Downtown LA Proper Hotel

Client

The Kor Group + Stork/Alma Development

Area

Fashion District, Downtown Los Angeles

Status

Complete

Type

Hotel, Restaurant/Bar

Awards

Los Angeles Conservancy - Preservation Award
California Preservation Foundation - Preservation Design Award Winner for Rehabilitation
The Downtown Breakfast Club - Best Adaptive Reuse
Los Angeles Business Council - L.A. Architectural Awards Award of Excellence
Southern California Development Forum - Honor Award, Adaptive Reuse Renovation Historic Preservation
Southern California Development Forum - People’s Choice Award
Dezeen - Hotel and Short-stay Interior of the Year
Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards - Honoree
Interior Design Magazine - Domestic Transformation

This 13-story Renaissance Revival-style building was designed by master architects Alexander Curlett and Claud Beelman and completed in 1926.

Collaboration

The Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel, owned by the KOR Group and Alma Development and part of Proper Hospitality, put our architects together with interior designer Kelly Wearstler. Together, we converted an underutilized building to a 115,000 sf, 148-room hotel.

History

The building originally held the Commercial Club, which was dedicated to promoting Los Angeles’ industrial and commercial growth. Many prominent Angelenos joined, including film moguls Cecil B. DeMille and Harry Warner, department store mogul Moses Hamburger, banker Irving Hellman, hoteliers, theater operators, and more.

In its heyday, the Commercial Club Building offered an enormous range of amenities and uses: there were offices, game rooms, a spacious banquet room, a ladies’ club, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, an athletic facility, a barber shop and 126 guest rooms for the club's members.

The Club occupied the building through 1932 when it ceased operations, hit hard by the 1929 economic collapse, and a new entity, the Cabrillo Club of Southern California, took over. In 1941, the building was renamed the Cabrillo Hotel, and by 1947, again renamed, the Case Hotel, a moniker retained until 1965, when the YWCA purchased the building and opened a short-term housing, job assistance, and rehabilitation facility that occupied the entire building, including the Los Angeles Job Corps Center, until 2012.

Mural by Abel Macias

Design

A key part of our work has been to strip away decades of non-historic additions and restore the building’s character. There has been plenty to work with, and in many cases, our programming for each space restores a space’s original use.

At the original pool facility on the 7th floor, we are creating a 2,500 sf guest suite, incorporating the full-size original pool directly into the living room of the hotel guest room. In a double-height former basketball court, we’re creating a 1,300 sf guest suite with a screening room. At the multi-level rooftop, we’re designing dynamic spaces for a restaurant/bar and spa, mixing cozy corners with expansive views, especially northward up the Broadway corridor.

For the building’s exterior, we are restoring the original steel storefronts, providing new façade lighting to illuminate the original terra cotta details, rehabilitating the original blade sign, and building a new open panel roof sign per the new Broadway Sign Ordinance (which we also helped to write).