Mod with a light touch

ARCHITECT Wayne McAllister’s name may not trigger the same flash of recognition that goes with Gehry, Wright or Meier, but his retro-modern designs certainly do. Think of the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, Lawry’s the Prime Rib on La Cienega and the Fremont and the Sands hotels in Las Vegas, and McAllister’s signature touches -- neon, steel, flamboyance and openness -- immediately come to mind.

The recently released book “The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister,” by Chris Nichols, an editor at Los Angeles Magazine, examines the modern and swanky designs of an architect with no formal training. (McAllister took a full-time job drafting bungalow plans in San Diego in what would have been his last semester of high school.)

The book spans McAllister’s career -- from his wunderkind days as a 19-year-old from San Diego, entrusted with creating the $10-million Agua Caliente resort (which opened just across the Mexican border in 1928) to his retirement from architecture at 49.

Nichols, a former chair of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee, says McAllister “invented Las Vegas” -- and he’s only half kidding. During its heyday, Agua Caliente was the hotspot for Hollywood’s A-list. Stars such as Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper indulged in the resort’s amenities: its legal watering holes (this was the Prohibition era), its horse track and its Monte Carlo-style casino. So when the time came to design hotels in the kitsch capital of America -- smack dab in the Nevada desert -- McAllister was at the top of the list. According to Nichols, early ads touted the architect’s El Rancho Vegas project as “The Caliente of Nevada.”

Closer to home, McAllister designed bars in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A., the old Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Smoke House Restaurant in Burbank and dozens of places -- such as the Melody Lane restaurant and Starlite Room at Wilshire and Western -- that only original hipsters can remember now.

But of all the McAllister designs that are now razed, Nichols wishes that just one of his drive-ins -- McDonnell’s, maybe, or Simon’s -- could have survived. “They were almost ephemeral,” says Nichols, “made out of light and air.”