Urbanize Los Angeles: “It’s official: Hollywood’s Lytton Savings Building has met the wrecking ball, clearing the biggest obstacle to the construction of the Frank Gehry-designed 8150 Sunset development.”
The Googie-style building, designed by the late architect Kurt Meyer, had stood near the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights Boulevards for more than 60 years. The two-story edifice, most recently home to a Chase Bank, was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2016, and was the subject of an unsuccessful preservation campaign waged by the Los Angeles Conservancy and the advocacy group Friends of Lytton Savings.
In its place, developer Townscape Partners plans to construct a pair of mid-rise buildings featuring 203 residential units, some of which would be set aside as workforce and affordable housing, atop 57,300 square feet of ground-floor retail space and basement parking.
Gehry’s design for 8150 Sunset calls for the towers – standing roughly 178 feet in height – to be arranged around a large courtyard which would maintain view corridors and serve as a reference to a past occupant of the project site: the iconic Garden of Allah hotel. The village-like hotel, popular with celebrities, was demolished to make way for Lytton Savings in the late 1950s.