A tale of two buildings

To judge from its exuberant façade, the new Versailles apartment building in Koreatown (one of at least three apartment houses with this classy-sounding name in Los Angeles) has all the right stuff: a throwback to the great French-inspired postwar buildings of Leland Bryant, complete with turrets, balconies, peaked roofs and, most important, a sense of play and fantasy.

The Versailles, Koreatown

The interior, however, tells a different—and disappointing—story. So-called "bedrooms" in this massive block-long building (S. Oxford between James M. Wood Blvd. and San Marino) are the size of closets.

Good luck opening that bottom drawer!

The dining room doubles as the apartment entryway (of course) and the cool turrets are non-functional paste-ons with blind windows (couldn't they have been closets, at least?).

Dining table in the entryway, useless turrets.

The worst may be the living rooms, which are cramped and miserly in size.

A living room at the Versailles, Koreatown.

Just down the street, at 900 South Serrano, is the St. Germaine, a thrilling 1929 Leland Bryant building (an obvious model for the Versailles) with generous living spaces, including spacious living rooms, real dining rooms, and full-sized bedrooms. And the turrets are functional interior spaces, with real windows that admit more light into the apartments.

The St. Germaine, Leland Bryant architect (1929).

Interior of the St. Germaine: generous living spaces and a functioning turret room.

A real, adult-size bedroom at the St. Germaine.

There is much to be admired about the projects of Frost/Chaddock, the developers of the Versailles, but they should be ashamed of their avarice in trying to squeeze as many residents as possible into this new building at the expense of quality of life.

The death of the dining room

The apartment dining room is apparently on its way out, or has perhaps already expired in an untimely demise. The "dining area" has replaced the dining room, not only in adaptive-reuse condo conversion projects but in new-construction apartments as well.

Dining as event: a dramatic apartment dining room in Miracle Mile

Dining as after-thought: the "dining area" in a new building in Mid-Wilshire

In the example immediately above, the awkwardly-situated dining area is relegated to an after-thought; it serves not so much as a place to shove down food (preferably as quickly as possible) but rather more prominently as the entryway for the apartment. Alas, this plan is far from uncommon in today's lofts and apartment buildings.

True dining should be an event, and it deserves a dramatic space dedicated solely to an indulgence in food, wine, and company: the dining room.

A proper dining room at The Talmadge on Wilshire, with a view into the living room

A dining room at The Gothic, Los Feliz (courtesy GLB Properties)

Hollywood Tower redux

The only-semi-fabled Hollywood Tower on Franklin (originally La Belle Tour) is getting a younger sibling nextdoor.

Evidently, the new building will sport a name that harkens back to the original moniker of this Franklin Avenue stalwart, La Belle at Hollywood Tower.

Hollywood Tower, 1929

Info is sketchy, but construction is proceeding at a surprising rate and the few available renderings show the new four-story building to be a sensitive contemporary reflection of its much older forebear. Very nice, in my opinion—but then again, I haven't seen the floor plans.

The pace of construction is brisk.

La Belle at Hollywood Tower

Actor George Raft had a share of the original building and lived there for a while. We assume that thespians of similar skill and ambition will populate the new addition.

The secret of Patio del Moro

Nina and Arthur Zwebell's Patio del Moro apartment building, at 8225-8237 Fountain Avenue, holds a secret: Two of the units—a studio and a three-bedroom suite that was once home to Charlie Chaplin—are offered for short-term rental by the building's current owner, Kevin McConnell.

Patio del Moro, West Hollywood (photo courtesy Kevin McConnell)

The streetside façcade, with its pink and funky Moorish-fortress stance, gives little indication of what charm and sophistication lie inside the gates of this fabled 1925 West Hollywood building. Former residents include not only Chaplin and his then-mistress, Paulette Goddard (in adjoining apartments separated by a service door), but also the likes of Joan Fontaine, Humphrey Bogart, and, later, Suzanne Pleshette.

The living room of the Chaplin suite (photo courtesy Kevin McConnell)

The sensitive restoration that McConnell has engaged on is, in his word, "an ongoing effort." Effort well-spent, I'd say.

The third bedroom of the Chaplin suite (photo courtesy Kevin McConnell)

Check back here later for an exclusive inside tour and an interview with McConnell about his and his inerior designer wife's five-year project to bring this important building back to the glamor of its heyday.

Meanwhile, if you have friends visiting from out of town, this is the perfect pied-à-terre to recommend for an immersion in old Hollywood. See the Patio del Moro website for more information.

Park Avenue on Wilshire . . . part II

"MacArthur Park is melting in the dark."

So sang Richard Harris in the highly over-produced but uncannily prescient Jimmy Webb song. Harris was staying at the Sheraton Townhouse on MacArthur Park when he took a walk one morning in 1968 and discovered a cake left out in the rain, "the sweet green icing flowing down." The rest is history.

The Sheraton Townhouse on MacArthur Park

All that was an age and a half ago, but today the Sheraton Townhouse still stands thanks to the preservation efforts of Rob MacLeod. When the Japanese owners of the building wanted to raze it in the mid-1990s and wait for a better economic climate (sound familiar?), MacLeod secured funding and turned the historic apartment house-turned-hotel into low-income housing for families and seniors. It re-opened in 1997.

The building, as stately as they come in Los Angeles or anywhere else, is a 14-story Georgian revival masterpiece designed by Norman Alpaugh. Originally an apartment house in the mold of The Talmadge, just down the street, it was transformed into a hotel in 1937.

Socialite hotelier Conrad Hilton bought it in 1942 for a cool million, and in 1950 his son Conrad Nicholson "Nicky" Hilton (great-uncle of future tabloid fodderettes Paris and Nicky) got married to Elizabeth Taylor there, the first of her seven-some husbands.

The hotel closed in 1993, as MacArthur Park was rife with drugs and crime. ("Someone left the crack out in the rain," as my friend Steve Silberman so eloquently put it.)

Someone left the crack out in the rain
(photo from you-are-here.com)

I haven't (yet) been inside this place, but sooner or later will do a blog on the wonders to be found therein. Perhaps I can divest myself of all my wordly possessions and plead poverty in order to qualify for residency at the Townhouse in my impending old age.

As for the architecture, Richard Harris puts it best: "I'll never have that recipe again."

Park Avenue on Wilshire . . . almost

The Talmadge, at 3278 Wilshire (official website), was built in 1924 by producer and United Artists president Joseph Schenck as a gift (read: revenue stream) for his then-wife, silent film star Norma Talmadge. The cost was an eye-popping $1.5 million.

The Talmadge, 1924

There is no evidence that Norma Talmadge actually lived here, but former residents do include Schenck protégé Buster Keaton, Captain Alan Hancock of Hancock Park fame, and, much later, television star Telly Savalas.

The Talmadge today, pride of Mid-Wilshire

Architects Aleck Curlett and Claude Beelman—designers of the Elks Club (later the Park Plaza Hotel), not far away, and several other large L.A. projects—chose to work in a Georgian revival style unusual for Los Angeles.

The red brickwork in American bond, the Ionic pilasters, the six-over-six sash windows, the neoclassical limestone friezes and roundels set into the façade, and the prominent balconies on the top floor with broken-pediment window surrounds all conspire to bring a healthy dose of East Coast sophistication to this once-glamorous strip of Mid-Wilshire.

God is in the details

The Talmadge would provide design cues to the stately Sheraton Townhouse just down the boulevard, built a few years afterwards and designed by Clarence Russell and Norman Alpaugh (blogged here).

The building's marquise—a lovely but incongruous Beaux-Arts element—is still in place but has been rather insulted and made redundant by a later burgundy canvas awning with crude lettering; this should be removed post-haste.

Like it rains in L.A.?

The ten-story Talmadge recalls the classic New York apartments of Park Avenue (which are generally a couple of stories taller but have no groovy palm trees waving outside) and was considered the finest apartment house west of Manhattan at the time.

Park Avenue apartment houses
(coutesy of Carter B. Horsley's excellent City Review)

The interior is perhaps not quite up to New York's finest snuff, but it's still serveral cuts above average, with entry halls in each apartment, delicate two-tiered crown moldings, and maid's quarters in the larger units.

Crown molding

Interior view

The Talmadge is a dream building in a dream city. And perhaps the best thing about it is that it is suffused with that gorgeous, indescribable Southern California light.