70 minutes with …Ramtin Ray Nosrati

The builder of Los Angeles’s awesome, soulless spec palaces.

- Byb Adrian Chen

I always say, ‘The first thing you want to hear from the buyer when he opens the door is ‘Wow,’” said the luxury-housing developer Ramtin Ray Nosrati as he stood at the front door of one of his latest projects: a nearly completed 12,000-square-foot six-bedroom, nine-bathroom home in the affluent Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. He gestured across the living room to the retractable glass wall and the balcony, which opens onto the emerald expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “If you hear that word, wow, you know you got them.”

A key part of Nosrati’s design philosophy is to have at least one wow factor in every room of a home. I had always thought wow factor was a cliché until I found the word issuing from my lips again and again as we toured the house. What else can you say when confronted with a glass-enclosed wine cellar that holds 500 bottles, or bathrooms tiled floor to ceiling in patterned stone imported from Europe, or a restaurant-grade walk-in refrigerator, or a game room that features nine huge televisions arrayed in a grid that can be used as a single, even bigger television or to display nine different sports games at a time? Wow.