Face Lifts Give L.A. Landmarks New Lease on Life

A growing number of buildings in Los Angeles are undergoing face lifts, being stripped to their skeletons and rebuilt with the modern amenities and sleek exteriors that can attract top corporate tenants.

Make-overs are also a sign of the times--rising rents justify renovations in some markets but haven’t gone high enough to make new construction financially feasible. Buildings in Beverly Hills and Century City, where land is scarce, have recently been remade.

The latest candidate to go under the knife is Westwood Center at 1100 Glendon Ave., best known as the home of Monty’s Steakhouse. New owner Arden Realty of Los Angeles plans to start work in September on a $21-million renovation that will change the 33-year-old Westwood landmark so much that the original architect, the late Paul Williams, probably would not recognize it.

Bart Porter, Arden senior vice president, sounded as if he could not wait to get started making changes to the 22-story tower in Westwood.

“Calling it ‘dated’ would be generous,” said Porter. “ ‘Ugly’ is a good word. So is ‘tired.’ ”

Despite its cosmetic problems, however, the building has some inner beauty, according to Porter. A good location, as well as a good structural system, helped the company decide to buy 1100 Glendon. “We chose the building because it was superbly engineered,” he said. “Not a single one of the steel connections appeared damaged by the Northridge earthquake,” which harmed the steel structure of hundreds of other buildings in the region.

And as a high-rise in an area where current zoning bans such construction, 1100 Glendon is a “non-replaceable asset,” Porter said.

Noteworthy office buildings that have already undergone face lifts include the 21-story 811 Wilshire tower in downtown Los Angeles, as well as 5055 Wilshire Blvd. The latter, the former Carnation headquarters, started out as a near-windowless white box, and is now a window-filled “Class A” office building that bears little resemblance to its former self.

Barton Myers, a Beverly Hills-based architect, has designed two such make-overs. “I’m the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon,” he said wryly. “Bring me an old, tired building and I’ll give it a new face.”

At the same time, Myers pointed out that the practice of adding new facades to old buildings dates at least to Renaissance Florence, when architect Leon Battista Alberti designed a new front in 1460 for the Palazzo Rucellai.

In the case of 1100 Glendon, the new design goes far beyond the facade and reaches into the depths of the building: The design by Nadel Architects of Los Angeles calls for a glass curtain wall to replace the building’s concrete skin and aggregate panels.

Floor-to-ceiling glass will replace the small, awkwardly located windows on each floor. Environmental crews will remove asbestos. And the building will receive all new plumbing, electrical systems, air conditioning and heating, as well as new elevators.

“We’re going to take [1100 Glendon] into the 21st century, and make it a hallmark that people will look at for 30 to 40 years,” Porter said.

Large-scale building renovations are cost-efficient in areas that lack sites for development, or where local zoning puts severe limits on new construction. Building face lifts also reflect the current economics of construction in commercial real estate: Los Angeles-area office rents are not high enough to offset the cost of construction in most locations, but are still high enough to “justify recasting older buildings,” according to William T. McGregor, owner of McGregor Co., a developer who has renovated buildings in Century City and Beverly Hills.

Renovating the 1801 Century Park West building cost about $40 a square foot, according to architect Barton Myers, who designed a new facade and interiors for the structure. That cost, he said, is “amazing” in light of the $150 a square foot or more needed to construct a comparable new building.

“That is a huge spread” in profitability, especially when some buildings in Century City are currently commanding rents of $3 a square foot per month, one of the highest rates in Los Angeles, according to Myers.

Not all aging office buildings are good candidates for face lifts. A good location is crucial in choosing a subject for a make-over, according to McGregor. One of his projects, the Ice House, is in the industrial area of the Beverly Hills triangle, which is sought after by “creative” firms, such as advertising agencies and architectural firms.

Deciding how much to spend on renovation is as much a part of the art of recycling old buildings as the design.

“The value [of the building] comes from the income generated, so you have to be able to judge where does the line cross between dollars invested vs. dollars returned,” said Arden’s Porter. “That is really what the process is all about.”

Architects start the job of designing a make-over by making a list of all the possible improvements that could be done to a building, and assigning a cost to each, according to architect Richard Keating, design principal of DMJM Keating of Los Angeles, who recently designed a new facade for the Rolex Building at 9420 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.

To add visual interest to the 26,000-square-foot building, the architects--Keating, project architect Joey Shimoda and senior designer Jose Palacios--added a translucent glass curtain around the structure that allows passersby to see the original building. The result, according to the architects, is “a transparency revealing the history of [the building’s] previous existence as a simple plaster box, as well as defining its current structural system.”

After listing possible improvements, the architect and developer then decide what is most important, and what can be afforded in the light of expected rental income. At that point, “you sort of work backward from the rental stream,” Porter said, choosing the most important features as the budget allows.

For architect Myers, however, the recycling of older buildings is not simply a matter of economics, but of reusing older buildings that have hard-to-find qualities.

The architect, who has his office in the Ice House, praised the natural light and the flexible floor plan of the former warehouse. “There is not another building like it,” he said.