Santa Monica Proper Hotel

Santa Monica Proper opened in June 2019 as the first hotel of Proper Hospitality, joining the restored 1928 Santa Monica Professional Building to a new curved seven-storey wing at 700 Wilshire Boulevard. Kelly Wearstler designed the 262 rooms and suites, and the rooftop — pool, cabanas and the Calabra restaurant — remains the only one of its kind on the Westside.

The place

The hotel occupies the block at 700 Wilshire Boulevard, with its entrance on 7th Street, four blocks inland from the beach in downtown Santa Monica and a short walk from the Third Street Promenade. It is not a beachfront property — the ocean is a walk away rather than out of the window — but the rooftop deck buys back the view.

The concept

Santa Monica Proper was the founding hotel of Proper Hospitality's collection and the property that established Kelly Wearstler as the group's defining designer, before she went on to do Downtown L.A. Proper and San Francisco Proper. The site is two buildings, not one: the landmarked Santa Monica Professional Building of 1928, a Spanish Colonial Revival office block, restored and reused, and a new seven-storey wing with curved walls and a free-form plan set alongside it. Howard Laks Architects handled both halves and the bridge that links them, with ground-floor retail and restaurants opened onto the street. The restoration was recognised the year after opening with the Santa Monica Conservancy's President's Preservation Award, alongside design honours from the Westside Urban Forum and the Los Angeles Business Council. Wearstler's interiors run the two structures on deliberately different registers — heavier and more textured in the historic half, lighter and more sculptural in the new — and the hotel has since leaned hard into wellness, adding a recovery suite, a class studio called Helios and a members' club layer on top of the hotel operation.

Dining & wellness

Two rooms, both open to non-residents. Palma is the ground-floor lobby lounge and bar; Calabra is the rooftop restaurant, bar and lounge, sharing the deck with the swimming pool and its cabanas — Santa Monica's only rooftop pool, and one of the reasons the hotel keeps turning up at the top of Los Angeles rankings. Wellness is handled by Surya, an Ayurvedic spa, plus a 24-hour fitness centre, the Helios studio and a dedicated recovery suite. There are 24,000 square feet of event space across the two buildings.