- 1
- 2
- next
- | single page
Loft living used to be reserved for some of the most down-to-earth people I know.
In the late 1970s and early '80s, artists flocked in increasing numbers to inner-city Los Angeles. Their neighborhood, near Traction Avenue and Hewitt Street, was anchored by Hilbie's (now Bloom's General Store), the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art and Lili Lakich's neon gallery. A surreal, multihued airplane hung precariously above Al's Bar on Hewitt, a beacon for bohemians.
Yet the area's heart and soul—the things that made downtown boosters like me tout the neighborhood as a future SoHo West—were the affordable, spacious spreads that artists had made for themselves as places to live and work. Often the lofts they settled in weren't even legal: abandoned printing plants, toy and apparel factories, truck depots, shipping depositories, breweries, railroad and spice warehouses.
George Rollins, a painter, moved into a 3rd Street loft downtown in 1975. The old three-story brick building, a one-time electric-motor company and garment factory, had neither a toilet nor a kitchen. But the rent was right: $75 a month for a 4,000-square-foot space. "When I moved in, there was nothing but pigeon droppings covering the floors," Rollins remembers. "But it had brick walls and turn-of-the-century wood trusses and beautiful windows on the whole south and west side. It was a killer space."
Over the last decade, of course, the loft landscape has been transformed dramatically. "The good old days of cheap rent are gone," says Jon Peterson, an artist-turned-developer who 30 years ago lived downtown in a five-story brick garment building, paying 3 cents a square foot for his digs. By comparison, a downtown loft today generally rents for about $2 to $2.50 a square foot.
But it's more than just the price that has changed.
What's most remarkable is that the loft—its definition once so clear in my mind—has morphed into a host of newfangled forms. There are still traditional artists' lofts, such as in the Brewery, a 21-building complex on a huge North Main Street parcel directly behind the Los Angeles train-switching yards. But now, developers and brokers also talk about demi-lofts and soft lofts, new-construction lofts, condo lofts and townhouse lofts.
Some of these concepts are wonderful. Others make me cringe. The term loft has "been slapped on anything as a marketing device," says Mark Tolley, one of two managing partners at Urban Pacific Builders, which has three loft projects in Los Angeles. "Even condos with walls and 8-foot ceilings seem to qualify."
Tolley threw it back at me: "Give me another name for loft. You're the wordsmith."
"How about tfol?" I reply. "That's loft spelled backward." It seems appropriate, the way everything has become so turned around.
Artist's loft
Hamid Behdad, the city official who keeps track of the number of "joint living and work quarters" in Los Angeles, says there were 10,503 at last count. However, there is no official definition of "loft" in the municipal code. If I could write one, I bet Behdad's total wouldn't be so high.
I recently drove past a plain-looking apartment-building-turned-condos in Venice. Slapped with a new coat of paint, it sported a large sign: "Artists' Luxury Lofts." There's an oxymoron, if I ever heard one.
My definition of a loft conjures a free spirit's lair, a former industrial space marked by cast-iron columns, a worn wood floor and light streaming through rows of large-paned, metal-framed windows. And then there's the nostalgia quotient found in the brick walls, bygone backdrops for seamstresses or printers who hunched over long tables, toiling 14 hours a day.
Painter Kelly Reemtsen and Dick Koopmans, a record company production director, live in my kind of loft at the Brewery. Overlooking Lincoln Heights, it's housed in a five-story concrete building that for three decades was home to Pabst Brewing Co.
The 3,600-square-foot open space features a dramatic wall of 15-foot-tall industrial windows. Traces of the East L.A. beer plant remain: Gouged ceiling joists mark the spot where large steel vats were once attached. The scored concrete floor has a definite slant. Reemtsen recalls setting a bowling ball on the floor and watching it roll all the way to the kitchen, where a drain used to be.
The couple has divided the loft into two nearly mirror-image sections. One is for Kelly's studio, which is equipped with a pair of easels, a large printer and several large tables—all on wheels so she can move things around as needed. The other side is for living. The dining room-den-library area is sandwiched between the kitchen, located along the back wall, and the living room, outfitted in midcentury furnishings. A former tenant—an architect—enclosed the bedroom next to the kitchen with a corrugated roof. "Otherwise," Reemtsen notes, "everything would be open."
It is that sense of openness that I so love. As one loft enthusiast explains: "You can build an environment totally on your own terms. You're not inheriting someone else's vision." The notion of the home as a blank canvas—that, in many ways, is the loft's true essence.
Demi-Lofts
In the late 1970s and early '80s, artists flocked in increasing numbers to inner-city Los Angeles. Their neighborhood, near Traction Avenue and Hewitt Street, was anchored by Hilbie's (now Bloom's General Store), the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art and Lili Lakich's neon gallery. A surreal, multihued airplane hung precariously above Al's Bar on Hewitt, a beacon for bohemians.
Yet the area's heart and soul—the things that made downtown boosters like me tout the neighborhood as a future SoHo West—were the affordable, spacious spreads that artists had made for themselves as places to live and work. Often the lofts they settled in weren't even legal: abandoned printing plants, toy and apparel factories, truck depots, shipping depositories, breweries, railroad and spice warehouses.
George Rollins, a painter, moved into a 3rd Street loft downtown in 1975. The old three-story brick building, a one-time electric-motor company and garment factory, had neither a toilet nor a kitchen. But the rent was right: $75 a month for a 4,000-square-foot space. "When I moved in, there was nothing but pigeon droppings covering the floors," Rollins remembers. "But it had brick walls and turn-of-the-century wood trusses and beautiful windows on the whole south and west side. It was a killer space."
Over the last decade, of course, the loft landscape has been transformed dramatically. "The good old days of cheap rent are gone," says Jon Peterson, an artist-turned-developer who 30 years ago lived downtown in a five-story brick garment building, paying 3 cents a square foot for his digs. By comparison, a downtown loft today generally rents for about $2 to $2.50 a square foot.
But it's more than just the price that has changed.
What's most remarkable is that the loft—its definition once so clear in my mind—has morphed into a host of newfangled forms. There are still traditional artists' lofts, such as in the Brewery, a 21-building complex on a huge North Main Street parcel directly behind the Los Angeles train-switching yards. But now, developers and brokers also talk about demi-lofts and soft lofts, new-construction lofts, condo lofts and townhouse lofts.
Some of these concepts are wonderful. Others make me cringe. The term loft has "been slapped on anything as a marketing device," says Mark Tolley, one of two managing partners at Urban Pacific Builders, which has three loft projects in Los Angeles. "Even condos with walls and 8-foot ceilings seem to qualify."
Tolley threw it back at me: "Give me another name for loft. You're the wordsmith."
"How about tfol?" I reply. "That's loft spelled backward." It seems appropriate, the way everything has become so turned around.
Artist's loft
Hamid Behdad, the city official who keeps track of the number of "joint living and work quarters" in Los Angeles, says there were 10,503 at last count. However, there is no official definition of "loft" in the municipal code. If I could write one, I bet Behdad's total wouldn't be so high.
I recently drove past a plain-looking apartment-building-turned-condos in Venice. Slapped with a new coat of paint, it sported a large sign: "Artists' Luxury Lofts." There's an oxymoron, if I ever heard one.
My definition of a loft conjures a free spirit's lair, a former industrial space marked by cast-iron columns, a worn wood floor and light streaming through rows of large-paned, metal-framed windows. And then there's the nostalgia quotient found in the brick walls, bygone backdrops for seamstresses or printers who hunched over long tables, toiling 14 hours a day.
Painter Kelly Reemtsen and Dick Koopmans, a record company production director, live in my kind of loft at the Brewery. Overlooking Lincoln Heights, it's housed in a five-story concrete building that for three decades was home to Pabst Brewing Co.
The 3,600-square-foot open space features a dramatic wall of 15-foot-tall industrial windows. Traces of the East L.A. beer plant remain: Gouged ceiling joists mark the spot where large steel vats were once attached. The scored concrete floor has a definite slant. Reemtsen recalls setting a bowling ball on the floor and watching it roll all the way to the kitchen, where a drain used to be.
The couple has divided the loft into two nearly mirror-image sections. One is for Kelly's studio, which is equipped with a pair of easels, a large printer and several large tables—all on wheels so she can move things around as needed. The other side is for living. The dining room-den-library area is sandwiched between the kitchen, located along the back wall, and the living room, outfitted in midcentury furnishings. A former tenant—an architect—enclosed the bedroom next to the kitchen with a corrugated roof. "Otherwise," Reemtsen notes, "everything would be open."
It is that sense of openness that I so love. As one loft enthusiast explains: "You can build an environment totally on your own terms. You're not inheriting someone else's vision." The notion of the home as a blank canvas—that, in many ways, is the loft's true essence.
Demi-Lofts
L.A. for less than the price of sunblock. 
