Australian developer Crown Group is now betting that both the condominium and hotel markets rebound in time for the planned 2025 opening of its ambitious Downtown L.A. project.
The developer has shaved off more than two dozen stories from a previous design and now wants to add a hotel to the $500 million development, according to the L.A. Times. It’s the third redesign of a project that Crown Group first proposed in mid-2018.
Plans now call for 319 condo units — down from 528 units — and a 160-unit hotel. The condo units would be priced between $600,000 and $1 million, according to Crown. Crown wants a restaurant on the ground floor of the building and a hotel amenity deck on the eighth floor with a restaurant, pool, and bar.
The top two floors would be reserved for condominium residents and include a restaurant, garden, and some entertainment spaces.
Crown has significantly dialed back the scale of the project from the 70-story version it unveiled last year. Besides chopping off the 27 stories from that design, Crown retained the California Redwood-inspired aesthetics created by Koichi Takada Architects for the project.
Crown, led by Iwan Sunito and Paul Sathio, is looking to secure approval from the city and start building by the end of next year. Sunito and Sathio are betting the economy will recover from the coronavirus pandemic and be back on track by the time they plan to open the property in 2025.
The pandemic has decimated the hotel industry, but Crown isn’t the only firm planning to build. Louis Vuitton’s parent company filed plans to build a luxury hotel on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills just a couple weeks ago. [LAT] — Dennis Lynch