The InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, occupying part of
the tallest U.S. building on the West Coast, is now open.
The 73-story Wilshire Grand Center has hotel guestrooms on
floors 31 to 68 and the sky lobby on 70, where a mezzanine-level bar affords
views to the Westside, South Bay and Pacific Ocean.
The 69th floor features restaurants Sora, where guests are
served sushi on a conveyor belt, and Dekkadence, a casual dining space described
as a "farm-to-fork international market experience" with live cooking
and carving stations.
La Boucherie on 71 is a French-inspired steakhouse. And atop
the hotel is Spire 73, which InterContinental calls the tallest open-air bar in
the Western Hemisphere.
The hotel has 889 guestrooms, making it the largest InterContinental in the Americas. The hotel is the largest to be built in downtown Los
Angeles since the 1,358-room Westin Bonaventure was completed in 1976. The JW
Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live, which was built in 2001, has 879 guestrooms.
The InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown has 95,000 square
feet of meeting and event space, with the boardrooms and ballrooms occupying
the first seven floors of the hotel. A 21,000-square-foot ballroom can seat as
many as 1,800 guests.
The building's 1,100-foot-high summit makes it the tallest
U.S. building west of Chicago. The $1.35 billion project, which was developed
by Korean Air and Hanjin Group, was built at the site of the Wilshire Grand
Hotel, which closed in 2011 and was demolished in 2013.
With the InterContinental, parent company InterContinental
Hotels Group has taken on Marriott International for hotel presence near the Los
Angeles Convention Center. The new hotel is seven blocks from the convention center. In April, parent
company IHG opened a 350-room Hotel Indigo about five blocks from the
InterContinental.
"We're very fortunate to have the opportunity to have
two such great properties under construction in downtown L.A. at the same time,"
said Joel Eisemann during a reporters' tour of the two hotels in January. "It's
going to help reshape downtown L.A."