Hidden Hallways

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — They’re currently redoing the hallways in Premiere Towers, where I’ve lived for the last two and a half years. Premiere was converted to condos in the 1980s with CRA involvement, and to date has very much looked like how you made apartments in the 1980s. The rehab is very welcomed. We’re going from carpeted floors and a nice pink/peach color scheme to more modern granite tiles and simple, clean colors.

In the process of redoing the floors, though, they’ve exposed the fact that a complete mishmash of tiles runs around the building. Scoping out just half of my floor I noticed four different styles of tile.

Just over a year ago I linked to a story about restoring the Douglas Building. There they found the fir and tile floors under linoleum and put painstaking work into restoring that original flooring. Downtown icon Hal Bastian has a unit in the Douglas and the thing I like most about it is the amazing wood floor with a swath of tile running across the middle of the room.

For Premiere that sort of restoration probably didn’t make sense. There’s no coherence to the tile layout and there are large gaps with none, but it’s fascinating to see history that’s been buried under floors.