Curbed L.A.'s Dakota
flags an upcoming W magazine profile of the architectural legacy being left to Beverly Hills by its wealthy Jewish Iranian residents. Interviewed by W's Kevin West, B.H. builder Hamid Omrani sniffs, “When I came to Beverly Hills, there was not any architecture. There were old houses belonging to the World War I or World War II era.”

In West's feature, titled, “The Persian Conquest,” Omrani also decries a 2004 Beverly Hills commission set up to look into local architectural standards, claiming it amounted to a “thinly veiled prejudice” against the so-called Persian Palaces associated with Tehran's exile Jewish community. The starting point for West is a familiar figure, the young club-and-hotel magnate Sam Nazarian, whose Hollywood Hills home is now for sale for nearly $19 million, and whose uncle Parviz's opulent mansion began the palace-building craze.

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