Why The Spare Room matters.
The Spare Room is a sophisticated gaming parlor where Hollywood's historic hotel culture meets intimate late-night drinking, analog competition and the theatrical polish of a lounge conceived around play as a social ritual.
Set within The Hollywood Roosevelt near Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive and just steps from TCL Chinese Theatre, the lounge occupies the hotel's mezzanine above the dense pedestrian corridor surrounding Hollywood and Highland. Heavy coffered doors open into a low-lit room organized through oversized leather seating, tufted stools, patterned carpeting and substantial drapery. Art Deco lighting and warm woodwork give the interior the character of a private residential salon, with games distributed through the room as part of the furniture arrangement. The bar occupies a deliberately intimate position within the larger lounge, preserving long sightlines across seating groups and the principal playing areas. The result is a richly furnished hotel parlor whose spatial organization turns drinking and games into a shared late-night gathering inside one of Hollywood Boulevard's most storied properties.
What defines The Spare Room.
The Spare Room is best known for Med Abrous and Marc Rose converting a former Hollywood Roosevelt storage area into a modern interpretation of the private gaming parlors associated with wealthy American households during the early twentieth century. Abrous had previously worked at New York nightlife institutions including Lot 61 and Life before moving west in 2005 to help Amanda Scheer-Demme launch the Roosevelt's Tropicana Bar, eventually becoming Thompson Hotels' director of entertainment. He and Rose developed The Spare Room as the hotel underwent another nightlife expansion under hotelier Jason Pomeranc, with Studio Collective directing a design rooted in 1920s references and antique finishes. Two vintage wooden bowling lanes were sourced from a collector in Texas and reclaimed for the project, with pencil scoring reinforcing the founders' interest in pre-electronic gaming culture. Custom backgammon tables joined dominoes and other parlor games, extending the concept beyond bowling into a broader social-gaming program. Los Angeles footwear designer George Esquivel created colorful oxford-style bowling shoes exclusively for the room, turning a functional component of the game into a commissioned fashion object. Aidan Demarest, whose Los Angeles résumé included First & Hope, The Edison and 1886, developed the original cocktail program around fresh fruit, house-made syrups and ingredients sourced through the Santa Monica and Hollywood farmers markets. The venue opened on January 5, 2011 with Chris Holmes and Shepard Fairey DJing, immediately connecting its gaming premise with Los Angeles music and visual culture. Beverage director Yael Vengroff later pushed the drinks program into another chapter, spending two years developing a Salt & Vinegar Martini built from potato vodka, dry vermouth, pickle brine and celery shrub with potato chips alongside; her work helped The Spare Room earn Bar of the Year at the 2016 Time Out Los Angeles Bar Awards. More than fifteen years after Abrous and Rose opened the room, The Spare Room remains active inside the Roosevelt as one of the hotel's principal nightlife venues.
Oat Couture builds the contemporary cocktail program around toasted grain, combining Old Forester bourbon with single malt, toasted oats, charred maple and Angostura bitters so cereal nuttiness moves into darker whiskey, smoke and concentrated sweetness. Goldenback takes bourbon toward a drier register through Amontillado sherry, peach and salted honey, using oxidative wine character and salinity to restrain the fruit. Playdate turns Fords Gin and Campari through strawberry vermouth, peanut butter, lemon, egg white and rosemary, placing bitter citrus against berry, nut and herb before egg white softens the drink's texture. Cha-Ching uses Herradura Blanco tequila with Cynar, chile, cinnamon, orange and lemon, building vegetal bitterness and spice around agave before citrus tightens the finish. Large-format drinking survives through punch bowls such as Babylon Is a Vampire, where white and spiced rums meet Martini Fiero, cinnamon, sparkling pineapple wine and lime in servings scaled for groups of four through twenty. The contemporary drinks preserve The Spare Room's communal premise through a different factual register: toasted oats, sherry, salted honey, peanut butter, chile, bitter aperitifs and sparkling fruit wine give individual cocktails distinct structures before punch returns the table to collective drinking.
How The Spare Room fits.
The Spare Room works as the anchor for a Hollywood Boulevard outing connecting a cosmetics headquarters that industrialized screen-era beauty, a family attraction created to bring inaccessible movie stars physically closer to the public and a costume business that has supplied Hollywood's appetite for constructed characters since the middle of the twentieth century.
Begin at The Hollywood Museum, housed inside the former Max Factor Building designed by theater architect S. Charles Lee. Factor purchased the property in 1928, but the Depression delayed the makeup studio's opening until 1935. Its four famous rooms were organized for blondes, brunettes, brownettes and redheads according to Factor's color-harmony theories, with wall treatments selected to complement the complexion and hair category assigned to each room. Marilyn Monroe and Lucille Ball became associated with the building through transformations in hair and makeup, and the company passed through owners including Norton Simon, Revlon, Playtex, Beatrice Foods and Procter & Gamble. Donelle Dadigan eventually acquired the property for a museum, spent nine years restoring it and opened The Hollywood Museum in 2003. Continue to Hollywood Wax Museum, created by Sapuran “Spoony” Singh after the Canadian entrepreneur visited Hollywood in 1964 and noticed that crowds seeking movie stars were largely encountering footprints and other traces of celebrity. Singh had previously operated sawmills and an amusement park in Canada before leasing a Hollywood Boulevard property and developing his answer to that absence. The museum opened on February 26, 1965 with hundreds of people lining up for $1.50 admission, and early figures included Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Singh promoted the attraction with methods ranging from a Charlie Chaplin impersonator to a gorilla-costumed skateboarder, and his family continued operating the business after his retirement. Conclude at Hollywood Toys & Costumes, which began as Hollywood Toy Shop in 1950 between a Thrifty Drug Store and J. J. Newberry five-and-dime. The Ellowitz family founded the business before the Moazzez family assumed ownership in 1980 and renamed it, carrying the shop from toys toward costumes, wigs, masks, makeup, magic and production supplies. Expansion eventually moved the operation into the former J. J. Newberry building during the early 1990s, and closure of Hollywood Magic in 2010 brought some of that business's merchandise and staff into the store. Movie studios and talk shows joined neighborhood customers across its decades of operation, and filmmaker Tim Burton credited the shop as a childhood inspiration when he received his Hollywood Walk of Fame star outside in 2024. The progression moves from Max Factor manufacturing screen beauty through Spoony Singh manufacturing physical encounters with celebrity and culminates in a family costume house supplying the tools through which Hollywood professionals and the public manufacture characters of their own.
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