Downtown L.A.’s historic Mayfair Hotel appears to officially be off the market! The storied lodging was put up for sale at a whopping $69,750,000 (or $237,245 per room) last September and the Los Angeles Times is now reporting that Mayor Karen Bass and her homelessness team are working to acquire it as part of their Inside Safe program. The paper details, “If the city finalizes the purchase, the Mayfair would be a key part of the city’s effort to create ‘permanent interim housing’ — city-owned residential buildings where homeless people can live for up to a year before finding their own apartments.” Though government officials “signed a nonbinding letter of intent” to buy the property three weeks ago, the offer amount is not set to be disclosed until a municipal facilities committee meeting next month. (Listing agent Harry Pflueger of Maxim Hotel Brokerage did not immediately respond to DIRT’s request for further verification or comment.)
Located at 1256 W. 7th St. in DTLA’s Westlake area, the Mayfair started life in 1927, designed by Alexander E. Curlett and Claud W. Beelman, the prolific architecture team behind the former Park Plaza Hotel (now The MacArthur event center), The Culver Hotel and the Commercial Club of Southern California (now the Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel). Commissioned by the Sun Realty Company, a local enterprise headed by Polish-born tailor-turned-developer Isidor Eisner, the upscale 15-story Renaissance Revival-style lodging was erected at a cost of $2.5 million (about $43 million today), with no expense spared in its construction. The furnishings alone, secured by the fabled Barker Bros. company on a three-week buying trip to New York, totaled $350,000, according to a Los Angeles Evening Express article from the day.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Boasting an incredible 160,694 square feet, it was the largest hotel west of the Mississippi at the time of its completion, not to mention one of the most luxurious. Fashioned with a handsome terra cotta and face brick façade and a Georgian-style interior inspired by Robert Adams, whom the Times noted was “the greatest decorator of the eighteenth century,” the Mayfair promptly became a hot spot for well-heeled Angelenos and tourists alike. Adding to the place’s allure? Its ultra-hip onsite supper club, the Rainbow Isle, from which George Eckhardt and the Rainbow Isle Orchestra would broadcast a live radio show each night. Immensely popular, the venue played host to countless luminaries throughout its heyday, with such stars as Mary Pickford, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Robert Montgomery and Joan Crawford all sashaying across its glittering dance floor, which was famously crafted out of glass.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt The Mayfair’s glory years didn’t last, though, and by the 1980s, newspaper ads were touting it as a budget hotel located in close proximity to the freeway. The decades that followed only brought more decline and neglect.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of Max Grueninger Enter Icelandic architect/designer Gulla Jónsdóttir, who was commissioned to extensively renovate the premises in 2018. The large-scale $37 million project truly elevated the property, outfitting it with a far more upscale look than it previously enjoyed (as pictured above in an image shared with DIRT by photographer/graphic designer Max Grueninger). Exuding old Hollywood glamour, the redesign included adorning the once cream-hued lobby with dark gray accents and velvet furnishings, installing an atrium on the second level complete with a 15-foot olive tree and garden wall, and embellishing the lobby bar with a towering statement sculpture dubbed “The Mayfair Flower.”
As the Luxury Travel Advisor website detailed, the “top-to-toe” reimagining repositioned “the historic property as an art-centric, lifestyle boutique hotel — a ‘living room’ for locals and guests alike . . . a new social hub in the Westlake neighborhood with a dedicated art and culture program, showcasing a custom-built podcast studio, a communal Writing Room, and an art gallery with a multimillion-dollar collection of art and photography.”
Jónsdóttir and her team also overhauled all 294 of the hotel’s rooms, as well as the rooftop deck, pool, business center, fitness facility, multiple restaurant and bar spaces and 15,000 square feet of meeting and special event venues.
Unfortunately, Covid-19 locked down the Mayfair shortly after the rehab was complete. Following a prolonged vacancy, the site was utilized by the city for two years as part of the Project Roomkey program, which provided temporary “non-congregate shelter” options for the most vulnerable of Los Angeles’ unhoused throughout the pandemic. It has remained shuttered and unoccupied ever since the program’s phase-out last July.
Should Mayor Bass’ proposed purchase fall through, the listing notes that “only a superficial value-add is required” to restore the place to working order as a luxury lodging, with the sale representing “an opportunity to enter a major metro downtown hotel market at a fraction of replacement cost for an irreplaceable historic hotel building.”
“Historic” doesn’t even begin to describe the Mayfair and its myriad claims to fame, though. Not only did Raymond Chandler write his 1939 short story “I’ll Be Waiting” while staying at the hotel, but the first Academy Awards after-party was held there in 1929 and Jim Willis also founded Gamblers Anonymous on the premises in 1957.
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Image Credit: Twentieth Century Fox -
Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Most notably, perhaps, U.S. secret agent Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) rode a horse through the Mayfair’s pre-renovated lobby while chasing motorcycle-riding terrorist leader Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik) in a famous scene from the 1994 action classic “True Lies.” (Interestingly, three lobbies were actually used in the memorable segment – the Mayfair’s, as well as that of the Westin Bonaventure and the now-defunct Ambassador Hotel.)
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Image Credit: Paramount Television Other productions to feature the lodging include the season one episode of “MacGyver” titled “The Assassin,” in which Angus “Mac” MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) and Terry Ross (Corinne Bohrer) visit the Mayfair while attempting to thwart the killing of an archbishop.
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Image Credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group It is from the Mayfair’s lobby that Beth Cappadora’s (Michelle Pfeiffer) three-year-old son, Ben (Michael McElroy), is kidnapped while she is checking in to her 15-year high school reunion in the 1999 drama “The Deep End of the Ocean.”
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Image Credit: Showtime Networks The property portrays the supposed Seattle-area hotel where Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), her son Silas (Hunter Parrish) and her brother-in-law, Andy (Justin Kirk), get jobs as a housekeeper, bellhop and dishwasher, respectively, after abruptly leaving San Diego in the season six episode of “Weeds” titled “A Yippity Sippity.”
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Image Credit: NBC In one of the most heartwarming scenes ever featured on the beloved show “The Office,” Michael Scott (Steve Carell) goes on a walkabout that ends on the rooftop of the Mayfair Hotel in season seven’s “The Search.” When he is ultimately found by his estranged longtime love Holly Flax (Amy Ryan), he professes how much he misses her and the two kiss, thereby ending years of will-they-or-won’t-they speculation.
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Image Credit: Comedy Central Nathan Fielder comes up with an outrageously covert way to rid hotels of pests while at the Mayfair in the season two episode of the docuseries “Nathan for You” titled “Liquor Store; Exterminator; Car Wash.”
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Image Credit: Hulu Following Jónsdóttir’s renovation, the lodging popped up on “Little Fires Everywhere” as the interior of the Varick Hotel, where Elena Richardson (Reese Witherspoon) checks in during a visit to New York in the episode titled “Duo.” (Exteriors were filmed at the Hotel Barclay, located about two miles away at 103 W. 4th St.)
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Image Credit: HBO And in the season three episode of “Westworld” titled “The Absence of Field,” Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) and Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) meet for a tense tête à tête in the Mayfair’s lobby.
Here’s hoping that whatever lies in store for the hotel’s future, it will continue to be utilized as a filming location for generations to come.