Downtown L.A. Proper: Kelly Wearstler Makes History Part of the Interior
The building as a starting point
The most memorable interiors at Downtown L.A. Proper are inseparable from the building they occupy. Kelly Wearstler worked within a 1926 Renaissance Revival landmark by Curlett & Beelman, allowing existing features and former uses to complicate the hotel’s contemporary identity. The project, dated 2021 in the designer’s portfolio, treats history as a set of physical conditions to work with: floors, volumes, openings and rooms that resist a standard hotel plan.
The property contains 147 rooms and suites. Its operator identifies two particularly unusual accommodations, made from a former basketball court and indoor pool. These inherited programmes give the design an architectural specificity that cannot be achieved through a palette alone. A suite is recognisable as a room with a past before its furnishings enter the conversation.
Local commissions at the point of arrival
Wearstler’s project account records the original pink-and-white checked marble at the entrance and a reception desk incorporating Morgan Peck’s ceramic work. Abel Macias’s painted ceiling and a glass screen by Judson Studios establish another register of craft. Each intervention operates at a different scale: the floor underfoot, the object-like desk, the overhead painting and the translucent partition.
In an interview published by Domino, Wearstler connected the commissions to a desire for a distinct sense of place. The publication describes how the work of Los Angeles makers helps the interior belong to its surroundings. For a hotel with such strong decorative energy, that local authorship supplies an essential framework. The commissions are identifiable contributions by artists, rather than anonymous flourishes used to signal luxury.
Rooms that preserve difference
The hotel describes its guestrooms as individually layered with colour, texture and pattern, including tiled bathrooms with Moroccan references. Their differences are part of the project’s appeal. The design does not require every room to replicate a single photograph; instead, it offers variations within a common material vocabulary.
The former sporting spaces sharpen that idea. The basketball-court and pool suites carry the proportions of their earlier lives into a new domestic programme. They invite a different approach to arranging furniture and defining areas for gathering. In design terms, the building supplies the brief, and the room’s former scale becomes a resource rather than an inconvenience to conceal.
A collection that remains legible
The Pool Suite includes a ceramic mural by Ben Medansky, while the rooftop continues the use of commissioned tile and ceramic work. Wearstler’s account of the project connects the interiors to Moorish, Spanish and Mexican references and to the surrounding city. The variety is deliberate, but it is grounded by repeated attention to crafted surfaces.
Historic fabric establishes the setting at Downtown L.A. Proper, local makers give individual features an author, and surviving room volumes shape how the spaces are occupied. The interior’s dense palette is held together by these relationships between the building and the objects made for it.
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