Hotel Wing to Reopen in ‘Rehearsal’ : Beverly Wilshire Employees Will Occupy Rooms

After more than a year of being closed, gutted and rebuilt, the Beverly Wilshire’s 60-year-old wing facing Wilshire Boulevard will reopen this week to some very special guests: the hotel’s own staff.

From the lowest paid, the maids, to the highest salaried, the general manager, employees of the Beverly Hills landmark will participate in the Be-a-Guest program.

It will be held from Friday through Dec. 21 so employees can sample and refine services before the building is reopened to the public at the end of this month. The refurbished Wilshire Wing’s official opening is planned for Feb. 11.

Employees to Be Pampered

Then there will be 800 on the staff, which now numbers 475. They have been servicing the 235 overnight accommodations in the hotel’s newer Beverly Wing.

Every cook, engineer and secretary who works for the hotel will stay overnight, starting this week, in a room or suite that will later cost $275-$750 a night.

Each worker will get a shoe shine, send out clothes for same-day dry cleaning, and dine, either in the hotel’s new dining room or in the guest quarters, where each course will be served by a waiter and a personal butler, actually stewards, who will man each of the nine floors 24 hours a day and answer service buttons located in every guest-room.

It will be fine living in a sumptuous setting, which was difficult to imagine for those on a quick, private tour taken a week ago. Glenn Texeira, principal of Project Associates--in charge of interior design, led the tour through undecorated areas under tarpaulin-covered fixtures.

Entry Doors Installed

Most of the major construction, however, was complete. The wing’s 248 small rooms had been turned into 148 large ones, or suites, and the lobby, facing Wilshire, was tripled in size--its marble floor cut and assembled in Italy and large ceiling decoration cast in plaster in Washington, D.C.

Large entry doors, off Wilshire, and a chandelier in the lobby were restored; the 1926 elevator doors nearby were refinished, and the rear of the building was reconfigured into an open-looking bar, previous site of the El Padrino restaurant, and dining room, formerly the Cafe of the Pink Turtle.

“We tripled our kitchen size, so we have a very happy chef,” Victoria Yust, a spokeswoman for the hotel, said.

Still, there was much to do.

In transit and commissioned for various public areas were six 10-by-5-foot French garden scenes by an artist who restores paintings at the Louvre, two 10-by-6-foot Dutch paintings, and some floral marquetry, manufactured in Paris.

Furnishings were still being installed in the guest rooms, which cost about $200,000 each to build and decorate, and in the rest of the building, expected to run $45 million in all.

Scaffolding was still up, and the dust, what dust there was for such a clean operation, was still settling.

Yust was, nonetheless, reassuring:

It would all be “in working order” in time for a press preview Wednesday, she said, except for the $2,500-a-night Presidential Suite; The Cafe, on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive, where such American favorites as ice cream sodas, will be dished up from 6 a.m. to midnight, and the Lobby Lounge, just off the front lobby, where afternoon tea, cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and late-night snacks will be the fare, beginning in February or March.

The front lobby is the one facing Wilshire. The hotel’s flamboyant previous owner, the late Hernando Courtright, had put the lobby in the rear, after building the 12-story Beverly Wing behind the Wilshire Wing in 1971.

As part of the $60-million renovation, that building will be updated next year floor by floor with no gutting and none of the eight private apartments touched, said Yust. Texeira said that the Beverly Wing, separated from the Wilshire Wing by a 40-foot-wide motor court and a second-story bridge, may undergo major changes starting in five years.

In Charge of Decor

Hong Kong-based Regent International Hotels bought the two-building complex in 1985 for $125 million. Then Regent hired Gruen Associates as the architect and Peck/Jones as the contractor. Wilfred Wagner, a Regent vice president, is project director, and Betty Garber, an associate of Texeira’s, is in charge of decor and accessories.

“We first put pencil to paper on this in May, 1986,” Texeira recalled, “so we’ve been at it now for 2 1/2 years. For such a major, major renovation, that isn’t long.”

Actor Warren Beatty Lived in Hotel Suite for 10 Years

Warren Beatty slept here. And for $500 a night, you can too!

Here is one of the refurbished suites at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

The handsome actor lived there for about 10 years. He moved about 1983, when he relocated to New York. He maintains a couple of homes in the Los Angeles area now.

In the decade or so that he lived at the hotel, he occupied what is known today as the Veranda Suite, which has arched windows as it did in 1928 but didn’t when Beatty lived there, and a sun deck with a magnificent view.

It should have a view: The one-bedroom suite is reached by private stairs and is on its own floor, the 10th, the upper-most portion of the Wilshire Wing.