Tales of Extravagance
by Robert Frohlich
Suppose in these complicated times that you need to get away. Find the time to get up to your retreat at Tahoe, that special sanctuary where the demands of daily life dissipate into The Lake's unruffled waters: your mountain cabin. Well, maybe not cabin. After all, it does have 10 bedrooms and 8½ baths. And an indoor lap pool and 61-inch, rear-projection TV with 6-speaker surround sound around an anti-gravity backstretch/ relaxation table with 7 adjustable heat settings installed above the wine cellar full of 1982 Château Ducru- Beaucaillou. Oh, and the lawn is big enough to accommodate the private helicopter, and the Kong-sized boathouse at the end of the pier can hold the 37-foot Nautique with dual 950 Volvo Penta engines.
We're kidding, right? Who installs $300,000 of home automation, $160,000 chandeliers and flat stone imported from China in a mountain cabin? These days, it seems, plenty of folks.
Tahoe has long been a place where people have spent to excess on their vacation retreats, from Lora Josephine Knight hiring Finnish stonemasons to build her Vikingsholm at Emerald Bay to George Whittell bringing in miners to drill the threestory deep tunnels through the solid granite beneath his estate.
Between 1890 and 1930, hundreds of elaborate homes sprang up at Lake Tahoe. San Francisco banker Isias Hellman built Pine Lodge on a rise of what is now Sugar Pine Point State Park in 1903. Up to 27 servants attended guests who played all day outdoors but attended dinner in formal attire. Other mega-mansions followed, such as the Valhalla, the Pope and Baldwin estates at Camp Richardson and Henry Kaiser's estate, Fleur du Lac, so grand and cool that Francis Ford Coppola filmed The Godfather: Part II on its grounds.
In the late 1930s, Whittell, scion of a pioneer San Francisco family who'd inherited a banking, railroad and real estate fortune, built Thunderbird Lodge. The 16,500 square foot main house is connected via a 600-foot tunnel to the boathouse and card house (as well as a steel-barred cage for Whittell's pet lion).
But tales of extravagance are hardly historic at Tahoe. After all, current lakefront homeowners could fill a Fortune 500 list. They are past or present executives of Microsoft, Dreyer's ice cream, Coleman camping, Proctor and Gamble, Hewlett- Packard and newspaper chains, or pro athletes, musicians and Hollywood notables.
"The high-end real estate market at Lake Tahoe is a reflection of the turnaround money made in Silicon Valley and the stock market," says Trinkie Watson of Chase International, one of the region's most successful realtors.
"A lot of young people were proud of their success and what they accomplished. These people wanted all the amenities of their primary urban residence in their country home. As it turns out, some of their Tahoe homes became more elaborate than their principal homes."
According to Watson, a lot on Incline's Village's Lakeshore Drive runs over $8 million. "If you buy the property for that much, what do you think the owner is going to build on it and for how much?" asks Watson.
"Lake Tahoe is a finite commodity," explains Rich Loverde of Loverde Builders.
"The price for property is so high that it forces an owner to build a home that is commensurate with the value of the property." Loverde, a Tahoe architect and contractor since 1970, was awarded by the Contractors Association of Truckee Tahoe the Residential Project of the Year in 2005 for the 27,000 square foot Pennington residence. "Building this type of home is a lifestyle decision for the customer," he says. "Tastes vary, but most are expensive. It's not unusual to install an elevator, lap pool, cavernous wine cellar, extraordinary water features and display vaults in a project. However, what the majority of our clients really want is the fi nest craftsmanship and materials, and the latest technology available."
Essam Khashoggi's family estate is reportedly the largest privately owned waterfront estate on Lake Tahoe. The approximate 25,000 square foot wood and stone vacation home was built in 1989 on a very secluded South Lake Tahoe beach and features a four-room master suite, indoor spa with waterfall, indoor and outdoor pools, a two-story pirate ship in a child's bedroom and a motorboat as bar.
"Essam had us travel to Mexico to buy a vintage Chris-Craft runabout," says Khashoggi's local contractor. We cut it in half, brought it into the house and made a party bar out of it. We ended up having to shop for two boats. We'd found this immaculate 1947 Chris-Craft, but after the owner found out what we were going to do to it, he called off the deal. So we had to go find another."
Commerce One founder Tom Gonzales built an estate in Incline Village, complete with a 1,600 square foot movie theater with a rubberized fl oor, so you can feel the bombs going off in Saving Private Ryan. It seems that, nowadays, even the "average" lakefront vacation "cabin" is outfi tted with a home theater, complete with candy and popcorn bar, comfy leather seating, hydronic heat, AC and humidifi cation, an exercise room, indoor rifl e range, basketball court, epoxy garage fl oors, wine cellar, spas (indoor and outdoor), lap pool, fountains, waterfalls and the biggest current trend, home automation.
"Steve Wynn could control with home automation most everything in his home at Tahoe from his penthouse in Las Vegas," says Watson.
Having sold four or five years ago, Wynn's residence on Lakeshore Drive was listed at $25 million. At 20,000 square feet, Wynn's former pad is not the biggest residence on the blocks—Zephyr Cove's 38,000 square foot Tranquility estate (see page 130) probably grabs that title—but it's bigger than his buddy Michael Milken's place next door. It was junk bond dealer Milken who bought and then tore down the old Auchenslauss house owned by the Kennedy family (and the supposed site of JFK and Marilyn's trysts).
"We potted six 100-foot-high trees on Milken's property and moved them so they wouldn't be cut down," says a contractor who worked on the project. "We rented a gigantic crane, one of only three on the West Coast, to move them to another piece of the property. I guess he's quite the environmentalist—saving those trees cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."
During the building of Milken's estate, the daily crew reportedly comprised as many as 300 workers, including 100 gardeners, all part of the effort to get the estate completed in time for Milken's birthday bash. No detail appears too large to a homeowner striving for perfection.
According to a local painting contractor, clients routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on paint jobs or interior refinishing. And who knows how much the owners of a lakefront Crystal Bay parcel are doling out for the crane that has sat on-site for nearly a year to construct their cliffside residence?
Bruce Olson of Bruce Olson Construction tells of a lakefront Adirondack-style mansion he built in Tahoe City boasting his-and-her escape passages. The owners, a couple who had made their fortune with an Internet company, feared that hit men may come after them over a dispute.
But Olson thinks we're seeing the end of the age of opulence. "We're starting to see an opposite turn, an almost retro era in building," he says. His company, which also builds homes in Pebble Beach and Hawaii, primarily constructs lakefront dwellings at Tahoe. "Instead of opulence, I think owners want to build more sophisticated homes using native materials. The newer designs tend not to be as lavish as you might think. More and more clients are subscribing to the native and natural surroundings of their property."
Maybe so. But perhaps they'll reconsider and throw in an indoor bowling alley just for fun.