Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles

Within living memory the United Artists film studio was practically synonymous with Hollywood big business, but just under a century ago it was born as the indie-est of ventures, as Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith joined forces to take on the established studios. Which is an odd way to introduce a hotel, we’ll grant — but it means there’s a nice symmetry in the fact that the old United Artists Tower is now home to the downtown Los Angeles installment of the Ace Hotel, a concern that’s traveled quite some distance down the road from indie beginnings toward massive mainstream success.

To be perfectly honest, it takes a bit of an effort to view the UA Tower, at least from the outside, as a truly beautiful building — distinctive, yes, but…. All the better, however, to appreciate the fact that what GREC Architects and Commune Design have done with the interiors is nothing short of extraordinary, managing to combine a rough-edged salvage vibe with touches of pure high modernism as well as nods to basically every significant period in Hollywood’s history, from the Twenties on up to the golden age of the Seventies and beyond. The result, though, is less a period piece than a boutique hotel that’s entirely up to date in its proudly eclectic postmodernism.

Put simply, the neighborhood’s massively on the up, the style is the Ace’s finest look yet, and the nuts and bolts of the place are more or less exactly what you’d expect — comfort not luxury, an atmosphere of inclusion not exclusion, and any number of details that remind you why the Ace hotels are at the top of the “cultural curation” game, right down to the Pendleton blankets and the intensely well-thought-out minibar selection.

And the immaculate Ace taste is on display in the public spaces as well, from the Stumptown lobby café to the hotly anticipated LA Chapter restaurant to the programming in the meticulously preserved United Artists Theater, which is basically unchanged since it opened as Mary Pickford’s ornate gothic fantasy back in 1927; the theatre’s first show featured no less legendary an act than Spiritualized performing Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space in its entirety, accompanied by full orchestra and choir — a gesture of grand intent if ever we’ve seen one.