Mohamed Hadid, controversial Los Angeles luxury developer, beloved Il Pastaio patron, and proud father to Gigi and Bella, has been featured with his longtime fiancée Shiva Safai on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Arabia Interiors. And what a thrill, as I have been dy-ing to get my eyeballs on this billionaire’s 48,000 square foot Bel Air palace (not to be confused with the other illegal half-built one—nicknamed “starship enterprise”—that is currently teetering precariously over its furious neighbors) after the hints we’ve seen of it on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“Walk through the estate’s large outdoor gates and through the main foyer with its glimmering chandelier, stucco wall finishing and rich neoclassical columns, and you will feel as if you’ve walked into the home of an 18th-century nobleman,” writer Rebecca Ann Proctor trills, emphasizing the home’s “warmth and charm.” The house, conceived and designed by Hadid, features, among other things (swans, for example), Renaissance-style portraits of Shiva and Mohamed that he painted himself.
This place is nuts.
Many important celebrities have come for visits, the article takes pains to note—including Andrea Bocelli (“He thought [the hammam] was so amazing that he started singing and I couldn’t get him out of there!”), Quincy Jones, David Foster (the second husband of Hadid’s ex-wife Yolanda, who has worked with both Bocelli and Jones), and of course, Michael Jackson:
Mohamed recalls how Michael Jackson came to visit them just before he passed away. “He didn’t have a home at the time and on Thanksgiving I gave him the house for three days and told him to invite his whole family.” A year later he passed away but his presence at the house can still be felt.
What?!?!
Read the whole thing (and see the rest of the photos) here.