Sunset Boulevard's Great Mansion Watch

While Beverly Hill residents come down from all that Measure H excitement, let’s look at another event going on in the neighborhood, notably the continued construction of two large homes on Sunset Boulevard. One of the addresses is 9577 Sunset (on the left), a residence currently being constructed by C. Frederick Wehba Sr., founder of real estate company Bentley Forbes Group. The Biglin Group, a local architecture firm, is behind that home—all the renderings in the gallery are of that home. Notably, the 32,000-square-foot mansion is estimated to cost $40 million, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal, the cost being being driven up by such items as gold-plated doorknobs. The other residence (on the right) is also on Sunset, but has the address of 901 Alpine (a side street). While the owner is a mystery, the architect is Frank Valentino's Park Lane Design Group. Valentino declined to make any renderings available to Curbed. Meanwhile, a commenter on a previous post stated there was some spat about height limits between these two homeowners, which could be untrue, but somehow that makes the story of these two mansions more intriguing. Yes, there must be so much more to these houses, and these people, and we only wish a Vanity Fair article would appear. In the meantime, some construction shots; the last ones were taken earlier this fall.

The land once housed the home of the late Mohammed al Fassi, the Saudi sheik whose reportedly ostentatious residence was torched by robbers. The story on that is here. Please look at the headline of his obit! That's how the mightiest newspaper in the country summed up his ENTIRE life. Terrible. UPDATE: Max Whittier, one of the founding developers of Beverly Hills, also lived here at one point.

Here are two comments left on the site last year concerning the night the house burned. Again, we can't verify any of it, but it sounds good:

"I was there the night the Fassil house burned - it seemed as if the entire city came out to watch the bonfire. Mohammed Al-Fassil had already abandoned the property admist rumours of a very nasty divorce. The house had a copper roof and inside the fire was so hot that there was little the fire dept could do to put it out; so they just stood there and watched the place burn down like everyone else. When the roof finally collapsed, people applauded and cheered.

As I recall, al-Fassi (who was only 24 when he bought the house two years before the fire) wasn't in the US at the time but the house was still staffed. Only a teen at the time, I was among those watching the house burn. The official reason for not putting it out may have been the copper roof but at the time the rumor was the fire department was only supposed to keep the fire from spreading as the city wasn't unhappy to see the house go up in flames."
· Construction Watch: Bev Hills Insanity [Curbed LA]For more stories from Curbed LA, go to la.curbed.com.

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