Granville Towers

About the Building

French Revival, Designated and Intact

Granville Towers stands at 1424 North Crescent Heights Boulevard, a block below the Sunset Strip, and has anchored this corner since roughly 1930 — published accounts date completion anywhere from 1928 to 1930. Architect Leland A. Bryant, working with Samuel Coine, designed it in the French Revival manner, and early records carry both the Granville and Voltaire names. Seven residential storeys hold about forty condominiums, making it one of West Hollywood's few pre-war towers of this scale, and its steep rooflines remain a recognizable silhouette along Crescent Heights.

Bryant was the specialist in romantic apartment towers of the late 1920s, and the Granville shows the type at full strength: a U-shaped plan wrapped around a garden courtyard, masonry walls rising to a steep roof whose ridge reaches roughly one hundred feet, and interiors planned in an era of formal entries and separate kitchens. The same office produced La Fontaine and other notable apartment houses nearby, per building histories. A 1935 fire damaged the building early in its life; it was repaired and has operated continuously since, later converting to condominium ownership.

The City of West Hollywood designated the building an individual cultural resource — in 2016, per published accounts — and it appears on the city's designated cultural resources list. Designation has two practical consequences. Exterior alterations, including street-visible windows, require a Certificate of Appropriateness reviewed against the Secretary of the Interior's Standards. And the property becomes eligible to apply for a Mills Act contract: the city's preservation office states that all locally designated buildings qualify to apply, though how a contract and its property-tax relief would apply to individual condominium interests is a question for city planning staff and a tax professional.

Day to day, the building runs closer to a serviced house than a typical forty-unit association. Listing and building sources describe a twenty-four-hour attended lobby, an indoor pool and spa, a fitness room, storage, and gated garage parking, with the courtyard gardens as the shared centerpiece. Residences reported on listing platforms run from about 850 to about 2,100 square feet, from one-bedrooms to combined homes, and interiors range from largely original to fully rebuilt. That staffing level is a comfort as well as a cost, and it shows up in the monthly budget.

City permit data on data.weho.org, covering roughly 2014 through early 2022, shows the pattern buyers should expect in a pre-war tower: a steady stream of unit-level remodels, full rewires with new subpanels, in-unit repipes, replacement of water-source heat-pump units that suggest a shared water loop for cooling, and an in-kind replacement of eleven window sashes in 2018. Notably, the building does not appear on West Hollywood's published survey of properties subject to its seismic retrofit ordinances. Ask the association for engineering reports, riser and roof history, and the current reserve study all the same.