Photo by: Ehsan Khakbaz

Yesterday’s LA Times writes sympathetically about the Persian-Americans who emigrated to Southern California, chiefly around Beverly Hills, and have erected the enormous and garish homes that are so detested by the tasteful and precious guardians of our domestic architecture.

It turns out these are aren’t a bad bunch of folks, just regular richies who want to live well and like showing it off. Their homes are light and bright and all that white marble just glistens (!!!) in the rich Southland sunshine. The little lots of Beverly Hills with those tiny cottages from the 1920’s, are now hosting fiberglass pimp palaces surrounded by gates and illuminated with halogen.

I have to say I’m half in agreement with the Shahrchitects. They don’t care about proportion or correctness. They want to live, to eat, to laugh and celebrate. They don’t want to live in tormented modernism preached on high by Dwell Magazine. They know how much it costs to build a home in 2006, and they want their damn Corinthian columns and gold faucets and plasma screen TV over the toilet.

Early in 2006, my 50 something cousin moved his wife and two sons from their home near Chicago, to a large palace that he rents south of WIlshire for only $8,500 a month. It has a kitchen large enough to park a Hummer, and a front entrance hall with a winding double staircase. A ping pong table and a bean bag chair decorate the front parlor. But Mr. and Mrs. Minivan are thrilled to live here as they attempt to make a success out of a burgeoning online Flash animation site. The venture is on borrowed time on investor’s terms. But now these Middle Western emigrants live in Beverly Hills. They’ve made it. The big house on the small lot proves it to anyone who drives by.