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The view of downtown Los Angeles
from the vibrating waterbed perched on the roof of Andre Balazs' new hotel is
stunning. Arco Plaza, the Citicorp Building, the Los Angeles Central
Library's ceramic tile roof and Flower Street pedways all jostle for attention,
as does the twisted tower atop the phone company building that looks like
something straight out of a 1950s sci-fi B movie.
"The whole thing is so
Jetsons,” says Balazs, marveling at the vista from the Astro Turfed outdoor bar
area. “When you're up here, you see a helicopter fly past, it's just all ...
it's so much more optimistic than the way New York feels right now, you know?
This perspective is just remarkable.”
But will people show up to enjoy
the view? Balazs will find out soon enough. Working with the Santa Monica firm
Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Balazs has spent the past 26 months renovating a
1955 office building at Flower and 6th streets. The 207-room Standard Downtown opens this month.
Balazs is gambling that downtown Los Angeles is ready for a medium-priced hotel
(rooms start at $95) geared to hip young business travelers.
From the
moment Balazs laid eyes on the 12-story building, he knew there was a hotel in
the making. “I was on my way to the airport one day going back to New York, and
someone told me I had to stop here, so I swung by and immediately thought it was
the most stunning work,” Balazs says. “What I think is so unusual about it is
there's a pride of authorship, a distinguished character that you find in a lot
of owner-developed buildings. It has details that I've only seen in places like
Rockefeller Center.”
The proud owner, Balazs soon learned, had been
California oil baron and philanthropist
W.M. Keck, who commissioned Claud Beelman--designer of the nearby Art Deco Garfield Building--to create the Modernist
headquarters for his Superior Oil Co. The building was occupied by a bank, then
lay dormant for nine years.
"Walking through the building was kind of
fascinating” Balazs recalls. “Some of the offices still had desks and paper. It
was like a ghost building.” By the time he bought the property early in 2000,
Balazs, 45, had successfully transformed several other old buildings into chic,
celebrity-friendly lodgings. In 1990, he took over the legendary but decrepit Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard,
gradually restoring it to pristine condition.
He spent eight years
overhauling a 19th century SoHo warehouse before wowing New York fashionistas
with the sleek Mercer Hotel in 1998. A
year later, Miami-based Architectonica gave a playfully minimalist make-over to
a nondescript 1964 building Balazs had purchased on the Sunset Strip.
Rechristened the Standard,
the hotel--with its upside-down sign, Andy Warhol-patterned curtains, orange
bathroom fixtures and shag-carpeted lobby ceiling--has become destination
lodging for fashion-forward, budget-conscious travelers.
For his new
venture, Balazs wanted to apply the Standard's sly aesthetic to the new
setting by dressing the building's essentially conservative bones in blasts of
color, cheeky pop culture references and irreverent riffs on corporate culture.
Strolling across the lobby's dark-green marble floor, preserved from the
original structure, Balazs says, “I always approach the starting point of a
hotel as this sort of archaeology, where you start digging around to figure out:
Where are we?
"What is 'downtown'? Who are the denizens, and what's
going on in the area? Then, coupled with the building itself, you develop a kind
of vocabulary for what you want to do,” he says. “I always approach a hotel
first and foremost with where it's located. And if it's a rehab like this, you
take a look at what you have to work with, and where do you take it? So we asked
ourselves: What is fun about this?”
Among the inspirational details,
which Balazs left intact: a row of glass-tubed clocks that provide times in
London, Tehran, Calcutta and other cities. “What a picture of optimism about
worldwide enterprise that is, right?” Balazs says. “So this then starts to
inform the spirit of the lobby.” Around the corner near the check-in desk,
Balazs points toward a semi-abstract stainless steel map of the world. It's
dotted with pulsing pink lights supposedly representing the vast global reach of
his company, Standard Holdings.
"That's a fantasy,” Balazs says with a
laugh, “But this is what corporations really do. [By creating this] world map of
far-flung holdings sort of inspired by [Italian Modernist designer] Gio Ponti,
we asked ourselves, 'If you're really going to play in this corporate world, how
do you stylize it?' You can do it a little bit tongue in cheek.”
To
crank up the impact of the new hotel's lobby, furniture designer Vladimir Kagan
was commissioned to create an extremely pink 150-foot-long sofa punctuated by
segments 4 feet off the ground to facilitate exhibitionists interested, as
Balazs says, in “striking a pose.” The building's original load-bearing columns
have been sheathed in glass to enhance the sense of spectacle Balazs likes to
create. “It's for the people watching, the views, the angles, the voyeuristic
aspect, which is part of why people enjoy hotel lobbies: You live there, but at
the same time it is public space.”
Suspended from the ceiling, in homage
to the era of corporate-sponsored abstract art, hangs a mobile that Balazs says
is “obviously in the spirit of Calder.” Other nontraditional lobby amenities
include a pool table, a photo booth, a 1970s-era funky white organ intended to
be a kitschy riff on the standard piano bar, and a barbershop named Flint--as in
the campy, 1966 James Coburn spy flick, “Our Man Flint.”
Balazs called
on interior designer Shawn Hausman, a onetime movie set designer whose credits
include “The People Vs. Larry Flynt,” to inject jolts of color throughout,
beginning with the ground-floor restaurant practically aflame in egg-yolk
yellow. Hausman, who has collaborated with Balazs on his other Los Angeles
hotels, also tracked down the bright red '70s-era fiberglass pods that house the
rooftop water beds and urged Kagan to upholster his hyper-sofa in hot pink. “I
really fought for that pink,” Hausman says. “It's important that everything
isn't too masculine.”
Hausman collaborated with Balazs on the original
Standard and says that bold color
choice is one unifying element of the two hotels.
But there's no pat
formula, Hausman says. “Andre's always open to experimentation, always trying to
come up with different approaches that combine humor and sophistication. It's
not specifically about a period but is really more about doing something in the
spirit of what a place feels like. And I think there's a consistency about
having an element of sophisticated fun without being too over the top.”
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For architect Hank Koning, finding fresh possibilities in a relatively
rigid framework required resourceful thinking. He created a new entrance set off
from the street, since city regulations prohibit parked cars on Flower or 6th
streets; transformed the cube structure that once housed the building's cooling
and heating machinery into the rooftop bar; and took advantage of the building's
off-center elevator core by crafting NBA rooms, so-called because the
proportions are unusually long.
"The big challenge was working within
the constraints of an existing building,” says Koning, whose clients have
included the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills and the Standard's Sunset Boulevard rival the
Mondrian Hotel. “It's been designated a cultural-historic landmark by the city
of Los Angeles, so there were things you really couldn't touch.”
On the
plus side, Koning says, the building had exceptionally strong infrastructure:
"It was designated an essential-services building, so it was extremely sturdy,
built on solid rock.”
Balazs and his team continued the
corporate-but-sexy theme established in the public spaces into the rooms
themselves. He explains, “If the role model for the lobby might be John
DeLorean, the rogue CEO who's got a lot of style, long hair, good-looking girls,
then in the rooms, we're sort of playing with that notion of bachelor chic.” The
desk has no drawers. The closets have no door, utilizing instead a curtain made
of the same kind of mesh material used for sports jerseys. And in place of
chairs, Balazs says, the platform framing the bed serves as an informal sitting
area.
"Playboy in the '60s did an interesting article about the perfect
bachelor pad,” Balazs says. “The idea was that it would be ultimately this
hugely sensual and efficient space where the bed was a living platform; you'd
have your controls and your stereo. Everything was right there, so we started to play with
that.”
Showers have a “modesty curtain” and a see-through glass window
facing the sleeping quarters. Bathrooms are something Balazs spends a lot of
time thinking about. “I obsess about stuff like this all the time,” he says.
"Business travelers--they've done studies--70% of their waking hours in the room
are spent in the bath area, so you want to make it comfortable as possible.”
Those glass shower stalls also are aimed at providing some romantic
sizzle for couples that Balazs hopes to attract on weekends, when business
travel is light. In corner rooms, the showers face straight through the glass
window onto the street. “The trick is to maximize, build upon what you can,”
Balazs says. “In this case, you've got a corner room, and we decided it would be
really interesting to play with the light....” Balazs suddenly pulls up the
blinds, revealing the building on the other side of 6th Street. “That's one hell of a sexy shower!” He
smiles.
"Look,” Balazs continues, “the Standard is a business hotel. It's
meant to be a place to do business, albeit for a new generation of
businessperson. But once we make sure the room has a generous working area, and
a view, and it's well lit, then we can start to play with the thing.”
Balazs, dressed for two days running in black pants, black shoes and
white shirt, comes off as remarkably even-keeled given the pressures of
preparing a major new hotel. Then again, Balazs says that creating new projects
is what he likes to do best. The son of Hungarian emigres who taught at
Harvard University, Balazs studied architecture briefly at
Cornell University before switching to Columbia University,
where he earned an MBA in journalism and business. He sculpted for a while and
nearly enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design, but instead started a biotech
company in 1980, made a fortune and began investing in Manhattan nightclubs. In
1985, he married Katie Ford, president of Ford Models Inc. They have two
daughters and live in a SoHo loft near the Mercer.
Balazs' gift for
anticipating the Next Big Thing is not infallible--the short-lived Los Angeles
nightclub BC comes to mind--but he hits the mark far more often than not. So
will downtown L.A. be the next SoHo?
"There's a lot of boosterism
going on,” Balazs says, “and I endorse all of that. But the idea of doing this
was not predicated on some expectation that there would be a booming revival of
downtown.
"I do think there's more than a glimmer of a changing culture,
between loft renovations, fashion, the art scene. So I think it's a very dynamic
time, but who knows? It happened in SoHo, on Prince Street where we're on, it
didn't have a single store--shortly after the Mercer Hotel opened, even while it was
under construction, these little boutiques started springing up, to the point
where, now to the chagrin of those of us who live there, the galleries have gone
and the shops are everywhere.
"I think this area is truly spectacular,
an undiscovered sort of niche in Los Angeles that I think people ought to come
down and take a look at.”
With Walt Disney Concert Hall under
construction just down the street, and the nearby Los Angeles Convention Center,
and of course Staples Center, the Standard Downtown may well prove to be
the right inn at the right time.
But hit or miss, Balazs' latest
operation will at the very least turn on its head the travel industry truism
about no surprise being the best surprise of all. Says Koning about his client:
"I travel a lot, and at most business hotels, it's the same old-same old.
Working with Andre, the one thing you're not going to end up doing is something
boring. If it's boring, you can check that right off the list.”
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles
Times
All Rights Reserved
Los Angeles Times
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