Melrose Triangle Offices to be Replaced With Residences

Another developer is reading the writing on the wall in the Los Angeles office market and tweaking its development plans accordingly.

The Charles Company has updated its plans for the vacant Melrose Triangle site at 9060 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, nixing a proposal for offices entirely and doubling down on residences on the city’s main thoroughfare, Urbanize Los Angeles reported.

The Charles Company began excavation at the site in 2021, but the hole has been empty in the five years since then. Plans to redevelop the site have floated around for more than a decade and undergone several changes over the years.

At first, The Charles Company proposed constructing a four-story building with 137,000 square feet of offices, 82,000 square feet of retail and 76 apartments. Subsequent new entitlements kept the same number of residential units while calling for fewer shops and restaurants across 60,000 square feet and 65 percent more offices at 225,000 square feet.

While the past iteration reflected confidence on the demand for offices, the latest proposal scuttles the office portion of the project entirely. The revised plan calls for three interconnected seven-story buildings containing 282 one- and two-bedroom apartments, including 66 affordable units for seniors; 96,000 square feet of retail; 10,800 square feet of restaurant space; and parking for 528 vehicles.

The development would be designed around a central courtyard surrounded with commercial spaces and outdoor dining. This “walkable series of distinct zones” would create a “space to support everyday retail spill-out while also accommodating seasonal activations, pop-ups and curated moments,” according to recent community presentation materials on the project.

A timeline for the project has not yet been disclosed.

The broader Los Angeles office market has been finding its footing in a new post-pandemic reality as more companies opt for remote work and smaller office footprints. In the first quarter, total vacancy ticked up to 25.5 percent, according to CBRE’s Q1 report — up from 23.8 percent in the same period last year, per Colliers data.

— Chris Malone Méndez