Vogue's coolest house in L.A.

It's Michael Chow's palace in Holmby Hills, designed by Chow and his wife Eva with a 28-foot-high central atrium and many Chinese touches, but with Mexican arches and carved wooden front doors liberated from a Mexican church. Eve MacSweeney wrote the piece in the 754-page September issue. Sheila Metzner took the photographs, but I'd be a crumb not to also credit Sittings Editor Hamish Bowles. What a great Vogue job title.

If a person can write an autobiography in stone and cement, complete with geographical shifts, wild enthusiasms, and far-reaching aspirations, then Michael Chow has done so in this gorgeously scaled, eclectically conceived, exquisitely detailed palazzo of his own, which (bar the movie theater under the pool house, which is still under construction) he recently finished building. The place took seven years to complete.

The artist Ed Ruscha's housewarming gift was a painting in brown acrylic of a perfect letter C. Of the house, he says "It's something, isn't it?" Gucci and InStyle magazine underwrote the dinner debuting the house last fall. Meanwhile, I'm told that the Eurochow space in Westwood Village, now closed except for special events, is all but certain to be taken over by another restaurant. It's got three separate kitchens and that oh-so-valuable full bar permit. Not likely to be going back to the days when the corner housed a Contempo Casuals store.