Reserving his magic touch for only the most regal of residences, Tony Ashai’s talents spread far and wide, but never thin.
Even though he has a staff of more than 80 in his California and Dubai offices, Tony Ashai still insists on putting his personal touch on everything Ashai Design Corporation puts its name on, exhibiting his passion to create truly remarkable residential buildings. “I get to see everything no matter where I am,” he says. “We have a policy in our office [that states] nothing leaves without me at least looking at it. I’m the bottleneck, and that’s why we can’t expand and become [a company of] 500,000 people.”While his hands-on, perfectionist approach may stop Ashai Design from becoming a megacorp, that precision is a key reason he’s seen megacorplike success internationally and in California, where most of his private estates are built. Dividing his time evenly between Dubai and Los Angeles (his projects in Dubai include master-planning for The World Islands and Dubai Lifestyle City, villa design for The Tiger Woods Dubai, and interior design for Dubai’s Marriott hotels), he’s the go-to choice for development abroad but continues to dominate the stateside market for custom mansions.
By choice, his firm, which he co-founded with his brother, architect Arthur Ashai in 1993, doesn’t do the amount of custom home work it used to. Instead, Ashai limits the company’s attention to four or five extravagant homes per year, which include estates for major Hollywood celebrities and business people such as former AT&T Chairman Chuck Noski and Michael Mulligan, one of the largest developers in Los Angeles. His criteria for picking such projects? “Number one, they have to really respect me as a designer,” he says. “[Secondly,] the sites have to be unique. I just don’t want any site. I always say you can design the most beautiful home but you cannot design the environment around it and the natural amenities, like a cliff, a bluff or an ocean view. And then, of course, the money.” He’s just being honest; only an elite few can afford this type of work.
Ashai homes in the United States begin at $10 million and sky rocket upwards (he just finished a home in Bel Air for $25 million). Cost per square foot is generally $500, though he has done homes for $1,000 per square foot, which is no surprise considering the details and amenities involved in these masterpieces, all of which fall under his realm of work.
Ashai Design does everything from the blueprints to the finishing touches, including landscape and interior design. “I don’t know how to separate,” he admits. “I don’t want a hodgepodge; I want a lot of creative people with a lot of creative input, but to all come together under one creative umbrella to make something unique. There has to be continuity in landscape, interior design and architecture, master-planning, furniture.” The result is opulent mansions that often boast lavish gardens, pricey materials and custom everything, though he insists the true signature in his designs can’t be seen. He calls his invisible signature “space planning,” meaning that he likes to control the flow of how a person will enter a home and move about it, and what they will see and experience as they maneuver, somewhat like how a screenplay controls what an audience views. For instance, Ashai will put a gate or a driveway in a certain spot so that homeowners are forced to enter this way and see a certain angle. If the home is on a bluff, he may either make the ocean panoramas come into sight slowly or with sudden impact.
Consideration is taken at every step, especially for his ocean-view homes, which he has done about 20 of over the last 15 years. “Ocean is a huge amenity. It becomes the main focal point when you are laying out the home, but at the same time, it also becomes a background. It’s a focal point for a person who comes there once, but for the person who lives there it becomes a backdrop.” When designing for this type of home he calculates where the sunset views are, where city lights come into play, if there is any glare off the water and where an outdoor living room or a garden would get the most use. His own home is on a hill over looking the ocean in Palo Verdes, Calif., and he has given every room an ocean view.
Even if an Ashai-designed project is landlocked, Ashai makes up for it with lush (and sometimes unusual) amenities, like bowling alleys, movie theaters, spas, secret passage ways that open up to a disco and even parallel hallways that provided a rather paranoid client with an escape route to a getaway car in the garage. He has made an eight-car garage double as a banquet hall at one home thanks to marble floors, detailed ceilings and fireplaces that make for a gorgeous space for 100 dinner guests once the garage doors disappear. “These are the things that don’t happen in normal homes, and if you don’t go to these homes, you’ll never see them,” Ashai says.
While creating beauty and luxury is second nature to Ashai, giving his privileged clients that “wow” factor is paramount. “When an owner of these homes throws a party, he doesn’t just want to say ‘I’ve got 20 bedrooms and 100 bathrooms’,” he says. “There has to be that one thing in the house that nobody else has.” And if anyone can bring that one thing, it’s Tony Ashai.
To Learn More
Ashai Design Corporation, 310.303.7916, www.ashai.com, www.tonyashai.com.
