Street of dreams: Mountain of luxury

Greg Gevorkian, owner of Hi-Con Inc., describes his entry in the Street of Dreams luxury home tour as "a lot of glass, a lot of stones, a lot of high-tech things."

The description is an apt one for all four of the homes in the show, which starts today at MacDonald Highlands, a hillside community located near Valle Verde Drive and Horizon Ridge Parkway in Henderson. It is the third such show in Southern Nevada (all three in Henderson).

Street of Dreams Inc. offers tours of extravagant homes with features and designs representing the latest trends in home building. The homes are open for tours Tuesdays through Sundays, plus Memorial Day, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. for the next six weeks. Tickets cost $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and children 4 to 12, and free for younger children.

Four builders -- GJM Development, Hi-Con, Job Construction and three-time participant Sun West Custom Homes -- will show off what the local luxury market has to offer in design, decorating and technology. The entries range from 5,408 to 8,251 square feet and are priced from just under $2 million to $3.75 million.

This year's event offers fewer homes -- four rather than the nine at the 2000 Street of Dreams show -- but each promises to be totally different from anything previously built in the Las Vegas Valley.

For starters, all of the homes are built on hillside lots, sites that have a grade of 10 degrees or greater, and are therefore technically not even in the valley. Very few hillside homes have been built in Southern Nevada. All four of the homes take advantage of the unusual terrain found in MacDonald Highlands and show off the builders' expertise in using the slope as part of the design.

Secondly, technology and style are changing rapidly in the luxury-home market, as each of these glass-and-stone giants demonstrate. All of the homes conform to the community's guidelines, which require discreet desert colors and contemporary styling, unlike the Mediterranean and Italian villa styles which are abundant throughout Las Vegas.

Gevorkian's three-story Dragon's Oasis, the largest of the show, sits across the street and slightly above its competitors, the Windemere; the Kismet; and Earth, Wind & Fire. With extensive landscape and a front door well above street level, Dragon's Oasis is surprisingly discreet for an 8,251-square-foot home, fulfilling Gevorkian's motto: "The home should be of the hill, rather than on the hill."

The five-bedroom, six-bath, two half-bath home has an impressive and rather lengthy list of amenities, including a home theater; wine cellar; elevator; pocket doors overlooking the valley; a four-car garage; lots of balconies; imported wood in the library, kitchen and baths; a central vacuum system; security system; misting and fog system; parquet flooring; and slate flooring.

Gevorkian and his wife, Annie, designed the home: Greg as the design-and-build contractor, Annie as the interior designer, although their roles seem far less distinct when talking to them. They do not quite finish each other's sentences, but they have the back-and-forth talking style of two people of one mind. The home was dubbed Dragon's Oasis after a nearby topographical formation.

Naming the home for the terrain is in line with the approach the Gevorkians take to home building. They design almost everything around their study of the lot: its shape, soil, color and environment. The shape of the house, its footprint, its colors, its features -- everything -- must respect the character of the land. Grading is minimized and viewed as a necessary evil.

"Why (dig) all the way down three stories and build up?" Gevorkian posed rhetorically. "If you're building on a lot, you need to make the house fit the lot, not the other way around. You don't want to disturb the land too much."

The principal result of designing around the lot is an abundance of glass. With the fortunate exception of the bathrooms, almost every room of the house has a view of the valley. A series of glass pocket doors lining the front keep views open across the entire floor, even from the back yard. The elevator, the balconies, the back of the stairwell -- all glass.

Views were such a consideration that the Gevorkians even combined rooms, knocking out walls just to maximize visibility, and placed windows nearly everywhere. The spiral staircase in the rear, for instance, features a tall, rounded window overlooking the backyard waterfall aligned to the arroyo and behind and above the lot. The middle and top floors are almost devoid of east-west interior walls, which would interfere with views.

"It's too valuable to waste a view like this," Annie Gevorkian said. "The view is just spectacular at night."

The Gevorkians favor traditional styles, but for this show, they had to use a more modern, contemporary design that would fit in at MacDonald Highlands. For Street of Dreams, they saw an opportunity to build "something unique."

"Really, each property can be unique because the land it sits on is unique. You want to work with the natural land and use it and incorporate it into your design," Annie Gevorkian said.

Annie Gevorkian points out some of the subtle ways they accomplished this: stacked rocks that imitate the geological bands found on the site, an exterior paint that matches the color of the dirt, and, more obviously, the extensive use of windows and a conspicuous sparsity of interior walls that would block views.

Hemmed in between the house and the rising slope behind it, the back yard is at once secluded and -- with its view through the house -- open to all. Like the rest of the house, it is loaded with amenities, including colorful landscaping, a built-in barbecue and bar, patio and fireplace.

Oddly, there is no swimming pool in the back, but rather at the front of the house, although well above the street. Like most custom homes, it is infinity edge and is served by a secluded bath house built into the side of the home, accessible only from outdoors. Inside the bath house, cherry wood planks line the walls of a steam bath, while a complete bathroom offers close access for swimmers.

The home's decorator touches continue the "of the hill" theme. Exterior paint exactly matches the nearby soil. The color of the stones for the waterfall are similarly matched to the environment.

"These colors belong to this mountain," Annie Gevorkian said. "We wanted it to look like it was built right out of the mountain."

Interior areas in Dragon's Oasis continue the outdoor theme. The massive stone steps of the front walk carry into the living room. Also carrying the theme inside the home are stacked slate stones that imitate the pattern of the earth the home sits on, falling water in the living room and master bath, and a tree set in the middle of a spiral staircase. The stacked stones are placed such that they appear to continue through the floors.

"It's like a Frank Lloyd Wright design: a lot of falling water and stacked stones," Gevorkian said.

The theme only goes so far. Much of the home has a contemporary style with a few unusual ideas tossed in. Some features in the home are works of art -- literally. They defy description. The mirror above one of them looks a little like a waving flag.

Yet another style defines the home theater: art deco. Annie Gevorkian incorporated a lot of early 20th century style theater touches into the home theater. The carpeting has a pattern befitting of a commercial theater.

"Wall sconces have been done so much (in home theaters). I wanted to try something new," Annie Gevorkian said.

Instead, she ordered two wrought-iron pieces built to resemble an original Oscar statue, which she saw pictured in a book. Movie munchies can be stored behind a bar made of onyx in the rear corner.

Most people cannot try this at home, but such finishing touches may inspire ideas. That, she said, is the whole idea of the show.

"I would say 80 percent of the people coming to Street of Dreams are not home buyers. Their purpose for coming is to see something new and different," Annie Gevorkian said.

Even fewer than 20 percent would be a potential home buyer for this property. The base price, stripped of all those amenities, is $3.75 million. The furnishings, supplied by Milton Homer, is valued at more than half a million dollars.S A T U R D A Y , M A Y 4 , 2 0 0 2

Real Estate home