http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/us/21condo.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=...

LOS ANGELES — Candy Spelling, widow of the television producer Aaron Spelling,
is downsizing.

After nearly 20 years in The Manor, a 56,500-square-foot French chateau-style
home known for its size and extravagance — it includes a wine-tasting room, a
bowling alley, a silver room, a china room and a well-known gift-wrapping room —
she says she is ready for the next trophy property: a condominium.

“People say, How can you move from The Manor? There’s no place like it,” Mrs.
Spelling said, sitting in the library with leatherbound scripts of every episode
of Mr. Spelling’s shows, from “Charlie’s Angels” to “7th Heaven.”

But a condo, she said, “is no different than a house, maybe even better.”

Mrs. Spelling is the most conspicuous buyer in an ultraluxury condo market that
is new in the sprawl of Los Angeles, where wealth and fame have usually spelled
out “estate,” not apartment living. But real estate experts say a New York-style
luxury high-rise lifestyle is creeping into the wealthiest echelons, fed by
trends like people looking to own more than one home, foreigners drawn by the
weak dollar to invest in Los Angeles, and new residential buildings being
designed by celebrity architects like Robert A. M. Stern, Richard Meier and Jean
Nouvel.

Mr. Stern designed The Century, the 140-unit building under construction where
Mrs. Spelling recently bought the top two penthouse floors — 16,500 square feet
— for $47 million.

That’s $2,848 a square foot, if you’re counting.

Los Angeles is becoming a more vertical area at all income levels as land for
development becomes less plentiful and traffic congestion, and now high gas
prices, steer more people to cluster around mass transit stations and more
community-like sections, like downtown and West Los Angeles, said Delores A.
Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the University
of Southern California. For 2006 and 2007 in Los Angeles County, condos sold
better than single family homes, even as the market was dipping, real estate
data shows, although sales above $5 million are still few.

Last year, 59 percent of new home sales were condos.

“The city is becoming more interconnected and growing up,” Ms. Conway said.
“It’s a major change in the landscape of Los Angeles.”

And competing to lure the ultra rich out of their grand homes and compounds is a
new generation of high-end high-rises, with hundreds of units already under
construction or planned that promise a higher level of services and more square
footage than the typical luxury condo here, which usually sold for under $10
million. The new pampering, with prices to match, includes restaurants open
24/7, outdoor entertaining spaces and patrols by Israeli-trained security guards
to foil the paparazzi.

“It’s a field of dreams,” said Stephen Shapiro, chairman of Westside Estate
Agency in Beverly Hills, which represents one of the new condo properties.
“Build it, and they hope they will come.”

The Century, a project of Related Companies, the developer of the Time Warner
Center in New York, sits on three acres of green and offers a 200-foot-long
entrance driveway, “meditation cabanas” in the gardens, a wine storage and
tasting room and guest suites for home offices or household staff. Units go for
$3.5 million to $10.5 million and penthouses for $15 million to $29 million.

Not too far away, The Carlyle Residences, a 24-story crescent-shaped building by
Elad Properties, owners of the Plaza Hotel in New York, will have 78 units
priced at $2.9 million to $20 million when it opens next summer. Among its
offerings are a floor dedicated to staff quarters and hedges monitored by
security cameras.

“This is Los Angeles, and the paparazzi problem is so prevalent here,” explained
Jill Eisenstadt, a spokeswoman for the project.

At least six projects are going up on the west side between Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica alone, including hotels with a residential component. The Montage
Hotel Beverly Hills, opening later this year, has 20 condos with hotel services,
for $9 million to $32 million.

“We’ve had some terrific demand for them,” said Alan Fuerstman, founder and
chief executive of Montage Hotels & Resorts. “You have all the offerings without
the hassles of managing a large estate.”

David Mossler, the real estate agent who sold The Century’s first penthouse last
December, for $15 million, said the cachet of Mr. Stern was a big draw for his
clients, a couple he refused to identify to protect their privacy. They had been
looking for a second home in Los Angeles for two years but had not found the
looks, privacy or views they wanted.

When he mentioned a condo, Mr. Mossler said, “I think they thought I was crazy.”

“I told them about the high quality of the building and the security and the
other amenities,” he said. “The light went on in their heads. They said, ‘It’s
like a great hotel suite.’ ”

For Mrs. Spelling, 62, mother of the actors Tori and Randy Spelling, the draw
was being able to worry less about the upkeep of a house and being ready to
travel more two years after the death of her husband, who was afraid of flying,
she said. She is entertaining offers in the $150 million range for her W-shaped
mansion, which the couple built in the late 1980s in the neighborhood known as
Holmby Hills.

“I’m looking forward to seeing the world,” she said. “I’m now single. My kids
don’t live at home. It’s the next chapter in my life.”

But going condo can be a challenge when your idea of downsizing does not mean
shedding a dining table for 26, or the private pool and rose garden, all of
which Mrs. Spelling plans to install in her new digs. Her solution was to
combine two duplexes on the 41st and 42nd floors, with 4,000 feet just for the
master bedroom.

Mrs. Spelling said she was shrinking her staff of 20 to less than half, three of
whom will continue living with her and her wheaten terrier, Madison. She said
she was talking to schools and children’s hospitals about donating the contents
of the library and most of her collection of Madame Alexander dolls.

But other things — her china, silver, Impressionist art, wardrobe, wine cellar,
ball clock collection and, yes, the gift-wrapping room — are nonnegotiable, she
said.

“I’m not giving it up,” she said of the sometimes ridiculed wrapping room that
she calls her “hobby and therapy.”

“That’s special to me,” she said. “I’ve always liked my packages pretty.”

Mrs. Spelling said she had also been mindful of her two grandchildren when
designing her new condo, which includes a guest suite and pool cabana reserved
for their use. The boy and girl are by her daughter, Tori, with whom relations
have been rocky, or “complicated” as they both have put it. (Mrs. Spelling is
completing a book deal that is not meant, she said, as a response to her
daughter’s best seller, “Stori Telling,” which portrayed her as cold and
controlling, and which she claimed not to have read.) Despite tabloid reports
about their feuds, and about Ms. Spelling’s inheriting less than $1 million from
her father (Mrs. Spelling said her children and grandchildren would inherit all
the Spelling money eventually), Mrs. Spelling said she saw her grandchildren
weekly.

As Mrs. Spelling extolled the 360-degree views and amenities of condo life,
including a health club with on-call massage service, she said friends were
already telling her “maybe this is what we should do.”

But some developers say the ultraexpensive condo market is still a gamble.

“The premium condo market is unproven in Los Angeles,” said Paul Habibi, a
developer who also lectures in real estate at the University of California, Los
Angeles. “Amenities are certainly a draw, but are they any better than what they
already have?”

Mr. Stern, the architect of The Century, which is going up in Century City, an
area with a shopping mall, movie theaters, upscale restaurants and many
entertainment offices, said wealthy Angelenos were ready for apartment living as
long as they got “that outdoor-indoor type of living.” He said Californians,
unlike New Yorkers, felt entitled to space, light and fresh air, which he
translated into spacious rooms and big balconies.

“People are ready to live in a more urban way,” Mr. Stern said. “They’re sick of
driving everywhere.”

The bad economy and soft real estate market do not seem to be affecting the $5
million and up housing segment, brokers said. The Century, which will not open
until at least the end of 2009, has sold half of its units, mostly to locals,
said David Wine, vice chairman of Related Companies, the project’s developer.

While the $2,848 a square foot that Mrs. Spelling paid set a record for Los
Angeles, Mr. Wine said, it was still a bargain by New York City standards, where
less space in the highest-end condominiums can go for thousands of dollars more
than that.

“It gives you comfort,” Mr. Shapiro, the Beverly Hills real estate agent, who
handles sales of $20 million and over, said of Mrs. Spelling’s decision. “Nobody
wants to be the first one. She sets the pace.”