MILLION DOLLAR DREAM HOMES HUGE LUXURY HOUSES SPROUT IN VALLEY VALLEY BUYERS WILLING TO SPEND BIG BUCKS.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Staff Writer

Imagine living in a house with four bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a walk-in cigar humidor, a gift-wrapping room and 10 or so others for whatever you want.

And a pool. And a pool house. And a barn. Oh, and don't forget the seven-horse stables.

That's only a glimpse of Joseph S. Kaplan's house in Hidden Hills, the most expensive sold in the San Fernando Valley last year, with a price tag of more than $5.5 million

The 36-year-old entrepreneur was among a wave of the wealthy who pushed the sale of luxury homes costing more than $1 million to a new record in the Valley, tripling the number from four years earlier.

``The high end just took off like a rocket,'' said real estate agent Bev Piecha, with Coldwell Banker in Westlake Village. ``I had extremely high-end buyers walking in the door, telling me they wanted from 14,000 to 20,000 square feet and the sky was the limit.''

At least 439 homes costing $1 million or more were sold last year in the Valley region, including Thousand Oaks, according to Acxiom/DataQuick, a La Jolla real estate research firm. That's up 25 percent from the year before and almost three times the 1995 figure of 152.

A few prestigious gated communities, including Hidden Hills and Mulholland Estates off Reseda Boulevard, were especially hot, as builders snapped up older properties for $1 million or more only to tear down the houses and build new ones three times as big.

Leading the prestige pack in the Valley last year was Kaplan's 2.6-acre Hidden Hills estate.

The home, built by Roy P. Disney, a scion of the entertainment clan, was by far the most expensive sold in the Valley last year, according to Acxiom. Disney, the son of current Disney Vice Chairman Roy E. Disney, spent more than two years building the home, but went through a divorce during construction and decided not to move in, according to records and people familiar with the transaction.

Now it belongs to Kaplan and his wife, Judi, who moved in with their two children last summer, although the interior remains a work in progress.

The house itself is a roomy 13,000 square feet - huge by comparison with the 1,557-square-foot home that was the median sold in the Valley last year, according to Acxiom.

It has nine bathrooms, and four bedrooms, plus about a dozen other rooms, from separate offices for Joe and Judi to a small ``gift-wrapping room.''

Yet, the Kaplan manse still feels intimate.

``We looked at these big houses that had massive rooms and didn't feel like a home,'' said Kaplan, who built his fortune on credit card processing. ``Whereas this house, it's warm and it's unassuming. You don't realize what's there until you're in it.''

The home mixes the look of an old-fashioned New England farmhouse with the latest in modern perks. It has porches, balconies and fireplaces everywhere. The back yard has a pool with ``beachfront entry,'' meaning there is no edge at the shallow end; it just slopes gradually to ground level. It also is designed and landscaped to look like a pond, for a more natural feel, and has an adjacent Jacuzzi.

The back yard also has seven horse stables, a two-bedroom guest house, pool house and a barn that Disney imported from Kentucky ``because it looks old,'' Judi Kaplan said. The back yard also has 10 speakers throughout, giving it concert-like sound, and will soon have a tennis court.

The Kaplans say even with the unfinished interior, they have already done quite a bit of entertaining for groups of friends ranging from 20 to 100.

``That's all we've done in the last two months,'' Judi said. ``We've had like seven parties.''

The house also has that Southern California rarity, a basement, which will eventually hold a walk-in cigar humidor, a media room with projection screen television, and a game room for poker and billiards.

It has two three-car garages, one of which the Kaplans use just for storage, and a goldfish pond off the front veranda.

Most Hidden Hills residents name their homes; the Kaplans chose ``Dreams Come True'' - not necessarily a Disney reference, but just their own feelings about their success.

Like many buyers driving the latest luxury housing surge, the Kaplans are a young family that has seen sudden success in the booming economy.

With a partner, Joe Kaplan founded a national credit-card processing business, Superior Bankcard Service, in Woodland Hills in 1994. By the time he got out four years later, merging it with a larger firm, Superior was earning about $60 million in revenues, he said.

In October 1999, he started a new venture, Innovative Merchant Solutions, run first out of his new home and now in its own office in Calabasas. The new business competes with the old one, processing credit card transactions, both in-store and on the Internet.

Joe and Judi Kaplan, high school sweethearts from Encino, said it was the larger property size and the safe, friendly feeling of Hidden Hills that prompted them to move out of their Calabasas home. They also wanted to keep their two children in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

Those are the typical concerns of people who buy high-end homes in Hidden Hills, said Patte Gilbert, the real estate agent with Fred Sands in Calabasas who represented the Kaplans in the sale. The schools, the security and the rural environment with its horse trails are the big draws, she said.

``One of the things people really like about Hidden Hills is you don't feel like you're living in Los Angeles,'' Gilbert said. ``It's that feeling of, Wow, isn't it neat, our kids come home from school, they do their homework and get on their horse.''

The Kaplans' home may have been the Valley's most expensive sold in 1999, but there were plenty of others that went for seven figures. Prestige homes, in fact, led the region's comeback from the early to mid '90s housing slump.

``It was a real top-down economic recovery,'' said John Karevoll, an analyst with Acxiom/DataQuick.

After sales of luxury homes started rising, the normal-priced ones followed, Karevoll said, and ``right now, everything's going up all the way from the top to the bottom.''

Calabasas, for example, saw a 46 percent increase in the median sales price last year, and a section of Glendale saw an increase of 75 percent, according to Acxiom.

Most experts believe the trend will continue for several years at least, in part because there is very little land left to build on close to Los Angeles.

Luxury home builder Ron Levy of LG Development Co. in Tarzana said he is seeing much younger buyers now than in the past, many in their 30s and 40s with families. While about half are connected to Hollywood, many made their fortunes through smart investments in the Internet and other technology companies.

He said he has also seen a number of people flee Beverly Hills and other Westside communities for the lower crime and traffic, and community feeling, of Hidden Hills.

Strangely enough, as a result of these skyrocketing prices, $1 million doesn't buy what it used to anymore.

``It's really funny because they used to talk about owning a million-dollar home. Now a million-dollar home is just a tract home,'' Levy said. ``At a million bucks we buy tear-downs. The whole marketplace has changed.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, chart

Photo: (1 -- color) Former Encino dwellers Judi and Joe Kaplan stand in the back yard of their $5.5 million, 13,000-square-foot mansion in Hidden Hills

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer

(2 -- color) A wood-paneled library with fireplace is just one of the dozens of Hrooms in the Kaplans' expansive home.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer

(3 -- color) A butler statue waits to greet visitors to Joe and Judi Kaplan's home in Hidden Hills. A lone houseplant in the living room testifies to the difficulty in furnishing a 13,000-square-foot domicile for a family of four.

Chart: MILLION DOLLAR MADNESS

SOURCE: Acxiom/Data Quick and Multiple Listing Service