The New Old Los Angeles

The city’s flourishing restaurant, nightlife, and hotel scene creatively embraces Tinseltown’s extensive historic building stock.

- Jessica Ritz

Peyton Hall laughs when he remembers a call he got in 2003 from a developer client fresh off a successful hotel launch in Los Angeles. The developer, whose transformation of a neglected midcentury building into a boutique hotel had turned heads among the hipper-than-thou set, was in search of another L.A. property ripe for reuse.

“We’ve come a long way from 1980, when people didn’t want to touch historic buildings because they were too much trouble and too expensive,” says Hall, who is a principal architect at the Pasadena-based Historic Resources Group, a historic preservation consulting firm. When Hall first moved to the city, interest in local architectural relics was arguably at its nadir. “Now we have a developer looking for them,” he recalls. That the client’s enthusiasm included postwar structures, a style then only tepidly appreciated by the general public, made the call all the more memorable.

Though adaptive reuse may have been a novelty in the early aughts, it is now an in-demand practice in Los Angeles— and one that’s dovetailed with the city’s recent hotel and restaurant boom.

“L.A. has a reputation for being a progressive city architecturally, and a city that’s always transforming itself,” says Eric Needleman, cofounder of 213 Hospitality. Needleman and his partner Cedd Moses develop and operate bars known for, aside from top-tier mixology, their siting in older building stock. “We have an amazing amount of architecturally significant historic buildings. I think people have grown to appreciate what those have to offer.”