Conrad Los Angeles

Conrad Los Angeles is Frank Gehry's first hotel tower and Conrad's first property in California, opened in July 2022 as the residential-and-hotel anchor of Related Companies' Grand LA development on Bunker Hill. Five José Andrés restaurants and a rooftop pool deck back up architecture that was always going to draw the attention regardless.

The place

100 South Grand Avenue sits at the top of Bunker Hill, across from Walt Disney Concert Hall and steps from The Broad and MOCA: a stretch of downtown Los Angeles that has spent twenty years trying to convince visitors it has a center. The hotel occupies the ground-up hotel tower of The Grand LA, a $1.3 billion mixed-use complex from Related Companies that also includes a 436-unit residential tower and, eventually, 164,000 square feet of retail.

The concept

Conrad Los Angeles is a 28-story, 305-room tower designed by Frank Gehry: his first hotel commission in the city where he has built some of its most recognizable civic architecture, and the building that gives Conrad Hotels & Resorts its first foothold in California. The exterior reprises Gehry's familiar vocabulary of curved, faceted metal panels, set against the more restrained residential tower next door (The Grand by Gehry); inside, Tara Bernerd & Partners handled a calmer, warm-toned interior scheme that avoids competing with the architecture outside the windows. The hotel opened on July 6, 2022, ahead of the rest of The Grand LA's retail component, which followed in spring 2023. It functions as the anchor tenant of a development explicitly designed to answer a longstanding complaint about downtown LA: that its cultural institutions had never been stitched together by a street life to match. Whether one hotel tower changes that verdict is a separate question from whether the building itself succeeds, and on its own terms (a serious Gehry commission, delivered largely as designed) it does.

Dining & wellness

Food and beverage across the property is handled by José Andrés and ThinkFoodGroup, in five concepts: San Laurel, a Spanish-California dining room on the tenth floor; Agua Viva, a rooftop restaurant mixing Latin and Asian influences; Airlight, the pool-deck bar and light-bites counter; and SED, a small spirits-focused bar. The rooftop itself runs to 16,000 square feet, with a private pool deck and views back toward the Concert Hall. Conrad Spa Los Angeles adds seven treatment rooms across more than 7,000 square feet, with an infrared sauna and recovery cabins: sizeable for a hotel spa, though not a full destination wellness offering.