Celebrity designer wants 5X return on Los Feliz home

Once dubbed the “queen of the high-end house flip,” celebrity home designer Xorin Balbes is at it again.

He’s looking to sell a Spanish-style house in Los Feliz for $10.75 million, nearly five times the $2.3 million he paid for it in 2015, The Real Deal has learned.

Balbes said the price hike is justified, because of the $7.5 million he spent on the renovations and construction. While the original 1920s-era home on the site was just 3,200 square feet, the new one is more than double the size, after he partially razed the first property and supersized it, he said.

All that’s left of the original home is the entry way, the living room and two upstairs bedrooms.

The replacement home, which sits on less and half an acre in Laughlin Park, spans 7,800 square feet with five bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It has a living room with wood beam ceilings, an office, a theater, a gym, a sauna and two dining rooms. There’s also a pool house and an indoor-outdoor lounge with a fireplace.

“What’s unique to my work is the indoor-outdoor flow of the home,” Balbes said of the reimagined property.

Billy Rose of the Agency has the listing.

A nearby Franklin Avenue property known as the Sowden House, which was designed by the late architect Lloyd Wright and renovated by Balbes, drew criticism from preservationists who said that Balbes had been too liberal with his changes to the property. That home is now on the market for $4.7 million.