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LAistory is our new series that will take us on a journey to what came before to help us understand where we are today. We began with Val Verde, the "Black Palm Springs", then journeyed to Thelma Todd's Roadside Cafe, and now we're looking at where a house once stood in Beverly Hills...
The piece of property at 9755 Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills sat empty for a good twenty years. I have some vague memory of a pale green house boarded up for years before it was condemned and destroyed.
At one time, the house was a massive Italian villa, sitting on a fairly sizable piece of property, as is common on the north side of Sunset Boulevard before Beverly Hills turns into West Hollywood just after North Sierra Drive (you can tell when the buttery smooth pavement of BH hits the ruts and potholes of West Hollywood -- the sound of money vanishing.)
At some point, it was bought by a newly married Arabian couple. They commissioned a number of area artisans to do a huge amount of elaborate and costly work -- gold plated fixtures were to be put into the bathrooms, along with a huge amount of tile work, expensive marbles and an outer wall made of river stone.
There were a number of statues on the property -- nudes -- which were painted in true to life hues, causing quite a scandal. The city insisted that the paint be removed.
Near the end of the construction, they threw a huge party and everyone in Beverly Hills was invited, including everyone who had worked on the house. Afterward, one of the dads of the couple came and whisked them back to Saudi Arabia. The debts for the work that the had done on the house were never paid.
After a few years, a psychiatrist decided that the art that was up in the house should be "saved." He gathered some guys together and they robbed the house. They couldn't get it all, so they had to go back. This time the police were ready for them. But the burglars set the house on fire, creating the distraction that allowed them to escape. (They were eventually caught.)
The house was demolished. There were plans to build an apartment building, but financing never came through. The property sat, vacant and overgrown, green with grass in the spring until it turned yellow in the summer, surrounded by an ornate fence. The river stones were scavenged until the wall was no more. They even took some of the spikes off the iron work of the fence. When I took these pictures in 2005, there were tractors and permits up, piles of dirt everywhere.
In New Orleans, it's never surprising to find a dilapidated house, a vacant lot in the middle of the nicest neighborhoods, but in Beverly Hills it was always as though it would be in bad taste to mar the smooth lawns, empty sidewalks and perfect (in some cases, perfectly ugly) houses. So the site at 9755 Sunset Boulevard always drew attention. These days, a new house has been built, less scandalous, I'm sure the neighbors like it better, but also less interesting.
Photos by Jacy for LAist
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Sheikh Mohammmed Al-Fassi's painting of the statues in Beverly Hills was a fascinating case of cross-cultural misundertanding.
Al-Fassi came from a culture that discourages figural art - portrayals of living beings - as a gateway to idolatry, so he was not deeply familiar with the traditions of classical Western sculpture.
So he did some research, and discovered that the statues of classical Greece and Rome were originally painted in lifelike colors - the pristine white marble of museum pieces is the result of the original paint wearing off over the centuries.
Since the statues were meant to be contemporary decoration, not preserved museum pieces, he assumed that the culturally respectful thing to do would be to have them painted in lifelike colors, just as the statues of antiquity had originally been painted.
After all, in an upscale neighborhood like Beverly Hills, no one wants the neighboring homes looking like dilapidated ruins, right?
He was actually rather surprised by all the uproar and outrage, since he had mistakenly assumed that Westerners would be more aware of their own cultural heritage.
"A 36,000-square-foot mansion with a guardhouse in its front yard and a stone bridge over a lake is under construction on the site of Beverly Hills co-founder Max Whittier's former estate. In the 1970s, the estate belonged to Saudi Sheikh Mohammed al Fassi.
The sheikh caused a neighborhood uproar by painting the white plaster statues of nudes on the front veranda in natural skin and hair tones. He put plastic flowers in urns and painted the house lime green.
The French Country-style chateau, being built on Sunset Boulevard two blocks east of the Beverly Hills Hotel, will have a limestone exterior and a gray slate roof but no outdoor statues, said designer-developer Frank Valentino of Beverly Hills' Park Lane Design Group.
The sheikh's house, on 3.6 acres, was gutted by fire in 1980 and razed in 1985. The land was subdivided and sold. The house under way is on 1.5 acres, and Valentino estimates it to be a $25 million project. "
NYTimes Obit - Published: January 5, 2003 -
"Mohammed al-Fassi, 50; Upset Beverly Hills Over House
Mohammed al-Fassi, an in-law of the Saudi royal family who won fame by turning a Beverly Hills mansion into an eyesore, died on Dec. 24 in Cairo. He was 50.
His death was reported this week in Los Angeles by Marvin M. Mitchelson, the divorce lawyer representing one of his wives, Sheika Dena al-Fassi. Mr. Mitchelson said the cause was an infected hernia.
Mohammed al-Fassi, at times referred to as Prince al-Fassi, was born in Morocco. His father, a merchant, took him to Saudi Arabia when he was 10. His sister married a brother of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.
In 1978, he paid $2.4 million in cash for a 38-room white-stucco mansion on Sunset Boulevard and scandalized a staid neighborhood by painting it pea green and covering its Italianate outdoor statuary in ''natural'' colors, genitals and all.
Two years later, the villa was gutted by fire.
Four grown children survive."
Awesome! Next time I'm just going to post suggestive bits and let you guys do the work!
It was going to be subdivided into several smaller single family lots. It was never going to be an apartment house since the zoning would never allow that.