Why Sheraton Grand Los Angeles matters.
Sheraton Grand Los Angeles is a reinvented metropolitan hotel where Downtown's commercial resurgence meets Charles Luckman's 1970s megastructure and a $75 million redesign that recast the property for the city's renewed street culture.
Set along South Hope Street near West 7th Street and just steps from 7th Street/Metro Center, the hotel occupies the Financial District between South Flower Street, West 8th Street and the towers extending north toward Bunker Hill. Its high-rise slab rises directly from The Bloc, placing the entrance beneath a dense vertical field of offices and residences. Broad glazing and a recessed street-level threshold connect the lobby visually with Hope Street, countering the heavy masonry that historically characterized the surrounding complex. Interior sightlines extend toward the adjoining open-air court, with the hotel functioning as one vertical component within the larger city block. The result is a high-rise hotel whose street-facing entrance and connection to The Bloc place overnight hospitality directly inside one of Downtown's busiest transit, office and retail intersections.
What defines Sheraton Grand Los Angeles.
Sheraton Grand Los Angeles is best known for surviving the reinvention of Broadway Plaza from an inward-facing 1970s commercial megastructure into the open-air complex now called The Bloc. Charles Luckman & Associates designed the original Hyatt Regency as part of Broadway Plaza, a $65 million development that opened in 1973 with a department-store flagship, enclosed shopping galleria and companion office tower. Luckman conceived the complex around the ability to work, sleep, shop and eat within one urban center, a model characteristic of an era when large downtown developments deliberately separated their interiors from surrounding streets. The hotel tower rose 24 stories and originally incorporated a revolving restaurant at its summit. Broadway Plaza became Macy's Plaza after the department-store consolidation of the 1990s, and the hotel subsequently operated under several identities before becoming Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown in 2005. Wayne Ratkovich's company joined National Real Estate Advisors and Blue Vista Capital Management in purchasing the larger property for $241 million in 2013. Their redevelopment removed the shopping center's immense glass atrium roof, breached its formerly closed street walls and cut away portions of the main floor to create a sunken outdoor court. The hotel underwent its own $75 million reconstruction, with Colum McCartan directing interior design across 496 rooms, the lobby, meeting areas and new dining spaces. McCartan used gold accents and contemporary forms to draw from Downtown's Art Deco heritage. District, developed with RDC, received the 2016 Gold Key Award for Best Restaurant Casual Dining after opening within the redesigned property. Sheraton designated the hotel a Sheraton Grand in April 2016, placing it among 24 properties worldwide carrying the brand's new premier designation at that time. The larger redevelopment eventually exceeded $250 million, with the hotel remaining operational as construction dismantled the enclosed commercial world that had surrounded it since 1973.
Walnut, leather and deep upholstery bring darker tones into District, where the dining room moves from the brightness of the adjoining lobby toward a warmer setting built for breakfast and evening drinks. Eggs, breakfast potatoes and griddled components establish the morning service through direct heat and browned surfaces, with fruit and lighter accompaniments breaking through the richer elements on the plate. The bar shifts that balance after dark toward spirit-forward drinks, where vermouth, bitters and stirred whiskey or gin give the program a drier profile than the sweeter fruit-led cocktails common to large hotels. Negronis and Manhattans continue in Hope Street Bar off the lobby, using bitterness, fortified wine and aged spirits to build depth through classic proportions. Seasonal highballs move in the opposite direction through ice and carbonation, lengthening spirits into colder, lighter drinks suited to the adjoining public rooms. District and Hope Street Bar give the hotel two different speeds of service, moving from cooked breakfast and an American dining room into a cocktail program grounded in bitterness, dilution and cold temperature as the building shifts from daytime business traffic toward evening drinking.
How Sheraton Grand Los Angeles fits.
Sheraton Grand Los Angeles works as the overnight anchor for a Downtown outing connecting an athletic institution born before the automobile, a haberdashery transformed by Parisian Art Deco and a turquoise tower created for two Depression-era retailers.
Begin at Los Angeles Athletic Club, founded in 1880 by 40 Angelenos when the city held only 11,000 residents. The organization moved into its permanent 7th Street clubhouse in 1912, commissioning John Parkinson and Edwin Bergstrom to create a 12-story Beaux-Arts building with athletic, social and residential functions stacked vertically. Its sixth-floor swimming pool became an engineering distinction, placing an indoor pool high above street level at a period when such facilities generally occupied basements. Charlie Chaplin lived at the club, and Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller joined the actors and athletes associated with its early decades. The institution later helped found the California Yacht Club in 1922 and Riviera Country Club in 1926. Continue to Oviatt Building, constructed in 1928 as the headquarters of luxury haberdashery Alexander & Oviatt. Walker & Eisen designed the building, but James Oviatt's visit to the 1925 Paris Exposition redirected its decorative program toward the emerging Art Deco style. More than 30 tons of glass by René Lalique originally filled the sheltered lobby court, with Lalique also creating elevator doors, mailboxes and other fittings. Oviatt occupied a ten-room penthouse decorated by Parisian firm Saddler et fils with burled mahogany, geometric parquet, imported fabrics and further Lalique glass. Conclude at Eastern Columbia Building, Claud Beelman's 13-story Art Deco tower completed in only nine months and opened on September 12, 1930. Glossy turquoise terra cotta covers its reinforced-concrete structure, with deep blue and gold ornament forming sunbursts, zigzags, chevrons and stylized plant and animal forms across the exterior. A four-sided neon clock crowns the building above Broadway, originally advertising the Eastern and Columbia outfitting companies housed below. Beelman and engineer R. M. Storms moved mechanical systems into the rooftop tower, freeing basement area and turning building infrastructure into the architectural crown. A $30 million conversion completed in 2006 created 140 residences and later earned a 2008 Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award. The progression moves from a 1912 clubhouse that stacked athletics above Downtown streets through James Oviatt's importation of Parisian decorative arts and culminates in Beelman's turquoise tower, where engineering equipment became part of one of the city's most distinctive Art Deco compositions.
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