You can’t keep a good manse down

By Brendan Buhler

Friday, Feb. 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

It’s an old-money neighborhood, as Las Vegas understands the term.

It means that from the fourth-story skydeck on the house on Tomiyasu Lane, you can see into the horsy backyard of Wayne Newton. Hi, Wayne.

(If it weren’t for all the trees, you could, somewhere beyond Wayne, see the homes of newspaper owners. Hi, boss.)

(Funny old world that it is, if it weren’t for Wayne, trees and newspaper owners, you could see my own depreciating pile of paint flakes and weekend projects. Hi, honey.)

What it also means is the house on Tomiyasu Lane is part of a new development of 14 custom mansions, possibly the last new palaces to fill in the moneyed neighborhood near Sunset and Pecos roads that has been home to, among others, Robert Goulet, the Sultan of Brunei and Mike Tyson (back in the day).

This particular house is a showcase called the New American Home 2009.

It has some amenities.

There’s the prep kitchen, so handy for catered parties, and a hobby room, complete with a gift-wrapping station and a dog shower. The wine cellar has its own backup generator. In the master wing, there’s an extra washer and dryer to spare you the trip to the other side of the house, and in the bathroom there’s the vibracoustic tub, which combines the warmth of water with the soothing influence of horrible spa music. “They say 20 minutes in this is equivalent to eight hours asleep,” says Lee Lundquist, one of the house’s three designers.

She helped flesh out the house’s Zen Rat Pack look, almost literally in the case of the first-floor bathroom, one wall of which sports a framed showgirl’s thong (vintage and authentic). There’s a couch modeled after one on the first Perry Mason shows, white porcelain Weimaraner dog statues and flat-screen televisions everywhere, including three in an outside courtyard. There are gas fireplaces all around, innocent-looking bowls of broken glass that spout flames, plus a pool with a swim-up bar.

The place nods to the environment, too, with concrete and steel walls and carpeting made from corn. (The Brazilian cherry staircase? Less so.) Ideally, the house will have a power bill of $0, thanks to its LED lights and 12 kilowatts worth of solar panels.

How much is the house?

The 9,000-square-foot New American Home 2009 will, its builders estimate, sell for more than $4 million, well out of reach for most Americans, especially in 2009.

That price puts the house in a part of the market that has just started to feel the economy and has, in the past year, introduced into real estate listings the term “luxury foreclosure.”

But the builder of this subdivision says he feels great putting up mansions right now.

“The people who are buying these homes have money,” says Tyler Jones, the 31-year-old president of Blue Heron.

(Speaking of old money, Jones’ family has been in Las Vegas since the 1920s. Jones learned the building trade from his father and grew up not far from Tomiyasu Lane.)

Still, Jones has taken some hits. The starter mansions in his development cost about $1.1 million, which is nearly $1 million less than Jones estimates they could have been sold for in 2006. But, with six houses sold out of 14, Jones says he thinks the worst days are almost behind us.