So
Xorin Balbes (currently domiciled in the Sowden House) struck again did he? I'm not really up with the doings of the latest Southland charlatan, but here's
Your Mama™'s take on one of the celebrity house-flipper's other projects.
Folks with more money than sense flock to the
pretentiousness, but all his projects, of whatever era, end up looking pretty much the same.
The "award-winning architectural conservator" explains the virtue of utter banality
here
While
Oprah details the "design wizard's" 8 steps to your own "Soul Space" (also the name of his best-selling book).
LA's survived worse.
I'm actually surprised that the Ebell or that museum in the old Scottish Rite temple (both just steps away) didn't snap up this square footage for some kinda annex before Balbes got his mitts on it.
If you can stand it, Zillow's got
42 pix of the property (omg, that meditation room, or whatever it is, is enough to make one scream). I can't bear it, this much beige makes me feel like I'm being smothered in oatmeal cookie dough:
Balbes got the house for $3,190,000 (previous owners were asking $6,500,000 back in 2014). Balbes is now asking $8,999,000. Even if he threw away a million dollars on the upgrades, he'll still make a profit....if it sells at all.
ETA: Balbes did the interior of the little black & gold building (Morgan, Walls and Clements, 1929), formerly a Security Pacific Bank branch, at 5209 Wilshire. It is, as you probably guessed, beige:
Temple-Home (projects)
There's a sucker born every minute and no one knows it better than Xorin Balbes, former president of Global Vision for Peace and 15 other companies over the last ten years, all now defunct. He seems to have finally found his niche:
temple-home