Home Is Where the Concierge Is

Photo by Heidi Winsor

Hotel living has always seemed the pinnacle of urbanity and convenience.
Room service. Beds made up every morning. A concierge and doorman just a phone
call away. A high-rise view over the metropolis. A car waiting downstairs. But
while a significant number of people still live in high-end hotels in New York
City, and an even larger number live in single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs,
on Skid Rows everywhere, the midrange hotel for those who want to avoid — or
can’t afford — the commitment of a mortgage had all but disappeared.

Until recently, when the Pegasus opened 322 sleek new loft-style
apartments in the renovated historic shell of the long-abandoned Mobil Oil building
downtown, around the corner from the grand old Central Library and across the
street from the rave-y Standard — a hotel housed in what used to be corporate
headquarters for Superior Oil. If the Standard proved the downtown market for
hipness, the Pegasus, where monthly rents range from $1,200 to $6,000, proved
the market for high-end, high-style “serviced” living quarters — a
hybrid of hotel and apartment that includes concierge and cleaning service,
as well as a business center and rooftop lap pool.

Now developer Brett Mosher and architect John Sofio are turning
the downtown Holiday Inn into The Flat, its 200 rooms remodeled as efficiency
apartments with hot plates, plus a heliport, barbershop, maid service, rooftop
pool and spa, and a restaurant with a bar. Westwood developer Kam Hekmat is
updating classic Westwood courtyard housing into a residential hotel for professors
and students from UCLA. And in downtown West Hollywood, developer Avi Brosh
is breaking ground for the Holloway-Olive, the prototype for what will be a
chain of serviced and furnished condominiums and “extended-stay guest suites,”
all with concierge, maid service, restaurants and bars.

Brosh is at the very forefront of the changing housing market
that’s providing a plethora of new real estate “products” to replace
the single-family home. He’s garnered favorable notice in The Wall Street Journal
and a dozen design magazines for building intriguingly different live/work loft-style
condos and apartments with gardens and courtyards in the thick of downtowns
— like Library Court in Old Pasadena and the Lofts at Melrose Place and Lofts
at Laurel Court in West Hollywood, and, coming soon, a highly anticipated remodel
of the big old Ostrich Farm on the arroyo in South Pasadena. But it’s the Holloway-Olive
that has people talking most of all.

“It will be the Oakwood meets the W Hotel,” says Brosh.
“What the housing market needs is a little imagination. Housing needs to
evolve to take into account changing lifestyles.”

Both Sofio and Brosh are among those whose successful careers
are based on paying close attention to the influences revamping American lifestyles
and reviving interest in living downtown: the impossibly high cost of land and
property; traffic; the Internet, laptops and cell phones; the globalization
of markets and low-cost airfare.

As a result, people want living arrangements that make it possible
to blend life, work and entertainment. And the “creative class” that
best-selling author Richard Florida says gravitates toward cities (designers,
buyers, P.A.s, assistant directors, actors, musicians, architects, lawyers,
engineers) lives an itinerant “have job/will travel” lifestyle: L.A.
today, Miami tomorrow, São Paulo Friday. Says Sofio, “These days
the question is, ‘Where do we live?’ I was in Dallas last week and New York
the week before — but I think I spent only 20 minutes in my apartment in New
York, because I was in meetings and restaurants the entire time I was there.
My life is my work is my life. There is no separation, no 9 to 5 anymore.”

esidential hotels were commonplace at the turn of the century,
offering, at one end of the spectrum, personal service, elegant dining and sociability,
as well as privacy, all without the fuss of having to maintain a home and yard.
At the other end, they offered inexpensive accommodations for people in transition,
without family or means. In Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels
in the United States, UC Berkeley architecture history professor Paul Groth
quotes New York hotel keeper Simeon Ford, who amused a banquet of hotelkeepers
at the time by remarking, “We have fine hotels for fine people, good hotels
for good people, plain hotels for plain people and some bum hotels for bums.”

But in the early 1900s, housing reformers sought to address the
problems brought on by the increasing industrialization of cities and the overcrowding
of workers in tenements, by razing the old city and then building anew, with
a modern set of rules built upon the separation and specialization of uses.
The rules, writes Groth, “promised each function an area by itself, uniformity
within areas, less mixture of social classes, maximum privacy for each family,
much lower density for many activities, buildings set back from the street and
a permanently built order.”

Federal rules supported those local zoning and building codes,
finally making it difficult to insure, and therefore get loans for, downtown
housing of any kind. As Groth explains, “Minimum Property Standards stated
that ‘the [insured] property should be located in a neighborhood homogeneous
in character,’ a neighborhood sure to avoid ‘inharmonious land uses’ . . . National
underwriting manuals . . . gave low ratings to any residential property in a
crowded neighborhood, one with racial mixtures or one with a mixture of ‘adverse
influences,’ defined as stores, offices or rental units.”

The moral fervor of the reformers, who sought to separate, privatize
and sanitize the American way of living, as well as establish the primacy of
the nuclear family and the residential neighborhoods in which they were to be
properly housed, must have made them hard to defy. Groth quotes Edith Elmer
Wood in her book Recent Trends in American Housing: “The only excuse for
apartments is for celibates, childless couples and elderly people,” she
scolded. Added city- and suburban-homes builder E.R.L. Gould: Apartments should
serve only as an intermediate stage between the “promiscuous and common
life” of the existing city and the “dignified well-ordered life of
the detached house.”

The real estate industry was an eager partner in the zoning reforms,
which in effect codified what has become known as suburban sprawl, and over
the next few decades a frenzy of suburban home building ensued. Any housing
left in downtowns by midcentury was soon leveled by misguided attempts at “urban
renewal,” literally draining downtowns of their lifeblood and creating
the familiar checkerboard landscape of high-rise office buildings and asphalt
parking lots that become ghost towns at 6 p.m.

But seismic changes in the demographics of this country are forcing
the housing market to broaden the notion of “home” in cities everywhere:
Single adults will soon be the new majority. Families consisting of breadwinner
dads and stay-at-home moms — the nuclear family of yore — account for just one-tenth
of all households. Married couples with kids — the demographic group that made
up the vast majority not too long ago — now account for just 25 percent, a share
expected to drop to 20 percent in five years. At the same time, the U.S. population
continues to become more ethnically diverse, and there are more “empty
nesters” and what the U.S. Census calls “nonfamily” households
(unmarried couples and singles).

“Echo Boomers,” who will account for more than a third
of the U.S. population in 2010, epitomize the demographics and lifestyle that
will soon dominate the housing market: 40 percent are nonwhite, they are tech-savvy
and they like easy access to entertainment, and they’re very social. “They
want to be where the action is . . . near coffee shops, clubs, restaurants,
and shopping,” Pamela Hamilton of the Centre City Development Corp. in
San Diego told the Chicago Tribune in a recent housing story. “[T]his group
is very social.”

Edith Elmer Wood almost had it right. The single-family detached
home had a good run as the embodiment of the American Dream, but it’s coming
to an end. Even while suburban sprawl continues unabated at the city’s outer
edges, the center of the city — of L.A.’s many cities — is contracting and densifying
as people move back to the urban core: Last month, 9,000 people registered for
the Central City Association’s tour of new housing downtown, where 122 development
projects are under way.

As Groth concludes, the “unattached” — that is, anyone
not a part of a family unit, that sacrosanct building block of the American
real estate market — have been ill-served by planners and the real estate industry.
But, he writes, public officials are finally coming to understand three basic
realities: “that people are diverse; that diversity requires flexible approaches
and multiple solutions to problems; and that diverse environments are essential
for maintaining important social and cultural options. No one solution can work
for all Americans. These ideas mark a major shift from professional attitudes
of the past 100 years.”

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.