Why you should experience Sunset Plaza in Los Angeles, California.
Sunset Plaza is a polished enclave where West Hollywood's Sunset Strip character meets Georgian commercial architecture, steep hillside residences and a development lineage extending from a nineteenth-century country estate into one of the corridor's earliest purpose-built retail centers.
Positioned between Norma Triangle, Laurel Canyon, and Beverly Hills, the neighborhood occupies the western-central stretch of the Sunset Strip and the rising ground immediately north, where Sunset Plaza Drive leaves the boulevard and climbs through the Lower Hollywood Hills along increasingly tight curves. Low commercial buildings establish a restrained architectural scale beside Sunset Boulevard before the terrain rises into residential streets lined with American Colonial Revival houses, Mediterranean compositions and later hillside designs positioned across steep south-facing parcels. Sunset Plaza Drive supplies the primary encounter, beginning amid tightly grouped storefronts before ascending through successive bends that expose broader views across West Hollywood and the Los Angeles Basin. Side streets including Rising Glen Road and St. Ives Drive create a secondary pattern of short climbs and branching hillside routes, replacing the boulevard's commercial frontage with detached houses, mature planting and sharply graded lots. The result is a neighborhood whose compact geography joins an unusually intact 1930s retail composition to the residential slopes developed directly above it, preserving the physical relationship between the Sunset Strip and the hills that helped define its early prestige.
What you should know about Sunset Plaza.
Sunset Plaza is best known for developing from the former country estate of Belgian-born financier Victor Ponet into an upscale commercial district that helped establish the Sunset Strip as a destination for Hollywood's entertainment economy. Ponet acquired 280 acres north of the settlement of Sherman 1892 and built a $10,000 residence amid land planted with avocados, citrus and poinsettias. His daughter Gertrude and her husband Francis Montgomery inherited the property after Ponet's death in 1914 and began commercial development along Sunset Boulevard during the 1920s. Francis Montgomery created an early Sunset Plaza restaurant and retail concentration there, placing commercial activity along a boulevard that had only recently been extended west through the foothills toward Beverly Hills. Russian Eagle became one of its early gathering places for the film crowd before a 1928 explosion and fire destroyed part of its building during an incident involving an adjoining shop; Charlie Chaplin, Jack Dempsey, Estelle Taylor and Richard Dix were among the patrons present. A more comprehensive building campaign followed during the early 1930s as the Montgomery family pursued an upscale shopping and business center along the boulevard. Architect Charles R. Selkirk shaped the Georgian Revival commercial composition completed by 1934, placing decorators, beauty salons and other high-end businesses inside low buildings whose architectural restraint distinguished the plaza from the clubs developing elsewhere along the Strip. Talent agents, publicists and business managers increasingly established offices along Sunset Boulevard during the same period, helping turn the corridor into a commercial extension of Hollywood's studio economy. Sunset Plaza consequently emerged from a single family's former estate as one of the early architectural anchors of the Sunset Strip's transformation into a concentrated district for entertainment, retail and professional activity.
R. H. White extended the Sunset Plaza name uphill after the 1927 subdivision of Tract 10122, creating a residential counterpart to the commercial district below. Substantial construction began during the mid-1930s along Sunset Plaza Drive, where the curving street followed the southward slope and placed houses on elevated parcels facing the basin. American Colonial Revival became the dominant architectural form, expressed through two-story houses with clapboard or brick exteriors, gabled roofs and restrained detailing. Wilson, Merrill and Alexander and architect Frank W. Green contributed residences during the principal building period, connecting the tract with professional architectural practice at a moment when much of the surrounding hillside remained under development. Twenty-five properties compose the surviving Period Revival residential concentration between Pine Tree Place and St. Ives and Belfast drives, with nineteen retaining the characteristics associated with its principal 1935 to 1954 construction period. Most of the tract had been built by the close of the 1930s, leaving only a smaller group of houses to fill remaining parcels during the following two decades. Curvilinear streets, uniform setbacks and the absence of sidewalks reinforced the residential character created by the hillside itself, producing a physical composition markedly different from the commercial blocks at the foot of the drive. The paired development of the boulevard frontage and upper tract gave Sunset Plaza a rare vertical organization in which 1930s retail architecture and Period Revival domestic design occupy successive elevations along the same ascending street.
How to fold Sunset Plaza into your trip.
Sunset Plaza works as the anchor for an outing connecting a dramatic early modern house, César Pelli's immense design complex and Gordon B. Kaufmann's oil-fortune estate across the architectural territory surrounding West Hollywood.
Begin at Schindler House, completed in 1922 after Austrian-born architect R. M. Schindler decided to remain in Los Angeles following his work supervising Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House commission. Schindler created the Kings Road property for himself and Pauline Schindler and Clyde and Marian Chace as a collective dwelling constructed from concrete, glass, canvas and redwood, organizing separate studios around shared domestic functions and exterior courts. Pauline Schindler subsequently drew artists, writers, musicians and actors into gatherings at the house, giving the domestic experiment a cultural role extending beyond architecture. Friends of the Schindler House formed in 1976 amid threats to the property, acquisition followed in 1980 with California preservation funding and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture established its headquarters there in 1994. Continue to Pacific Design Center, where César Pelli conceived a 14-acre complex whose enormous geometric volumes introduced a radically different architectural scale to West Hollywood. The 750,000-square-foot Blue Building opened in 1975 and quickly acquired the nickname “Blue Whale”; Pelli's 450,000-square-foot Green Building followed in 1988, extending the original composition across the site. The 400,000-square-foot Red Building completed the architect's three-part concept in 2012, thirty-seven years after the first structure opened. The resulting 1.6-million-square-foot ensemble transformed the intersection of Melrose Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard into a major center for the design professions and one of Pelli's most conspicuous Southern California works. Conclude at Greystone Mansion & Gardens, created after oil entrepreneur Edward L. Doheny gave his son Ned Doheny 12.58 acres in 1926 as a wedding gift. Gordon B. Kaufmann designed the residence, P. J. Walker Company handled construction and Paul G. Thiene shaped the grounds; work began on February 15, 1927, and the Doheny family occupied the house in September 1928. The full estate cost $3,166,578.12, including $1,238,378.76 for the mansion, whose steel-reinforced concrete structure was faced with Indiana limestone beneath a Welsh slate roof. Beverly Hills dedicated the surviving 18.3-acre property as a public park in 1971, carrying one of the region's grandest interwar private estates into public ownership. The progression moves from Schindler's 1922 experiment in collective domestic architecture through Pelli's multi-decade composition for the design professions and culminates at Kaufmann's vast Doheny estate, connecting three sharply different responses to wealth, architecture and private space around Sunset Plaza.
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