(Studio KO designed Balazs’s acclaimed London property, Chiltern Firehouse.) John Krasinski and Aaron Sorkin have been developing a Chateau-inspired mini-series for HBO, with Krasinski saying he hopes it will be about “a hotel with secrets, with protection, with history.” Those secrets parade through The Castle on Sunset, a fabulously fizzy account of the Chateau, by Shawn Levy, who has chronicled the lives of Paul Newman and Robert De Niro (who both lived in the hotel from time to time). A long-rumored refresh of the hotel’s interiors is on the horizon, care of the Paris-based design firm Studio KO and under the direction of André Balazs, the Chateau’s owner since 1990. But the Chateau’s nonagenarian status comes at a propitious moment. The hotel says it has no plans to throw itself the kind of blowout party it’s so good at throwing for others-such as the Oscar-night bash it hosted for Jay-Z and Beyoncé last year. The Chateau is a grande dame that for nearly a century has remained as intriguing as an ingénue. Photograph by Jay Thompson/Alpha Press.īut not just any. Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, Chateau habitués, 1969. And so the Chateau Marmont became a hotel. Under new ownership, the property finally got traction when its apartments were rented to short-term lodgers. Leases fizzled and, two years later, Horowitz sold his concrete-and-steel bauble. Eight months after the Chateau welcomed its first tenants, the stock market crashed. It’s a miracle the place even survived infancy. It remains a pivotal Hollywood institution, one forever rooted in a pivotal Hollywood moment-the transition from silent films to talkies, from the raining-money 1920s to the breadline 1930s. The Chateau turns 90 this month, having opened its big wooden doors for business on February 1, 1929. Along with the Garden of Allah, the Chateau Marmont turned that faceless frontier into what would become the Sunset Strip. Horowitz toyed with names: Chateau Sunset? Chateau Hollywood? He went with Chateau Marmont. Promising Park Avenue-style discretion and privacy, it would be a sanctuary for New Yorkers moving West and for movie machers desiring East Coast polish. His California castle-“distinctively furnished and decorated,” as the early ad copy put it-would have state-of-the-art kitchens and bathrooms. Here, on the north side of Sunset, he would build a brawny, earthquake-proof, seven-story, Manhattan-worthy apartment house in a fairy-tale French Gothic style: thick, buff-colored walls, spiky turrets, steep roofs, arched windows, raftered ceilings, and a vaulted colonnade, with the two flanks of the building folding in upon a grassy courtyard, all adding up to a veritable fortress of luxury, taste, and fantasy. One day in November of 1926, the story goes, he rolled up to the unpromising site in a town car, pulled out a snapshot he’d taken in the Loire Valley of the Château d’Amboise (where Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France shacked up in the 16th century), and, in a title-card moment from a silent movie, shouted: “ YES.” Where this unpaved road met Marmont Lane, catty-corner to an oasis-like complex of villas in mid-construction called the Garden of Allah, the attorney and developer Fred Horowitz became mesmerized by a barren hillside. Winding through it was a forlorn trail with a presumptuous name: Sunset Boulevard. In the late 1920s, as Hollywood was booming and Beverly Hills was sprouting a bumper crop of movie-colony mansions, the stretch between them was little more than sagebrush and scrub.
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