Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
- Year
- 1927
- Style
- Spanish Colonial Revival
- City
- Los Angeles, CA
The Hollywood Roosevelt opened on Hollywood Boulevard on May 15, 1927, built for $2.5 million ($46.3 million in 2025) by a syndicate of movie-industry money — Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Sid Grauman — and named for Theodore Roosevelt. Its Spanish Colonial Revival design captured the boomtown confidence of Hollywood's silent-era Golden Age, and it now holds Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument status.
the building
The 1985 restoration. By the 1950s a previous owner had stripped the hotel's archways, painted over its elaborate ceilings, and coated the whole building seafoam green. Radisson bought the hotel in 1985 and spent $35 million ($105 million in 2025) working from original blueprints and historic photos to bring back the Spanish Colonial detailing, including the lobby's coffered ceiling and a new three-tiered fountain.
The Hockney mural. In 1987 David Hockney painted a million-dollar mural on the floor of the hotel's Tropicana Pool, turning the pool into a piece of poolside art as famous as the hotel itself.
the style
The Spanish Colonial Revival style — arched loggias, tile work, hand-painted ceilings — was the house style of 1920s Hollywood, evoking a romanticized California mission past for a hotel built on movie money. Much of that detailing was later covered up and only came back through the 1985 restoration, guided by the hotel's original blueprints and historic photographs.
More on Spanish Colonial Revivalsignificance
The Hollywood Roosevelt is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, financed at its founding by Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Sid Grauman, and restored in 1985 after decades of alteration.
nearby
- Petersen Building
- Hollywood Masonic Temple
- El Capitan Theatre
- Lee Drug
- Bank of America Building
- Max Factor Make-Up Salon