Latest news with #StreamlineModerne
New York Times
28-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
$650,000 Homes in Colorado, Georgia and Florida
Denver | $646,000 This two-bedroom, two-bathroom house was extensively renovated by the current sellers, who sourced a mix of new and vintage fixtures in an effort to honor the home's original character. Within a 10-minute walk are a park, a Brazilian bakery and a public elementary school. A supermarket, a drugstore and a hardware store are five minutes away by car. City Park, home to the Denver Zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, is a 10-minute drive. Denver International Airport is half an hour away. Rocky Mountain National Park, a popular destination for hikers, is 90 minutes away, as is the ski town of Breckenridge. Size: 1,009 square feet Price per square foot: $640 Indoors: A paved path links the sidewalk to this home's covered front porch, which, like the rest of the home, has rounded corners typical of the Streamline Moderne style. The door opens directly to the living room, with herringbone patterned floors and windows set into a corner. There's a chrome ceiling light fixture and two arched passageways. One leads to a hallway and both bedrooms, the other to a sunny dining room with a street-facing window. The dining room is open to the kitchen, where the appliances — new, but in a retro style — are mint green. The backsplash is made of glossy tiles in shades of gray and pink. The primary suite, at one end of the back hallway, has a door with a glass knob opening to a bedroom big enough for a queen-size bed. The attached bathroom has a white porcelain pedestal sink and a combined tub and shower lined with green and black tile. The other bedroom could hold a double bed, and next door is a bathroom with a deep soaking tub and vintage vanity lights. Outdoor space: A paved patio behind the house holds a free-standing wood-burning stove with a bright orange enamel finish. The fenced backyard has a square lawn surrounded by gravel, and the driveway at the front of the house has two parking spots. Taxes: $2,844 (estimated) Contact: Kevin O'Brien, Brokers Guild Homes, 970-420-3448, and Skyler Hackett, Hackett Homes, 915-666-9614 Atlanta | $650,000 This one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit occupying a tower at the top of the former Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill, in Atlanta's Cabbagetown neighborhood. Residential development of the building began in the mid-1990s, and this unit occupies a space that once held industrial water tanks. A city park with basketball courts and open green space is within a 10-minute walk, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park is less than a mile away, and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum is about two miles away. Also nearby is The Municipal Market, an indoor farmers' market and dining hall. By car, the center of downtown Atlanta is about 10 minutes away, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is a 15-minute drive. Size: 1,541 square feet Price per square foot: $422 Indoors: This unit's front door opens to a foyer with polished concrete floors that continue straight ahead into a galley-style kitchen with Miele appliances, including a wall oven and a separate gas cooktop. The custom-made cabinets are maple, and the countertop is travertine. Through an arched doorway is the main living area, where the walls are brick and the ceiling is 71 feet above the floor, with large arched windows near the top and lower windows with skyline views below. The floors here are also polished concrete, and the space is open, with sitting and dining areas on opposite sides of the room. Wood beams crisscross the space high about the floor. The bedroom is off a hallway extending from the foyer, with the same exposed brick walls and high ceilings as the living room and space for a king-size bed. The en suite bathroom has more travertine and a combined soaking tub and shower. Through the bathroom is a walk-in closet. Outdoor space: The building has an in-ground pool for use by residents, along with a roof deck. The complex is gated, and this unit comes with one assigned parking spot. Taxes: $5,778 (estimated), plus a $657 monthly homeowners association fee Contact: Chase Mizell, Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby's International Realty, 770-289-2780 St. Petersburg, Fla. | $649,000 This two-bedroom, one-bathroom house is a few blocks from Crescent Lake Park, which has walking trails and a playground. A tavern, several cafes, and a handful of restaurants are within walking distance, and the shops and nightlife of downtown St. Petersburg are about a mile away. The St. Pete Pier, which extends into Tampa Bay and is home to a local history museum, is five minutes away by car. St. Pete Beach, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, is roughly a 20-minutes drive. Tampa and Clearwater are is within a 30-minute drive, and Orlando and Fort Myers each take about two hours by car. Size: 1,232 square feet Price per square foot: $527 Indoors: A paved path runs from the sidewalk to the main entryway, where the mailbox is lime-green and the front door is painted blue. Inside is a foyer, with engineered wood floors that continue into a dining room with a street-facing window and an atomic-style ceiling light fixture. On the other side of a wide doorway is the living room, where a wood-burning stove sits in one corner. French doors with their original hardware open from the foyer to a home office. Behind the living room is the kitchen, updated with blue cabinets and quartz countertops. The appliances are stainless steel, and the backsplash is made of white tile. A mudroom at the back of the house has backyard-facing windows and access to a laundry room. Off a hallway that begins in the living room are both bedrooms, each with a ceiling fan, a closet and big enough to hold a queen-size bed and a desk. Off the hall is an updated bathroom, where the combined tub and shower is lined with white subway tile. Outdoor space: The grassy backyard has mature landscaping, and the property includes a gravel patio and two detached structures. One is an air-conditioned studio that could be a gym or an office, and the other is a one-car garage. The driveway has room for two more parked cars. Taxes: $1,524 (estimated) Contact: Annie Rocks and Kevin Rocks, Rocks Realty, 727-777-3264
Los Angeles Times
27-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Walking all 15.5 miles of Pico Boulevard in a day revealed hidden parts of L.A.
We took about 37,000 steps forward and one step back. For the fourth iteration of what friends and I playfully call our annual big walk, we embarked on a considerably easier quest. One year after delineating our limits by walking all 28-plus miles of Western Avenue, two years after surmounting all 25-plus miles of Sunset Boulevard, we settled on perambulating Pico Boulevard this month. It lacked the grandiosity of our past pursuits. But Pico's 15.5 miles presented plenty of opportunities — to chat, to consider, to explore, to linger. We met at 9 a.m. on the outskirts of downtown and finished about 9½ hours later on the Santa Monica sand. Along the way we ran into friends, made new ones and reconnected with welcome parts of our collective home. Our guiding principles are simple. After selecting one long Los Angeles street that ends at the ocean, we start walking at its other terminus. Ideally, there's some sort of special marker there. While Western has the Fern Dell Stairs, Sunset's start is unceremonious. Wilshire Boulevard, the site of our first walk in 2022, has eight out-of-place palm trees, perhaps planted as a hint of what's to come. Pico wins with a giant Coca-Cola bottle, outside an entrance to the company's storied bottling facility designed in Streamline Moderne architectural fashion. We started there and never turned. Two miles in, at Pico's intersection with Union Avenue, we took over the street itself as part of CicLAmini. The car-free event put on by a local nonprofit was just beginning, so the street almost felt like ours alone. And we've walked enough to know how rare a public restroom is in Los Angeles, so the portable toilets were appreciated. Eight miles in, we stopped for lunch in Pico-Robertson, where options abounded. Pico, of course, was the street on which the late, great Jonathan Gold once set out to eat at every restaurant, and Pico-Robertson was the neighborhood where he resided during that pursuit. We didn't have that much time. We did, however, split up and sample an array of restaurants: a lauded Tokyo- and Neapolitan-style pizza place called Pizzeria Sei, neighborhood classics Factor's Famous Deli and Jeff's Gourmet Sausage Factory, and the Rooster, a newer addition. We would've loved to eat all together, but there is a remarkable dearth of green spaces near Pico, throughout the city of Los Angeles. Public green spaces, we should say, for we soon encountered back-to-back golf courses covering more than a mile. Pico proved pedestrian-friendly, at least compared to our past pursuits. Sidewalks exist for almost every step of the way. And, for several stretches, they have history built into them. Surrounding Bonnie Brae Street, in Pico-Union, there are a number of Victorian houses, modeled after actual nearby houses, engraved into the sidewalk. In eastern Santa Monica, information about the street and surrounding area is at several locations painted into the sidewalk, forming a timeline as you approach the Pacific. Just don't try to veer to the north or south. Between Arlington Avenue and La Brea Avenue, there are several gates visible from Pico that block both vehicles and pedestrians from easily visiting nearby neighborhoods. The gates, funded by neighborhood councils, date to the 1980s. They have remained a hotly contested issue in recent city council races. And don't accept every apparent office building at face value. At neither the Packard Well Site nor the Cardiff Tower, about 1½ miles apart, did we stop and take notice of the strange, tall facades shielding us from something. If we had, we would've realized there were no windows. There are not offices but massive oil derricks and rigs inside. As part of a 2015 survey on historic districts, the Los Angeles Department of City Planning called the Cardiff Tower 'significant as a rare remaining oil production facility located on a commercial corridor.' Los Angeles! Pico only calls two cities home, L.A. and Santa Monica, which is rare among our long streets that tend to snake between many cities. But double-digit Los Angeles neighborhoods include the street in some capacity. It feels like a relentless parade of new neighborhoods. At the northeast corner of the intersection with Fairfax Avenue, there are even signs for two neighborhoods that somehow start in exactly the same place: Wilshire Vista and Little Ethiopia. At the Daily Pint, where we sourced sustenance for our final leg, the bartender could tell something was up as soon as we all walked in, sweaty and setting down our backpacks. Just the week before, she told us, a similarly disheveled man came in on a solo journey from downtown to Pacific Palisades. It was his punishment for coming in last place in his fantasy football league. We told her we were just doing this for fun. She didn't say anything for a few seconds, then asked what we wanted to drink. Soon enough we were on the beach, admiring the last of the day's sun with the Santa Monica Pier as our backdrop. Pico actually meets the sand in a way that we have not seen with any other long streets. At its last intersection, with Appian Way, there's a little valet circle for a hotel restaurant, and anything resembling a typical road ends. Then there are eight steps down and 100 feet of connected S-shaped sidewalks guiding pedestrians down to the beach. That's still Pico Boulevard, according to every map we consulted. It's like an artist's last, tasteful touch. This was our largest group yet: 22 starters and 19 finishers, including one fearless 4-month-old. January's Eaton fire displaced four of our walkers, two of whom remain marooned far from home for at least a little while longer. Everything still feels a bit different here, obviously. The downsides of Los Angeles life might be a little more top of mind. All that, combined with blessedly less mileage to cover, gave this walk a different feeling than in years past. Less delirious, more contemplative, with more time to notice, to share memories with peers. Most of us have been here long enough to remember old iterations of spaces. One nail salon used to be a coffee shop, where a few of us first learned about Ethiopian coffee ceremonies. Catch One, now a club where bottle service with Jack Daniel's sells for $400, used to be Jewel's Catch One, one of America's oldest Black-owned discos and gay bars. The iconic Papa Cristo's Greek Grill, at Pico and Normandie, just closed, its building now for sale for more than $5 million. Some spaces continue to reign. The Mint, the music venue that once hosted the likes of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, has been around for 88 years. The Apple Pan is not far behind, at 78 years, long outlasting the Westside Pavilion across the street. One thoughtful walker brought along a book of Mary Oliver poems and slowly flipped through it during lulls. She asked others to stop her whenever they felt like it and read the resulting poem aloud. Toward the day's end, we happened on 'Yes! No!,' which was first published in 1994. 'How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly, looking at everything and calling out Yes! No!' reads one portion. 'Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.' We were not perfect. But on this day, it is fair to say, we completed our work. And what a luxury it was to do it once more.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Historic Shangri La Hotel in Santa Monica Closes
Santa Monica's historic Shangri-La Hotel has gone dark; the doors shuttered by Sonder, a San Francisco tech company that took over the landmark in 2023. The 86-year old hostelry, renamed The Beacon when Sonder arrived, had been transformed into an automated rental in the style of Airbnb. Sonder properties did not typically have a front desk or room keys and amenities like housekeeping are requested through their app. "The fact that hotels still have a person typing in who knows what when you're checking in at a hotel is a complete joke," twentysomething CEO Francis Davidson-Tanguay told Skift. 'It's really laughable how far behind the hotel industry is from a tech perspective."Sonder closed 80 locations last year, laid off 17% of its workforce, and received a delinquency notice from Nasdaq before acquiring a new round of investment totaling $18 million. CRETECH reports that the owner of their former 125-room Craftsman hotel, across from Downtown's Apple store, recently defaulted on a $56 million loan. Today, Sonder lists only one L.A. property, the Winfield, on their website. Former locations, including the Beverly Terrace, City Center in Long Beach, and Lum Hotel near LAX no longer appear connected to Sonder. Marriott has entered into a licensing agreement to create Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy which will take over some 10,000 rooms from the company throughout 45 cities in the U.S. and abroad. The Santa Monica Daily Press reports that existing room reservations at the Shangri La / Beacon are not being honored, citing one guest from New Zealand who lost not only their room, but hundreds of dollars due to exchange rate differences. A sign on the door announces a new name and operation coming in June when it will be renamed Eden. The hotel will have the same Streamline Moderne architecture and breathtaking views of the Pacific but the price of paradise is high. It may be a pre-opening glitch, but room rates on the site start at $999 a night, or about five times the rate of Sonder's other L.A location.
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Still Deco after all these years: Robert Landau's L.A. images showcase the enduring style
Art Deco has never really gone out of style: Even after a century, the zigzag meanders, suave ladies and elegant lines associated with it still define sophistication. The style gained popularity after being showcased at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925, and to coincide with that centennial, West Hollywood's Denenberg Fine Arts Gallery has mounted an exhibit showcasing photographer Robert Landau's new book, 'Art Deco Los Angeles.' In addition to Landau's photos of beloved landmarks, some familiar and some reduced to rubble long ago, the Angel City Press tome includes an essay by author and architecture historian Alan Hess about the 20th century style known for bold geometric shapes. 'I was responding visually and emotionally to places I grew up going to,' Landau tells The Times of his photography, mentioning Pan-Pacific Auditorium as one such place. 'Went there as a child to see Harlem Globetrotters,' he says of the sprawling Fairfax District structure near the Farmers Market that was destroyed by fire in 1989. 'The '20s, '30s, '40s was an exciting time, and people were inspired by the dynamics of things like automobiles and technology, and also making architecture that was fun and engaging.' Designed by Wurdeman & Becket in 1935, the Pan-Pacific's Streamline Moderne aesthetic echoed the Motorama auto shows that were once held there. A low-rise sprawling structure, it was an example of an L.A. iteration of Deco — horizontal versus the vertical style found in most cities. The Eastern-Columbia department store, whose clock tower was allowed to exceed L.A.'s existing heights limits, has since been transformed into lofts. Landau photographed the 1930 building and accompanying pool in 2015. 'We have smaller-scale Deco here,' observes Margot Gerber, executive director of the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles. 'For a long time, it was one or two stories, a sprawling metropolis. We used to have 150-foot height limits, but technology evolved so we can have taller buildings in L.A.' Also in the book: the Mauretania, a low-rise apartment building designed in 1934 by Milton J. Black in a Streamline Moderne style that references the British luxury liner of that name, which set a transatlantic speed record in 1909. The 10-unit, stucco structure surrounds an open courtyard and is topped by an extensive penthouse where 'Wizard of Oz' Tin Man Jack Haley once lived. Los Angeles Central Library, photographed in 1988 and originally constructed in 1926, typifies low-rise Art Deco design in a city concerned about earthquakes. Other low-rise examples in the book include the Los Angeles Central Library (Goodhue and Winslow, 1926), Union Station (Parkinson and Parkinson, 1929) and the Griffith Observatory (Austin and Ashley, 1935), all emblematic of L.A. Deco. Ornamentation on buildings has been around for as long as buildings, but the roots of Art Deco style are often traced to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, his mentor Louis Sullivan and movements like Art Nouveau, Bauhaus and the Vienna Secession. A Gilmore service station at 859. N. Highland Ave. now dispenses Starbucks coffee. Built in 1935, it was photographed in 2024. 'You can see where they simplified all forms and took it out of what it had been in the classical period or the Victorian Age,' notes Gerber. 'You look at Art Deco and it's lighter, so black-and-white and so graphic.' The book also includes modest homes, like one on Hudson and Larchmont that features a period stained-glass window but whose interior was remodeled in the Midcentury Modern style. Storefronts like the deserted Long Beach commercial building on North Atlantic Street are also pictured along with gas stations and tire shops repurposed as eateries and coffee shops. The Wiltern and Pellissier Building, located at 3790 Wilshire Blvd., was built in 1931 and photographed in 2002. Too many structures have been lost over the years, none as painful as the 1969 razing of the Richfield Tower, a 1929 office building in downtown L.A. designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements, the firm also behind the Mayan Theater, Pellissier Building and the Wiltern. 'It's increasingly difficult because of state mandates for housing. And a lot of limitations on development have been lifted,' says Gerber about the fight to preserve these architectural gems. Son of an L.A. gallerist, Landau began photographing the city in the late 1960s. She and others fought to get the Fairfax Theatre designated as a cultural monument, but despite that successful campaign the owner demolished the theater's interior, leaving only the Art Deco facade, as required by law, with an open pit behind it. Among the many Art Deco casualties are the Pacific Theatre on Wilshire (demolished 1988), Wilshire Bowl/Slapsy Maxie's (demolished 1952), the Mole-Richardson Studio Depot on LaBrea (demolished 2014), Simon's Drive-In Restaurant (demolished 1971) and the Four Star Theatre Building on Wilshire (demolished 2015). 'There's a lot we thought were landmarked but just because you get designation does not mean the building cannot be torn down. You can tear down within a year of its nomination. Our hope is the kind of publicity we get with these buildings, they'll become icons,' says Gerber. 'L.A. has not had a very good history of respecting its past, maybe because it's still a relatively young city,' Landau says. 'The May Co., they could have easily knocked that down and put a box there, but they didn't and now it's the Academy Museum. The public is coming around to understanding that a lot of these modern buildings that are put up don't match in character or quality some of these buildings from the past.' Formerly a May Company department store, this Art Deco style building constructed in 1939 now houses the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Landau photographed it in 2024. The son of L.A. gallerist Felix Landau, Robert began photographing the city in the late 1960s. Previous books include 'Rock 'n' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip' and 'Outrageous L.A.' The earlier images in his new book were shot on a Hasselblad in the 1970s and '80s. For later images he used a Nikon D700. 'I grew up a black-and-white guy,' he says. 'My heroes were the European street photographers — Atget, Kertész, Bresson. But here, the elements in the urban landscape are designed for cars driving by and they're screaming for attention, and color is a big part of that. I do a lot of my shooting on weekends, Sunday mornings, and late in the day. The light comes through the atmosphere, sometimes smog, and you get color.' Popular with the public in its day, Art Deco was rejected by the art and academic community in favor of the International Style, a sleek, minimalist sensibility seen in the works of practitioners like Richard Neutra and Philip Johnson, curator of a landmark 1932 MoMA show on the subject. Yet it has endured. 'People rejected Deco in the '50s because it seemed like something that was old school and they wanted nothing to do with it. But it didn't die,' observes Gerber. 'The Oscars, the past five years, have done a very specific elegant Art Deco style to their set. Now the style is synonymous with timeless elegance. I don't think it ever really disappeared.'
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
House hunters flock to Art Deco-inspired home in Sacramento. Take a look inside
Inside Look is a Sacramento Bee series where we take readers behind the scenes at restaurants, new businesses, local landmarks and news stories. Potential buyers flocked to an Art Deco-inspired home with Streamline Moderne influences in one of Sacramento's most desirous neighborhoods after the unique and impressive property hit the market this month. The 2,723-square-foot residence is for sale for $1.3 million in the Curtis Park neighborhood. 'It's unique architecture in Curtis Park was compelling for a lot of people to want to come see it,' listing agent Paloma Begin of Compass said. A two-day weekend open house brought in 75 home hunters each day, which is considered well above average, she said. Begin highlighted that visitors came from both the capital region and the out-of-area market. Ultimately, the interest resulted in an offer being accepted on Friday. The sale is pending. The house was built in 2010 after a late 1980s dwelling on the lot was torn down. The husband-and-wife team of architect Kale Wisnia and interior and building designer Catherine Reon of Sacramento-based CRKW Studio collaborated on the project. The architectural style is perhaps best described as an updated blend of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne themes. The aesthetic is 'Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, 1930s-inspired (with) clean lines,' Begin said. Art Deco and Streamline Moderne share a modernist lineage. The Art Deco movement emphasized luxury, lavish materials and intricate geometric patterns before evolving into Streamline Moderne, an architectural style of the 1930s and '40s which favored simplicity and functionality. The two-story Curtis Park residence is sophisticated — and fun. Soaring ceilings, a central fireplace, private patios and an open-concept layout set the stage for the wonderfully designed home. A second-story hallway opens up to sweeping views of the living space below, creating an open, airy feel and a sense of seamless connection inside. The well-equipped, beautiful gourmet kitchen and marble gas fireplace draw attention immediately upon entering the home. '(The seller) was a professional chef, so he built this kitchen to accommodate his needs,' Begin said. The kitchen showcases three large pantries for storage and prep work, under-counter refrigerator drawers, a six-burner Wolf range, long and sleek granite countertops. But the most outstanding feature in the kitchen might be an expansive silver hood over the range with an exposed chimney pipe that resembles an art piece and ascends all the way up to the second-story ceiling. A wet bar serves a large dining room and an elegant living room is distinguished by built-in shelves, an elegant, captivating, round tray ceiling and glass chandelier. French-style doors open out to an outdoor grilling and dining area under a pergola. There's a path leading to a water feature and areas to sit on the lawn under a lush canopy of mature trees. The backyard contains raised beds for a kitchen garden and fig and lemon trees. Upstairs — just beyond a study loft next to a sleek staircase and a second bedroom — lies the magnificent primary suite. The main bedroom offers an expansive dressing room, private roof deck, lavish marble bathroom with separate vanity areas, a steam shower, a jetted tub, a bidet and a strong baseboard vacuum to keep things neat. A third bedroom is found in a private location downstairs with a full elegant bathroom nearby. The property comes with a detached garage with a stylish glass garage door and a car charger. The backyard features a solid storage shed on the side. The home delivers other amenities, such as a whole-house vacuum with strong suction power, an upstairs laundry and a mudroom. The house sits on a tidy, tree-lined residential street just steps from Curtis Park, making the property even more attractive, Begin said. 'You can walk to dinner, you can walk to beer and coffee, you can ride your bike,' she said. 'It has city amenities nearby. The park is great.' Granite Bay's highest-priced sale in 3 years is a home built for sports-car collection Explore Elk Grove's 'modern castle' right on golf course. Ultra-luxe home lists for $3.4M
