Growing up poor in Shreveport, La., as the daughter of an alcoholic mother and a father who had moved to Hawaii, Nicole Sassaman says she developed a strong attachment to her Barbie. She would spend hours making furniture and accessories for dollhouses she created from shoeboxes.
“Barbie helped me learn design,” says Ms. Sassaman, 43, now a successful home designer and flipper with celebrity clients. “It was a way to create a whole different world.”
In 2012, Ms. Sassaman paid $2 million for her piece of the Barbie dream: a penthouse apartment in the Century Towers, a luxury condo building located on the Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles.
The condo was being sold by Barbara Segal, the real-life namesake of the Barbie doll created by her parents, Mattel toys founders Ruth and Elliot Handler. Ms. Segal had inherited the condo from her parents.
After the deal closed, Ms. Sassaman put the three-bedroom, three-bathroom, 3,000-square-foot condo through a yearlong, $3.5 million renovation that removed walls, raised ceilings and refinished pretty much every square inch of space. Now Ms. Sassaman lives in a dollhouse of her own—“Barbie Penthouse”—detailed in a self-published book of the same name released this month. A housewarming party was attended by some of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, who are friends, dressed in Barbie-like outfits for the occasion. (Ms. Sassaman acknowledges that they usually dress that way).
Visitors to the condo are greeted at the front door by a life-size Barbie mannequin, which Ms. Sassaman dresses in different outfits, according to the season and occasion. The living room has a massive framed Barbie hologram, and there are doll-like women’s portraits throughout. Ms. Sassaman has a “Barbie Photo Booth”—a giant Barbie doll box that friends can step inside, making them look like a Barbie doll for sale on a shelf. One closet holds a stash of Barbie dolls still encased in their plastic packaging that she hands out to visitors. The room for her daughter, Ava, 8, is a Barbie extravaganza, with a Barbie painting, a Barbie mobile hanging over the bed and Barbie books.
Yet despite all these fab touches, this is no pink-and-plastic dollhouse. It is clean and modern, almost serene, with Holly Hunt furniture, ultra-high-end finishes in muted colors and contemporary artwork. The kitchen has a high-tech feel, with lots of stainless-steel, contemporary chandeliers and a $58,000 custom-made La Cornue stove. The wine cellar is a stand-alone glass floor-to-ceiling box off the living room. The master bath has and a sculptured white free-standing Boffi tub.
Ms. Sassaman has made a career out of buying, renovating and reselling condos and homes in the Los Angeles area, starting with a 900-square-foot apartment she bought for $196,000 in 1997 and sold for $310,000 a few months later. In 2003, she says she paid $1.4 million for a Beverly Hills home briefly occupied by Greta Garbo. After a three-year, $3 million remodel that doubled the space to around 5,500 square feet, she sold it to a Russian filmmaker in 2006 for $7.5 million. She renovated a Malibu home she and her now ex-husband bought in 2006 for $3.5 million and sold it in 2011 for about $7.5 million.
One of her strategies is to always buy places that have great views—something the Century Towers condos, where she has bought and resold 30 apartments to date, have in spades. Ms. Sassaman says she turned down a $10 million offer for Barbie Penthouse a few months ago (by a “top hotel-industry executive” she declines to name), but adds that she will probably sell some day.
She says the Los Angeles chapter of her life began when she fled there as a senior in high school to escape her mother, who at that point was drinking heavily. Her father, John Sassaman, by then had moved to Las Vegas, where he bought a Prevost bus to travel the country. When he offered his daughter a ride to California, she accepted. She lived in the bus for a time, taking jobs as a flower designer and the manager at a gift store, eventually finishing high school and buying her own apartment. She was soon making her own line of cards and giftware, and has since expanded into pillows, candles, books and other home products.
Ms. Sassaman says she inherited much of her design taste from her mother, who died last year. She believed that it was more important to save up and buy one thing that was very beautiful than many things that weren't.
Ms. Sassaman’s father now lives in a ground-floor condo she owns in her building after moving to L.A. recently. “She is a very strong woman,” Mr. Sassaman says. When she puts her mind to something she really goes for it.”
Ms. Sassaman says she ignores all the bad press on Barbie—the accusations that the doll encourages an unrealistic body image. This reflects her overall philosophy on life, one that got her through her childhood and helped her forgive her parents: “If you look at anything in the world, you can make it positive,” she says.
