When the largest, most expensive home in Los Angeles is finally completed at the end of this year, after five years in the making, one of its distinctive features will be an absence of books.
There's a beauty salon, a cinema, a bowling alley, a nightclub, a casino, a lounge with walls constructed from tanks of jellyfish, a glass-walled library - yet, no books. Nobody really reads books, according to Nile Niami, the film producer and real estate developer behind the project (he anticipates a sale price of $500 million dollars). And so the copious rows of bookshelves will be filled with blank books: white covers, white spines, empty white sheets of paper. As though content, literature, history, have been erased from the pages. And, stylistically, this works. It’s in keeping with the monochromatic theme favoured by the architect commissioned by Niami. A Paul McClean home is composed of marble, concrete, steel and glass; retrac…