LA Times: Hollywood W Hotel "ungainly"

The 15-story, $600m W Hollywood Hotel and Residences opened this morning after 10 long years of planning and construction. The development, which sits atop the Hollywood/Vine Metro Red Line station, boasts 305 hotel rooms, 143 residences, and 375 rental units, 78 of which are designated low-income. The mess of buildings, billboards, and public space occupies an L-shaped site with the historic 1924 Taft Building at its corner. LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne calls it "equal parts Chateau Marmont, LA Live, and Pershing Square," going on to say that it aptly symbolizes an LA that is "groping toward a denser, more vertical and more public future while still reluctant to abandon its love affair with the car and the glossier, more exclusive corners of celebrity culture."

The W Hotel is the largest mixed-use development to open in Hollywood since the Hollywood/Highland TOD in 2001. But the W project is higher market, more aspirational, and further from Hollywood's epicenter. Because of this, the W project faces more challenges than its neighbor to the west. Back in April of last year, we reported that the new W hotel would attempt to steal back the traditional press junket from the Four Seasons Beverly Hills. It has made an admirable attempt at this lofty goal, with 20 large suites specially suited to accommodate hair and make-up crews and heavy-duty electrical demands. But the W must also cater to a high-end residential market that doesn't want that glitzy Hollywood exposure. Still more divergent are the needs of the low-income renters and Metro passengers - a group that seems likely to be ignored by an upscale hotel management.

The intractable scale and awkward amalgamation of uses and users is less the result of poor planning than it is of a pioneering compromise between a multitude of diverse stakeholders. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in Los Angeles. As Hawthorne suggests, it may be too much to ask that low-income subway commuters mingle with the glamorous Hollywood elite. The complex also suffers from chronic design schizophrenia; a whopping five architecture offices (HKS, Designstudio, Architropolis, Daly Genik, Rios Clementi Hale) produced designs for different aspects of the project, with almost no regard for the intentions of the others. The flashing hotel lobby poses as much of a contrast to the stark rooftop pool as the subway station does to the valet station. Whether the W Hotel and Residences proves to be that much-fantasized catalyst of urban activity and merger of LA's notoriously divergent classes will be its chief test over time.

Rooms sell for between $259 and $1000/night and residences are 30% sold.

Korean Air Unleashes Plans for Downtown Megatower

The LA Times reported today that Korean Air, the South Korean transport conglomerate, plans to demo the existing Wilshire Grand hotel and replace it with a pair of sleek office/hotel skyscrapers. The company, which bought the 57-year old property in 1989, claims it has accumulated a special reserve of cash in anticipation of the economic downturn and argues that with sinking construction costs, there is no better time to build. The development will be the latest and greatest of a long string of Korean investment in Los Angeles. If granted approval from the city, groundbreaking could commence in 2011 with completion set for 2014.

The existing Wilshire Grand, while underused and aging, is located on a prime piece of downtown real estate - the corner of Figueroa St and Wilshire Blvd. The location, which is convenient to Korean Air's current LA headquarters, is significant because it is outside of the large and dense Koreatown neighborhood. The $1 billion 1.8 million sf center, built by influential LA developer Thomas Properties, will be an important testament to the growing clout of Koreans and Korean Americans in this city.

Plans call for a 40-story luxury hotel/condo tower connected to a 60-story office building by groundlevel retail and a public plaza. The property is located across the street from the 7th St Metro station. David Martin of endeared downtown architecture firm AC Martin will be the design architect. Rendering shows a sun-friendly north-south orientation and energy-generating photovoltaic panels. It will be the first new office tower built in Downtown since 1992. It may also mean hungry downtowners will no longer have to venture past Vermont Ave for their bulgogi fix.

W Hotel: Bring Press Junket Back to Hollywood

The W Hotel & Residences, under construction at the corner of Hollywood Blvd and Vine St, has announced plans to try to attract the 'press junket' phenomenon of movie marketing back to the industry's historic district. The intersection, which is well-known for its historic centrality in the movie-making business, has lost most of its significance since its heyday. Gatehouse Capital, the developer of the $350 million complex, declared last week that the building has been specially designed to accommodate those events, which are weekend-long marketing soirees used to promote a film and its stars to a glut of reporters.

For years, the majority of these gatherings have been hosted by luxury hotels in Beverly Hills, with about 90% taking place at the Four Seasons there. The ambitious effort by the W development is part of a larger trend in the attempt to bring components of the film industry back to their historical geographic roots in Hollywood. The biggest of these changes has been the Hollywood & Highland theater-shopping-entertainment complex down the street. That investment has almost single-handedly brought Hollywood back onto the tourist radar, and has prompted soaring real estate prices along the boulevard.

The design and construction features necessary for such a specific use however, are not simple. Many hotel rooms have to be big enough for camera and film crews to tape celebrity interviews, often with multiple extra-large bathrooms for hair and make-up teams. The convention floors must be wired for extreme electrical output and should utilize fiber optic cabling. All of these on top of the already restrictive zoning and building conditions. With respect to the adjoining historic Taft building, the hotel has a height limit of 15 stories. And built over a Metro Red Line station, the building must also conform to egress requirements for the underground station. Come November, we'll see if the Hollywood challenger can dominate the elite Beverly Hills incumbent.

NoHo: What Recession?

When visiting North Hollywood these days, one is unavoidably greeted by a thicket of construction cranes and high-rise steel skeletons. The scale of development here seems to have actually increased in the past couple of years, almost resembling its namesake brother to the south in the early 2000s. But if you look closely at the street banners, you’ll notice that this neighborhood has been designated as the NoHo Arts District. And the City of LA has done a fairly good job at marketing it as such and attracting small art galleries, stage theaters, and even bigwig entertainment offices like Disney Interactive Media and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. But of course, with the establishment of an arts community, comes the inevitable influx of trendy, market-rate condos.

The most obvious of these newcomers is NOHO14, the massive residential tower located across the street from the Metro station. Having opened in October 2008, this upscale loft complex is having difficulty filling units however, with occupancy at just 20%. Opposite the station lies NoHo Commons, a large mixed-use village with medium-density housing in back and retail along Lankershim Blvd (including a spin-off of the famed Hollywood wing joint Big Wang’s). The latest and boldest however is phase III of NoHo Commons, a freestanding structure located one block further south on Lankershim. Essentially in the backyard of the Academy of Television, what was a patch of dirt in September is now an attractively imposing tower. NoHo may be experiencing a real estate renaissance, but the scale and ambition of the Metro mixed-use office/hotel/retail/residential development above the Red Line subway station, to be developed by Lowe Enterprises, is absolutely insane. Best of luck to ‘em.

The majority of this new construction was spurred by the arrival of the Metro Red Line subway in 2000. But CRA/LA, the non-profit community redevelopment organization, designated North Hollywood as an immediate intervention zone because of overcrowding and slum conditions in 1979! Today, slum is the last word that comes to mind while strolling down Lankershim Blvd, which is lined with cute restaurants, high-rise condos, and shiny office buildings. The neighborhood has maintained its uniqueness over the years, partly because it is somewhat off-the-map and not easily discoverable. New construction seems to be taking place exclusively on vacant lots, rather than replacing existing lower-density housing, which continues to exist outside of the commercial core. The resulting mixture of residential and commercial uses is interesting and dynamic. Despite a seemingly reckless building boom, the area is ripe for new development, especially in the moderate density range. Who knows – maybe NoHo will be the next valley neighborhood to join the high-rent ranks of Studio City and Sherman Oaks.