There are so many reasons for choosing a hotel, but ‘location, location, location’ remains one of the driving factors. For any event at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, the luxury hotel of choice is The Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles. It is owned by AEG, which also owns and runs L.A. Live, and the two work very closely together. The gal looked out over highway 101, early evening as the sun set, and thought how beautiful this part of town, sorry city, is. She looked straight across at the Hollywood hills – how kind of someone to put the letters HOLLYWOOD there, as if you need to be reminded where you are.
Floor 23 of this 123-room hotel is the place to be as the club lounge is there. You also take a dedicated elevator from this floor up to the 26th floor terrace, to the pool, an oasis in a city that grows more concrete every day (to date, about 45,000 people live in the immediate vicinity of downtown).
At weekends, people drive here, to special events in L.A. Live, and stay over in the hotel and simply enjoy lazing around the pool. There are also 224 Residences above the hotel – the entire modern building, a blue-glass maxi sculpture, soars to 54 floors.
Apparently some of the owners of these residences have bought them so their little-darling kids can live there while they study at nearby USC, University of Southern California, where medical studies are one of the main disciplines.
Wolfgang Puck is more and more king of Los Angeles cuisine In hotels alone you can find him at the Bel-Air, the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons – and here. He runs WP24 (‘Wolfgang Puck on the 24th floor of the building’). The design, by iCrave, morphs from one area with sports bar televisions to another with wicker walls to another with an open kitchen to, finally, a more traditional dining room. But there is nothing traditional here.
You can eat steamed baby bao buns, or lettuce cups holding sweet Maine shrimp tempura, served with ginger-serrano chilli vinaigrette. You can go on to twice-cooked pork belly with shiitake mushrooms and peanuts, and have more shiitake with a side order of stir-fried mushrooms. You choose your beers or wines by swishing an iPad, programmed so simply that it takes only a few seconds.