No Dust Please : Way of Life at Chic Beverly Wilshire Hardly Disturbed by Renovation

Joseph R. Shelton peered down from a window in the Beverly Wilshire to the dump truck at the edge of the driveway, not far from two limousines and a Rolls-Royce.

The truck was almost completely shrouded with tarpaulins, “to hold down the dust,” Shelton said, approvingly, from debris collected out of the original, 59-year-old hotel wing undergoing a $40-million renovation.

“I told the workers, ‘We couldn’t have that,’ ” Shelton said of the dust. And so the hotel that has peeled grapes on request for the emperor of Japan and laid out a carpet of daisies for the queen of Denmark recently faced a new challenge: how to undertake a massive renovation in the wing on one side of the hotel driveway without dirtying the wing on the other side.

Regent International Hotels, the Beverly Wilshire’s Hong-Kong based owners, started work on the Italian Renaissance structure along Wilshire Boulevard last April 6, according to Shelton, the hotel chain’s director of special projects.

The work should be completed by February, 1988, he added, just after the posh Beverly Hills hotel’s 60th anniversary.

Regent executives paid $125 million for the Beverly Wilshire in 1986, but thought that the older of the two wings needed “to be brought up to its former glory,” Shelton explained.

The 200 rooms in the old wing are being reconfigured into 151 larger rooms, he added, because marketing surveys showed a demand for bigger rooms. The lobby will be twice the current size, and a “lobby lounge,” serving tea and “light refreshments,” Shelton said, will replace the bookstore.

Meanwhile, guests who pay from $125 to $1,000 a night are all staying in the “new wing,” a more modern-looking structure added by the hotel’s flamboyant previous owner, the late Hernando Courtright, in 1971.

The only store left in the old wing is Tiffany & Co. A store spokeswoman said the famed jewelry store had no plans to move out during the renovation. She claimed that, so far, “there is no noise.”

But Thelma Bauerdorf, who has lived in a $3,700-a-month suite in the new wing for the last 10 years, said, “You get a lot of noise in the afternoon, which is when I nap.” Other than that, she added, “Everything runs just the same.”