to upgrade and move into the old 12,500-square-foot mansion there, but never followed through.
When Hariri bought the Foxhall land, he paid the highest residential sales price ever in the city at the time. If he builds the house he's proposing, whether it costs $25 million or $45 million, it will be the most expensive home ever built in the Washington area.
And we're no slackers here when it comes to monster houses.
Four out of the top five big-house communities in the country are in the Washington suburbs, according to figures from the 2000 census. Travilah and Darnestown in Montgomery County come in first and second respectively. In Fairfax County, Wolf Trap comes in third in the country and Great Falls is fifth. (The others in the top 10 are near Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Cincinnati.)
That ranking is based on the percentage of homes with nine or more rooms; unfinished basements, bathrooms and utility rooms don't count.
"We just love big houses here in the Washington area," said Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Polytechnic University in Alexandria. "It's the richest region in the country if you look at household income. And although housing is expensive here, it's still a relative bargain compared to some other cities in the country, like New York, Los Angeles or Boston. All that creates the perfect storm for monster homes."
An analysis of property records in the area shows that the biggest privately owned house listed in the public record around Washington is in Upper Marlboro in Prince George's County -- a 25,730-square-foot estate owned by Rollie and Dorothy Washington. Rollie Washington, for many years a District government contractor, was in the spotlight in 1999 when the city evacuated two of his group homes for the mentally retarded following a Washington Post investigation of abuse and neglect in the group home system. Following close behind is a 25,186-square-foot home in Bethesda owned by Pakistani entrepreneur Rashid Chaudary, whose Illinois-based Raani Corp., one of the biggest Asian-American-owned manufacturers in the country, makes cosmetics and toiletries. Third comes Sharon Rockefeller's 22,652-square-foot estate in Northwest Washington. And in fourth and fifth places are mega-homes in Potomac and on Rock Creek Drive in the District. These rankings don't take into account a handful of very big house-like buildings in the District owned by foreign governments for use as embassies.
Tech tycoon Jim Kimsey's new digs overlooking the Potomac River in McLean might be substantially bigger than any of the other private houses, though. Kimsey's estate is not yet listed in the property tax records because it was only recently finished. Builders estimate it could be as big as 35,000 square feet.
Those who have seen it -- about 300 people were recently at a party there where the Beach Boys provided the entertainment -- say it has at least a 25-car heated garage, a guest house that's connected to the main house through the garage, a huge tennis complex with a viewing area for watching games on sunny afternoons, and several separate wings, all with dramatic views of the Potomac below.
Kimsey's place is certainly the largest house in Northern Virginia, real estate agents and builders say.
The largest house previously on the Fairfax tax rolls is Merrywood, the childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, just up the street from Kimsey. It's a paltry 17,254 square feet.
The world's biggest residences, such as Buckingham Palace, house more than just a nuclear family. For instance, of the London palace's 450 rooms, 188 are for staff -- a place that large takes a lot of cleaning. Some of Washington's monster houses, however, are occupied by just one couple, or even by one person, builders and designers say.
Dee Thornton, an interior designer at Houseworks Interiors in Alexandria who's worked on several mega-houses, says she bid on one job where a single woman was rattling around in a 10,000-square-foot house all by her lonesome.
Ted Visnic, president of custom builder Mitchell, Best & Visnic, said he has built several large mansions just for empty-nester couples.
"It's people who like art, people who like to entertain," he said.
American homes have been swelling over the last decade even as the size of American households has shrunk. The average new American home measured 2,324 square feet in 2002, up from 1,900 square feet 10 years ago, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.
New home sizes seem to be stabilizing now, however. In 2001, the average sized new home was four square feet larger than in 2002. The average existing American home is on the low side of 2,000 square feet.
"People who have these large homes don't use most of the house," said Ahluwalia of the homebuilders group. "Most people use the master bedroom, the kitchen, the family room and the dining room. Beyond that, it's extremely limited."
So how do these wealthy people fill up these monster houses?
Mega-houses here can have indoor swimming pools and cabanas, gyms rather than just exercise rooms, wrapping rooms, golf-club-swinging rooms, tennis-ball-hitting rooms, indoor basketball courts -- with each room the size of a normal house, high-end real estate agents report.
And then there are the fantasies.
Custom builder Visnic said the most unusual room he has ever designed in a local mega-mansion was a German-style beer hall for an Austrian owner who was nostalgic for his childhood home in the foothills of the Alps.
"We blew up this photograph of the Alps, put it in a glassed window frame, so one wall of the room was mountains," he said. "You could sit at the table in the room, drink a beer and look through the window and see the Alps. We put silk flowers between the glass and the Alps on the other side, so it looked like the flowers were in a field with the mountains in the background."
Adjacent to the Tyrolean-style room with dark pine paneling and pine floors was a long brick hallway that led to a wine cellar that housed 3,000 bottles.
A beer hall or two is, of course, just a bagatelle compared with the over-the-top indulgences of some of history's more extravagant homes -- Versailles has 2,153 windows and 67 staircases.
Visnic said he has also built cobble-stoned villages in sprawling basements with faux streetscapes. The homeowner then strolls down the fake street, stopping into the pub or the cafe, just like at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. One Visnic house also had a room that housed a full-sized Piper plane.
Custom builder Jim Gibson of Gibson Builders LLC in Washington, who has built several over-sized houses, says he's getting more requests for safe rooms hidden within the house that can protect a homeowner not only from a bullet from a .44 magnum, but also from biological attacks.
"You can live in these safe rooms for up to a week," Gibson said. "They've got fully stocked kitchens, beds for the family and a full filtration system where air doesn't need to be brought in from the outside."
Gibson said he built a room in a house owned by tennis enthusiasts: It featured a hitting area flanked on one side by a big grandstand filled with fans and a referee faux-painted on the wall. On the other side was a plexiglass window with a seating area behind it where the parents could sit and watch their kids, who were ranked tennis players, practice their serves.
Anita Tauber, an agent at Long & Foster Real Estate Inc., says she has a home on the market now in Potomac where the basement alone is twice as big as an average house. "It's a world unto itself," she said. "There's the poker room, the pool table room, the exercise room, the movie room, the wine cellar with 1,800 bottles and the ballroom with the dance floor and the grand piano." All that is in addition to all the regular areas most of us have in our basements. (Spare bedroom, maybe? Laundry room?)
Super-sized houses cry out for super-sized furniture, decorators say.
"You need big lamps, big art, big furniture, big chandeliers, big coffee tables, big everything, to bring these homes down to a human scale," designer Thornton said. "Little knickknacks just don't do it." She said huge wall tapestries to cover huge walls have come back into vogue.
And manufacturers have responded to the need for big stuff to put in big houses. "Many manufacturers are making large-scale pieces now," said Thornton, "like sofas that are 10 feet long and 45 inches deep."
So what could Hariri possibly put in his proposed house/castle?
"He'll have everything you could ever think of," guessed researcher Ahluwalia. "Instead of an exercise room, he'll have an entire gym. Instead of a media room, he'll have a full-sized movie theater. Instead of a garage, he'll have a parking garage. He won't be building a house. He'll be building a community."
But what the heck for?
"It doesn't have anything to do with reality," speculated one local real estate agent who has handled lots of big houses. "You're dealing with somebody who has billions of dollars and is going to build a tribute to himself."
Database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.