You’re lucky if you can afford a home in southern California at the moment, but the wealthy out do us all. Breathtaking vistas and mansions aren’t enough, they’ve got to have extraordinary basements as well.
Coined “iceberg homes” to indicate that a significant portion of living space is underground and hidden beneath the surface, these amenity-filled subterranean levels include wine cellars, home theaters, luxury gyms, and whatever else you can think of—including separate spaces for romance and intimacy. Some people even add in natural lightwells and skylights to flood the iceberg with California sunshine.
These homes were also a thing in London for years, too, among the city’s elite who couldn’t build up or out. Then, roughly five years ago, San Francisco Magazine published a story on iceberg homes. The author wrote: “In Palo Alto, as in many other affluent yet zoning-constrained enclaves around the Bay Area, homeowners are going underground…the once-lowly basement has become the hottest area in home design, resulting in a flotilla of square-footage-concealing iceberg houses.”
In Los Angeles, no one calls them icebergs. And they aren’t always called finished basements either, even if that’s basically what they are. Calling it a basement, “that’s considered kind of lowbrow,” Ernie Carswell, a luxury real estate agent based in Beverly Hills, said. “We call it the lower level.” The Wall Street Journal once labeled them McBasements, but the jury’s still out on whether the SoCal upper echelon will go for it.
Carswell could be onto something because these luxe underground configurations don’t give off damp basement vibes, they’re much cooler and exemplary of Los Angeles opulence. Some house billiard rooms and wine caves, some have bowling alleys and movie theaters, some have gyms and saunas, some have bars, some have bedrooms if there are lightwells, and some are straight out of a “James Bond movie,” as Carswell put it. In all posh neighborhoods where multimillion dollar homes line the streets, “it’s luxurious to have a bunker,” Carswell said. Maybe they’re taking a page out of the Silicon Valley billionaire playbook.
It’s hard to say how much it costs to build a lavish basement, or whatever you want to call it, but it can be more than $1 million. Loosely speaking, if you were to build a 2,000 square foot lower level, it could come out to about $1.5 million, said Andrew Vaitkevicius, sales and acquisitions manager for Arzuman Brothers, a luxury homebuilder. Or they could cost even more, maybe a double-digit million figure, according to Chris Pozil, a senior project manager for McClean Design, a contemporary residential design firm. It's because of how much work goes into them—the foundation, the finishing.
Vaitkevicius called the basements an almost “second house,” and they’re prevalent in neighborhoods such as Bel Air, Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Toluca Lake. Arzuman Brothers is building about 20 homes in Los Angeles at the moment, and about half will have basements that are fully fledged living spaces, he said. And in those neighborhoods, it makes sense because the sky’s the limit for how much you can sell for, more or less.
