Rooms With a Mod View

The view of downtown Los Angeles from the vibrating waterbed perched on the roof of Andre Balazs’ new hotel is stunning. Arco Plaza, the Citicorp Building, the Los Angeles Central Library’s ceramic tile roof and Flower Street pedways all jostle for attention, as does the twisted tower atop the phone company building that looks like something straight out of a 1950s sci-fi B movie.

“The whole thing is so Jetsons,” says Balazs, marveling at the vista from the Astro Turfed outdoor bar area. “When you’re up here, you see a helicopter fly past, it’s just all ... it’s so much more optimistic than the way New York feels right now, you know? This perspective is just remarkable.”

But will people show up to enjoy the view? Balazs will find out soon enough. Working with the Santa Monica firm Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Balazs has spent the past 26 months renovating a 1955 office building at Flower and 6th streets. The 207-room Standard Downtown opens this month. Balazs is gambling that downtown Los Angeles is ready for a medium-priced hotel (rooms start at $95) geared to hip young business travelers.

From the moment Balazs laid eyes on the 12-story building, he knew there was a hotel in the making. “I was on my way to the airport one day going back to New York, and someone told me I had to stop here, so I swung by and immediately thought it was the most stunning work,” Balazs says. “What I think is so unusual about it is there’s a pride of authorship, a distinguished character that you find in a lot of owner-developed buildings. It has details that I’ve only seen in places like Rockefeller Center.”

The proud owner, Balazs soon learned, had been California oil baron and philanthropist W.M. Keck, who commissioned Claud Beelman--designer of the nearby Art Deco Garfield Building--to create the Modernist headquarters for his Superior Oil Co. The building was occupied by a bank, then lay dormant for nine years.

“Walking through the building was kind of fascinating” Balazs recalls. “Some of the offices still had desks and paper. It was like a ghost building.” By the time he bought the property early in 2000, Balazs, 45, had successfully transformed several other old buildings into chic, celebrity-friendly lodgings. In 1990, he took over the legendary but decrepit Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, gradually restoring it to pristine condition.

He spent eight years overhauling a 19th century SoHo warehouse before wowing New York fashionistas with the sleek Mercer Hotel in 1998. A year later, Miami-based Architectonica gave a playfully minimalist make-over to a nondescript 1964 building Balazs had purchased on the Sunset Strip.

Rechristened the Standard, the hotel--with its upside-down sign, Andy Warhol-patterned curtains, orange bathroom fixtures and shag-carpeted lobby ceiling--has become destination lodging for fashion-forward, budget-conscious travelers.

For his new venture, Balazs wanted to apply the Standard’s sly aesthetic to the new setting by dressing the building’s essentially conservative bones in blasts of color, cheeky pop culture references and irreverent riffs on corporate culture. Strolling across the lobby’s dark-green marble floor, preserved from the original structure, Balazs says, “I always approach the starting point of a hotel as this sort of archaeology, where you start digging around to figure out: Where are we?

“What is ‘downtown’? Who are the denizens, and what’s going on in the area? Then, coupled with the building itself, you develop a kind of vocabulary for what you want to do,” he says. “I always approach a hotel first and foremost with where it’s located. And if it’s a rehab like this, you take a look at what you have to work with, and where do you take it? So we asked ourselves: What is fun about this?”

Among the inspirational details, which Balazs left intact: a row of glass-tubed clocks that provide times in London, Tehran, Calcutta and other cities. “What a picture of optimism about worldwide enterprise that is, right?” Balazs says. “So this then starts to inform the spirit of the lobby.” Around the corner near the check-in desk, Balazs points toward a semi-abstract stainless steel map of the world. It’s dotted with pulsing pink lights supposedly representing the vast global reach of his company, Standard Holdings.

“That’s a fantasy,” Balazs says with a laugh, “But this is what corporations really do. [By creating this] world map of far-flung holdings sort of inspired by [Italian Modernist designer] Gio Ponti, we asked ourselves, ‘If you’re really going to play in this corporate world, how do you stylize it?’ You can do it a little bit tongue in cheek.”

To crank up the impact of the new hotel’s lobby, furniture designer Vladimir Kagan was commissioned to create an extremely pink 150-foot-long sofa punctuated by segments 4 feet off the ground to facilitate exhibitionists interested, as Balazs says, in “striking a pose.” The building’s original load-bearing columns have been sheathed in glass to enhance the sense of spectacle Balazs likes to create. “It’s for the people watching, the views, the angles, the voyeuristic aspect, which is part of why people enjoy hotel lobbies: You live there, but at the same time it is public space.”

Suspended from the ceiling, in homage to the era of corporate-sponsored abstract art, hangs a mobile that Balazs says is “obviously in the spirit of Calder.” Other nontraditional lobby amenities include a pool table, a photo booth, a 1970s-era funky white organ intended to be a kitschy riff on the standard piano bar, and a barbershop named Flint--as in the campy, 1966 James Coburn spy flick, “Our Man Flint.”

Balazs called on interior designer Shawn Hausman, a onetime movie set designer whose credits include “The People Vs. Larry Flynt,” to inject jolts of color throughout, beginning with the ground-floor restaurant practically aflame in egg-yolk yellow. Hausman, who has collaborated with Balazs on his other Los Angeles hotels, also tracked down the bright red ‘70s-era fiberglass pods that house the rooftop water beds and urged Kagan to upholster his hyper-sofa in hot pink. “I really fought for that pink,” Hausman says. “It’s important that everything isn’t too masculine.”

Hausman collaborated with Balazs on the original Standard and says that bold color choice is one unifying element of the two hotels.

But there’s no pat formula, Hausman says. “Andre’s always open to experimentation, always trying to come up with different approaches that combine humor and sophistication. It’s not specifically about a period but is really more about doing something in the spirit of what a place feels like. And I think there’s a consistency about having an element of sophisticated fun without being too over the top.”

For architect Hank Koning, finding fresh possibilities in a relatively rigid framework required resourceful thinking. He created a new entrance set off from the street, since city regulations prohibit parked cars on Flower or 6th streets; transformed the cube structure that once housed the building’s cooling and heating machinery into the rooftop bar; and took advantage of the building’s off-center elevator core by crafting NBA rooms, so-called because the proportions are unusually long.

“The big challenge was working within the constraints of an existing building,” says Koning, whose clients have included the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills and the Standard’s Sunset Boulevard rival the Mondrian Hotel. “It’s been designated a cultural-historic landmark by the city of Los Angeles, so there were things you really couldn’t touch.”

On the plus side, Koning says, the building had exceptionally strong infrastructure: “It was designated an essential-services building, so it was extremely sturdy, built on solid rock.”

Balazs and his team continued the corporate-but-sexy theme established in the public spaces into the rooms themselves. He explains, “If the role model for the lobby might be John DeLorean, the rogue CEO who’s got a lot of style, long hair, good-looking girls, then in the rooms, we’re sort of playing with that notion of bachelor chic.” The desk has no drawers. The closets have no door, utilizing instead a curtain made of the same kind of mesh material used for sports jerseys. And in place of chairs, Balazs says, the platform framing the bed serves as an informal sitting area.

“Playboy in the ‘60s did an interesting article about the perfect bachelor pad,” Balazs says. “The idea was that it would be ultimately this hugely sensual and efficient space where the bed was a living platform; you’d have your controls and your stereo. Everything was right there, so we started to play with that.”

Showers have a “modesty curtain” and a see-through glass window facing the sleeping quarters. Bathrooms are something Balazs spends a lot of time thinking about. “I obsess about stuff like this all the time,” he says. “Business travelers--they’ve done studies--70% of their waking hours in the room are spent in the bath area, so you want to make it comfortable as possible.”

Those glass shower stalls also are aimed at providing some romantic sizzle for couples that Balazs hopes to attract on weekends, when business travel is light. In corner rooms, the showers face straight through the glass window onto the street. “The trick is to maximize, build upon what you can,” Balazs says. “In this case, you’ve got a corner room, and we decided it would be really interesting to play with the light....” Balazs suddenly pulls up the blinds, revealing the building on the other side of 6th Street. “That’s one hell of a sexy shower!” He smiles.

“Look,” Balazs continues, “the Standard is a business hotel. It’s meant to be a place to do business, albeit for a new generation of businessperson. But once we make sure the room has a generous working area, and a view, and it’s well lit, then we can start to play with the thing.”

Balazs, dressed for two days running in black pants, black shoes and white shirt, comes off as remarkably even-keeled given the pressures of preparing a major new hotel. Then again, Balazs says that creating new projects is what he likes to do best. The son of Hungarian emigres who taught at Harvard University, Balazs studied architecture briefly at Cornell University before switching to Columbia University, where he earned an MBA in journalism and business. He sculpted for a while and nearly enrolled at Rhode Island School of Design, but instead started a biotech company in 1980, made a fortune and began investing in Manhattan nightclubs. In 1985, he married Katie Ford, president of Ford Models Inc. They have two daughters and live in a SoHo loft near the Mercer.

Balazs’ gift for anticipating the Next Big Thing is not infallible--the short-lived Los Angeles nightclub BC comes to mind--but he hits the mark far more often than not. So will downtown L.A. be the next SoHo?

“There’s a lot of boosterism going on,” Balazs says, “and I endorse all of that. But the idea of doing this was not predicated on some expectation that there would be a booming revival of downtown.

“I do think there’s more than a glimmer of a changing culture, between loft renovations, fashion, the art scene. So I think it’s a very dynamic time, but who knows? It happened in SoHo, on Prince Street where we’re on, it didn’t have a single store--shortly after the Mercer Hotel opened, even while it was under construction, these little boutiques started springing up, to the point where, now to the chagrin of those of us who live there, the galleries have gone and the shops are everywhere.

“I think this area is truly spectacular, an undiscovered sort of niche in Los Angeles that I think people ought to come down and take a look at.”

With Walt Disney Concert Hall under construction just down the street, and the nearby Los Angeles Convention Center, and of course Staples Center, the Standard Downtown may well prove to be the right inn at the right time.

But hit or miss, Balazs’ latest operation will at the very least turn on its head the travel industry truism about no surprise being the best surprise of all. Says Koning about his client: “I travel a lot, and at most business hotels, it’s the same old-same old. Working with Andre, the one thing you’re not going to end up doing is something boring. If it’s boring, you can check that right off the list.”

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Hugh Hart is a regular contributor to Calendar.