Ma Maison: a New Venture
Just in time for Christmas:
Jack Lemmon, Ed McMahon and Suzanne Pleshette arrived by horse-drawn carriages last Monday at the ribbon cutting for Ma Maison Sofitel, that long-anticipated hotel at Beverly and La Cienega boulevards. And the new Ma Maison restaurant, in the $55-million facility, also opened to the celebrities and others attending the festivities.
The restaurant was expected to be ready for the public by last Thursday. Patrick Terrail’s popular Westside restaurant, by the same name, has been closed for about 2 1/2 years, the restaurateur said. And Lemmon, for one, was happy Terrail is opening another.
“I’m here because of Patrick,” the Academy Award-winning actor said as he was entering the 311-room hotel, co-owned by L.A. developer Sheldon Gordon, who also developed and still owns an interest in the Beverly Center, across the street.
John Lehodey, executive vice president of Hotel Sofitel North America, came from New York for the opening of Ma Maison Sofitel, the French-based firm Accor’s sixth Sofitel in the United States.
Sofitel is one of five hotel chains owned by Accor, which owns a total of about 750 hotels. Lehodey wasn’t sure of the count, because the company is expanding so rapidly. Where next? “We hope New York,” he said. “We have 10 sites or projects there and we’re adding and subtracting some each week.”
That doesn’t mean Accor will open 10 or more hotels in New York. “We just figure we need to have up to 100 projects, almost to the point of building, to get one hotel realized,” he explained.
As for the difference between the new Ma Maison restaurant and the old one, which Terrail started 15 years ago in a pink house on Melrose Avenue:
“This one is far more elegant,” Eugene Scott, senior vice president and chief financial officer of the Pacific Design Center, nearby on Melrose Avenue, said at the ribbon cutting. “And Orson Welles held court at the old one.”
Welles died in October, 1985, but Terrail is hoping other stars will follow Lemmon’s lead and make the new Ma Maison another hot spot for celebrities.
As his older brother Jack was being announced as George Bush’s choice for secretary of housing and urban development, Dick Kemp of Irvine was getting ready for the annual boat parade last Monday night in Newport Beach.
“My wife, Carolyn, and I saw the parade at my cousin Laurie Clark’s bayfront house,” he said Tuesday.
Regarding his brother’s nomination, Dick Kemp said:
“He is very enthusiastic and has a strong sense of mission. The idea that he’s conservative and (thus) doesn’t care isn’t true. He has a point of view that will represent the poor, homeless and minorities in a responsible way . . . as opposed to government handouts.”
He referred to his brother Jack’s interest in urban homesteading, in which tenants can purchase their apartments, and in providing tax breaks for businesses hiring inner city residents.
Jane Seymour and her business manager/husband, David Flynn, have sold a Beverly Hills-area house they had remodeled, with the help of architect Gus Duffy, and redecorated, with the help of Shawn Griffith from England, to Margaret and Christopher Forman (of the Forman family, which owns and operates the Pacific Theater movie house and drive-in chain).
The Forman deal closed the same day as Eddie Murphy’s to buy Cher’s Benedict Canyon house, we just learned. (Cher has moved to an 18th-floor, Wilshire condo.)
Seymour and Flynn sold the house to the Formans even before it went on the market at an asking price of $1,795,000.
Since March, 1987, Seymour and Flynn have been proving that they’re savvy in real estate as well as entertainment. This house marks the fifth, all in the same area (off Coldwater Canyon), that they’ve bought, refurbished and sold, at a profit, through Jana Jones of Alvarez, Hyland & Young.
