Welcome to the Hotel Surreal

The doors to Wonderland are 30 feet high, made of polished mahogany and stand open along a bend on the Sunset Strip.

In a $17-million renovation designed by French architect Philippe Starck for the Brooklyn-born hotelier Ian Schrager, the redone Mondrian Hotel will provide a playful trip through the looking glass into a world of distorted scale and unknown objects. The two massive doors, free-standing sculptures marking the entry into a dreamscape, shrink you down to the size of some mischievous imp. But when the hotel opens on Sunday, visitors will find that Surreal quality has an erotic twist.

It is not Schrager and Starck’s first creation; the Mondrian, located at 8440 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, tries to replicate the sleek glamour that the duo has mastered at Miami’s Delano Hotel and New York’s Royalton. All three share a relentless sense of theater. At the Royalton--Starck and Schrager’s greatest success until now--fashion editors smack lips with publishers, writers ogle the occasional model--everything is bathed in an atmosphere of chilling elegance. That setting for public voyeurism is the Royalton’s chief selling point.

At the Mondrian, chilled glamour achieves a dreamlike sensuality. While the Royalton is veiled in cold, dark colors--plush midnight blues, dark woods and padded surfaces--the Mondrian is more magical, filled with objects that fluctuate in scale and walls of muted light that dissolve all around you. Its public spaces--the essence of any of Schrager’s hotels--are fashionable playpens for people who want to be seen. Sited across from the House of Blues at what will be Sunset’s most invigorated corner, the Mondrian is Schrager’s most ambitious and enchanting space to date.

It is all part of a crafty formula: affordable rooms above a glamorous hot spot. Guest rooms cost $150-$185 and suites are $185-$385--and all have one key feature: huge views of the throbbing metropolis. But all of the hotel’s appeal is concentrated in the public spaces; by setting mid-range prices for large, simple rooms, both the chic set and the greenest out-of-towner can check in and swoop downstairs into the heartbeat of the city, mingling with locals who will inevitably be attracted to the energy of the design.

For the make-over, Starck and Schrager ignored the building’s previous mock-avant-garde style. Originally designed in 1959 as a banal box of apartments with art-deco pretension in the details, in the mid-1980s it was transformed into a hotel and the exterior was painted by artist Yaacov Agam in a red-yellow-blue pattern that vaguely echoed the work of painter Piet Mondrian. Attracted by the large windows, outdoor space and steamy location, Schrager says that he waited 10 years to buy the Mondrian, but he had no objections when Starck quickly suggested painting over the signature mural that gave the hotel its name. The hotel is now enveloped in an antiseptic white that gives the simple forms a straight-forwardness that is appealing.

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In the new design, the lobby is the main theatrical event. As you enter, a thin bar of light projects an ornate faux carpet onto the floor. The elevator bank, set square in the middle of the room, is encased in a glowing cube. Its walls are a tactile layering of glass, flowing white fabric and muted light. We are in an elusive, slippery world.

Everything is off-balance: At the windows, pale white curtains reach only partway down to the floor like dwarfish stage props, and “game chairs” have chess or backgammon tables sprouting out of their arms. Bar stools are fashioned out of bicycle seats or molded plastic Eames chairs. To one side, a 60-foot illuminated marble table is set at a diagonal across the main barroom space where guests can lounge and eat late into the night in a chic pseudo-communal environment. But even that will not be static--during the course of each day, the table settings will be whimsically rearranged in various configurations.

Shifting light sculptures--some designed by Starck, others by renowned Light and Space artist James Turrell--add to the dream-like unease of the spaces. Turrell, in fact, was too fussy to design spaces that he could not completely control, so he limited his work to the exterior and small screens at the elevator bank of each floor. Starck did the rest. Hollow panels of pale-colored light are carved out of many of the walls--like blank humming television screens, while natural light seeps in from all around.

In a play on an erotic cage, a video by Jean-Baptiste Mondino projects a disappearing image of a naked body in a corner of each elevator: a reminder that this is Lolita, not the plaza’s precocious little Eloise, at play. The new Mondrian is a place for lithe bodies and sexy glamour, not grande dames with snooty children.

To reach the main eating and lounging areas you have to slip back outside into a courtyard enclosed within the L-shaped building. In the garden’s decor the theme of shifting scales is repeated: Two parallel rows of giant, five-foot-tall pots separate the restaurant and the pool, leading you into a play land where everything seems slightly out of whack.

What is striking is the glistening exhibitionism of the restaurant and outdoor space. Deep stairs leading to the pool are lined with pillows so guests can recline Moroccan-style. A giant mattress appears as if tossed under a tree. The pool itself is raised on a plinth--a vague echo of Mexican architect Luis Barragan’s work.

Everything on this public level, inside and out, is on display. Giant plate-glass windows both in the restaurant and along the pool frame sweeping views of the cityscape. But they also allow the outside world to peer inside at the strutting bathers. At its best, Starck’s play of light and glass is reminiscent of the dissolving glass of Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation in Paris, a transparent maze where framed images constantly overlap, and the borders between inside and out are shattered.

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And what about the Mondrian’s rooms? They are beside the point. Schrager uses the hotel’s largest rooms to create vast apartment-like spaces with an almost Martha Stewart-like homeyness: eat-in kitchens, big windows, stuffed white couches, with the occasional polished apple balanced at the exact center of a table. But what is important from the public spaces below is only the vague sense that they are there somewhere up above when you need them.

In fact, only a hotel could achieve such a titillating mix of sensuality and escapism. What Starck and Schrager do so well is create a lure for the local scene that plays on the transient nature of its setting. In a city that thrives on fantasy, Starck’s creation is a supple mix of illusion and cold reality that will hold its own.