Japanese Group Buys Hotel Bel-Air for $1 Million a Room : Gathering Spot of Stars, Executives
The prestigious Hotel Bel-Air--gathering place for some of Hollywood’s top stars and motion picture executives--is being sold to a Japanese investment group for more than $100 million, the hotel’s current owners announced this morning.
The per-room purchase price of more than $1 million shatters the old record of more than $750,000 per room, established when the Sultan of Brunei bought the nearby 260-room Beverly Hills Hotel for about $185 million in 1957.
Laurie Farmer, a spokeswoman for the Caroline Rose Hunt Trust, which purchased the 11-acre property in the exclusive Stone Canyon residential neighborhood near UCLA in 1982 for $22.1 million, said the sale should be completed sometime later this month.
The purchaser, Sekitei Kaihatsu, is a 95-year-old firm based in Tokyo that operates luxury hotels, resorts and restaurants in Japan.
$20 Million for Renovation
Farmer said the Hunt Trust’s Rosewood Property Co. of Dallas will continue to operate the 92-room hotel for the Japanese investors. Rosewood has already spent more than $20 million renovating the Bel-Air.
The rambling, Mission-style complex of bungalows and larger buildings was allowed amid the mansions and estates of Stone Canyon because several of the original structures had served as business offices and stables for the original 1920s Bel-Air subdivision. Since these structures failed to conform to local residential zoning codes anyway, their transformation into a luxury hotel in the 1940s met with relatively little opposition.
The Bel-Air has won Travel and Leisure Magazine’s inclusion among the “Ten Great Hotels in the World.”
The hotel has some of the highest occupancy rates in the Los Angeles area, with rooms starting about $195 per night and some suites going for as much as $1,300 a night.
“The hotel has sort of an understated elegance,” Farmer said. “That’s why so many celebrities flock there. Because it’s not a showplace, they can be left alone there.”
A Place to Be Seen
Left alone, perhaps, but still observed.
Among Hollywood’s cognoscenti, the Hotel Bel-Air Restaurant is just as important a place to be seen at table as the perhaps more familiar Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Those seen engaging in power breakfasts at the Bel-Air of late have included actors Mel Gibson, Kathleen Turner, Sylvester Stallone and William Hurt, television executive Bud Grant of CBS and film studio chiefs David Puttnam of Columbia, Michael Eisner of Disney and Barry Diller of 20th Century Fox.
One longtime resident has been actor Tony Curtis, who lovingly described the hotel as “the best wife he’d ever had.”
“If I could, I would marry the Bel-Air tomorrow,” he told an interviewer in 1987. “She doesn’t ask me where I’ve been all night. She doesn’t mind if I bring a girl home. She makes my bed every day, feeds me regularly, takes my messages faithfully and puts my laundry in those little boxes tied up with ribbon.”
