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Beny Alagem’s new $2B One Beverly Hills design is loaded with gardens

Latest plan calls for a pair of 32-story condo towers, a 10 story hotel, and 8 acres of green space

Beny Alagem of Alagem Capital and renderings of the new design (Credit: DBOX for Alagem Capital Group via Los Angeles Times)
Beny Alagem of Alagem Capital and renderings of the new design (Credit: DBOX for Alagem Capital Group via Los Angeles Times)

Beny Alagem’s latest plan for One Beverly Hills is ambitious, totally new, and very green.

The developer’s firm Alagem Capital and partner Cain International unveiled architect Norman Foster’s new $2 billion design for the 17.5-acre property next to Alagem’s Beverly Hilton, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Alagem’s plan, the latest in a development saga that spans over a decade, would see the construction of two condominium towers at 28 and 32 stories; a 10-story hotel; and eight acres of green space, much of which would be open to the public. The hotel would feature 42 all-suite guest rooms, plus a fine-dining restaurant and 37 residential units; the condo towers would house 303 condos.

Greenery is clearly the theme of the design. Renderings show gardens across just about every surface of the buildings and grounds. Foster said “the building architecture is an extension of the greenery.

“The protagonist is the landscape, the garden,” he said.

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Those three main buildings line the west side of the development site. The central gardens separate them from Alagem’s Beverly Hilton on the northeast side of the One Beverly Hills site. Landscape architect Mark Rios with RIOS designed the gardens and said he was “interested in pursuing what a botanical environment is for the 21st century.”

Alagem Capital and Cain International filed the plans with the city of Beverly Hills on Monday. They hope to break ground late next year and wrap up construction by 2024, according to the Times.

Alagem, an Israeli-born hotel magnate, has been trying to develop condo towers next to his Beverly Hills hotel since George W. Bush was still president and the Great Recession had not yet struck.

In early 2016, he lost a ballot initiative to build condo towers on the hotel site. But his fortunes turned in 2018, when Alagem Capital and Cain International bought the 750,000-square-foot One Beverly Hills site in 2018 from rival Dalian Wanda Group for $420 million. Alagem tossed out Wanda’s design for the building approved by the city of Beverly Hills, and by May of 2019 tapped Foster + Partners as architect.

In February, the ultra-luxury Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel sued Alagem’s Waldorf Astoria hotel for allegedly conspiring with a Peninsula employee to gain access to guests’ accounts and then steal clients. [LAT] ­— Dennis Lynch

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Beverly HillsHospitality