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A grand villa looks for the rich and the famous

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Security guards, electric gates and high stone walls shield Beverly Park from intruders. Yet from a plateau high above the Beverly Hills Hotel, it is possible to look down on it, to have an aerial view of one of the most exclusive residential developments in the world. There's Sylvester Stallone's huge hacienda, Denzel Washington's formal French chateau and the gargantuan showplace that octogenarian media mogul Sumner Redstone bought not long ago for his new bride.

Past Paul Reiser's beautifully landscaped tennis court, beyond the palace-in-progress Eddie Murphy's waiting to move into, and beside the guest house being added to billionaire Haim Saban's vast compound lies a grand Mediterranean villa.

Earlier this fall, 80 Beverly Park opened its 18-foot front doors, welcoming real-estate agents for the first time. While the neo-Tuscan mansion contains a media room with a screen that descends from the ceiling at the push of a button, a distressed marble kitchen island the size of a small bedroom, an elevator with a floor of Italian travertine, 11 bathrooms and seven bedrooms that open onto balconies tickled by vines of blooming bougainvillea, the cappuccino stucco house lacks the one thing that will make it a home. No. 80, built on spec and now on the market for $19,750,000, needs an owner.

Buyers are out there

80 Beverly Park by the numbers How much? • 2-acre lot in Beverly Park: $7 million to $9 million • 50 sets of plans at $500 per set: $25,000 • Drainage system with subterranean moat: $200,000 • Landscaping: $750,000 How many? • Fireplaces: 5 • Toilets: 13 • Capacity of elevator: 4 adults • Capacity of wine room: 1,700 bottles • Steps from master bathroom to front door: about 65 (time elapsed, 36 seconds) How big? • Front doors: 18 feet tall, 700 pounds each • Kitchen island: 8-1/2 feet by 12 feet • Screen in media room: 15 feet wide • Heating and air-conditioning system: eight zones, 34 tons of digitally controlled air

How many house hunters are willing and able to adopt a nearly $20 million spec house? Well, this is Southern California, so the answer is quite a few. According to The Wall Street Journal, sales in the Los Angeles luxury market, where the median home price is $1.25 million, were up 18.4 percent in the first half of this year. In the metaphoric neighborhood where prices are only a couple of digits shy of a telephone number, the platinum club of shoppers looking for homes priced above $10 million includes at least two dozen members, and they can choose from an inventory of 30 estates in Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills Post Office, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.

The morning of the new house's public debut, brokers Brian Adler and Mauricio Umansky, wearing elegant dark suits and cheerful ties, stood under the barrel-vaulted ceiling in the entry hall, ready to greet any professionals who had seen the listing in the brokers' guide to showings on the Westside.

In 1979, Adler had assembled a group of investors to buy the 325 virgin acres that became Beverly Park, and he's been involved in the development, where he lived for 17 years, ever since. With little prompting and a salesman's enthusiasm, he will extol the virtues of the enclave or the charms of No. 80.

Visitors will have to imagine how the empty house would look once a decorator helps new owners spend $4 million to $8 million furnishing and appointing the interiors. For now, Adler has borrowed one round antique wooden table to place in the foyer, and set a voluptuous orchid plant on it.

Umansky is a broad-shouldered, curly-haired man in his early 30s who dropped out of the University of Southern California to start a clothing business, sold it eight years later, then looked for a new career. He found one in real estate and now concentrates on multimillion-dollar residential sales.

Highly successful

In the past two years, 14 properties on the Westside went for more than $10 million; Umansky was involved with six of them. "I know who all the people are who are looking in the upper price range," he says, "and anyone would recognize their names." So he wasn't surprised that he and Adler, who share the listing for No. 80, were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements by some people who expressed interest in touring the house as it neared completion. "They don't want anyone to even know they're looking," Umansky says.

How the rich spend their money can arouse as much curiosity as their sex lives, so conglomerate chieftains, studio presidents and movie stars take some pains to keep their major purchases private. That effort can seem a tad disingenuous, however, because part of Beverly Park's appeal is the status of the address, the cachet that accrues because everyone who's anyone knows the price of admission.

Tom Thompson of JLA Realty brought a couple he describes as "in the entertainment industry" to see No. 80. "They've been looking for six months in Holmby Hills and Bel-Air," he says, "but those areas don't have the prestige of Beverly Park. You tell someone you live in Holmby Hills, that doesn't say a whole lot. It's prestigious, but you could be in a $40 million home or a $2 million home. If you say you live in Beverly Park, everyone knows what that means."

It means a whopping property-tax bill, but that isn't likely to panic the eventual owner of No. 80. Umansky says: "During the Internet boom, when everyone was making crazy money, people were cashing out for $50 million and were ready to spend $20 million of it on a house. If we get a call from a broker to show No. 80, we ask who the client is. If it's someone we know from the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans or a celebrity who makes $20 million a movie, then showing it is automatic. If we don't know them, we ask what their business is."

Mostly cash transactions

By the time a prospective buyer makes an offer, the agents expect to see proof of funds from a private bank reference. In this bracket, Umansky says, seven out of 10 sales are for cash, so mortgage brokers and lenders are out of the loop.

Yet even among the house-payment-free, price matters. Another spec house that overlooks the Bel-Air Country Club costs the same as No. 80 and has been on the market for over a year. The developer has rejected offers of $15 million and $17 million. "Most of these people didn't get to have hundreds of millions of dollars by being easy with their money," Umansky says. "They have business managers and accountants who analyze deals for them. If they feel they're overpaying, they'll probably pull out."

It is Oberfeld's business to know what will make an affluent buyer lose his heart. The developer of No. 80, he was raised with a strong work ethic in a privileged precinct of Mexico City, a place ripe with promise when his grandfathers emigrated from Poland in the 1930s. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 13 and lived in his parents' home in Beverly Park while attending the USC School of Architecture. Barely out of his teens when he began developing high-end spec houses, he finished his first Beverly Park spec mansion when he was 25.

Now 32, Mo, as his friends call him, favors dress shirts open at the neck, tailored slacks and the sort of round-faced, oversized watches you'd expect to see on a Formula 1 driver. He and Umansky share a first name, a love of golf, a focus on family life and a long friendship.

Building on success

"My father bought four lots in Beverly Park in the early '90s," Oberfeld says. "We sold one immediately, bought another one. I took one and developed it. My father owned and ran the Bank of Beverly Hills for a number of years, and I worked there when I was in school. There are things I could not have done without the help of contacts I met through him. What counts is what I do with it. My father and his brother quadrupled the business their father had been successful with. That's my ambition."

No. 80 is romantic enough to be the setting for a perfume commercial, but prettiness is only part of the story. Oberfeld understands that the right suitor for the house will most likely be seduced by a combination of craftsmanship and the peculiar gestalt that bigness begets. No. 80 spans 19,040 square feet, with another 4,189 square feet of terraces and sleeping porches.

"There are homes half the size of No. 80 that have the same number of rooms," he says. "I don't believe a big house should have 25 rooms. I believe in very large spaces. Little rooms only complicate a plan, and people don't want them. People who buy this kind of home want to entertain and show off. We paneled the library on the first floor with mahogany, and that isn't a very big space, so it's intimate. But if a room is too intimate, it isn't as impressive."

More than designer clothes or limited-edition cars, and certainly more than jets or jewels that few friends get to see, an important house is a personal billboard that, in a land ruled by marketplace values, displays an incontestable message.