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.

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.