Wilshire Corridor Condos for Sale

The corridor's oldest survivor is modest: Wilshire Westwood Terrace, a five-story, nineteen-unit building of 1955 that still stands mid-corridor. The tower era arrived three years later. Wilshire Terrace, designed by Victor Gruen Associates with Edgardo Contini as partner in charge and developed by Tishman Realty and Construction, opened in 1958 as a housing cooperative; the Los Angeles Conservancy records it as the first residential tower on this stretch and the first building permitted after Los Angeles lifted its thirteen-story height limit, and it won a Progressive Architecture Design Award the year it opened. The Churchill followed in 1961 and the Marie Antoinette in 1962, and in 1963 the Wilshire Regent — built, like the Terrace, as a co-op before its later conversion — arrived at roughly 303 feet, then the tallest building in the area.

The condominium format remade the boulevard through the 1970s: the matched Wilshire Selby towers in 1972, The Westholme in 1976, the Wilshire Marquis in 1978, The Longford in 1979. Then the crescendo — The Grand, The Westford and Wilshire Manning in 1980, Wilshire Thayer in 1981, and a remarkable class of 1982 that included Ten Five Sixty, The Mirabella, The Diplomat, The Regency Wilshire and Wilshire House. The Wilshire-Westwood Scenic Corridor Specific Plan, in force from early 1981, capped density and held new buildings to seventy-five feet of east-west width, which is why the later towers rise slender. The decade closed formally, with Park Wilshire, Blair House and the arch-crowned Dorchester all completed in 1989, La Tour's green glass following in 1990 and The Wilshire's limestone-and-copper tiers in 1991.

A quieter decade followed before the luxury generation arrived. The Remington and the boutique Venezia both completed in 2001; The Californian, designed by Nadel Architects for Fifield Companies, followed in 2005-06 in integrally colored precast concrete with an Art Deco cast; and The Carlyle, by KMD Architects for Elad, delivered its limestone-clad crescent around 2009-10 — described by one of its own subcontractors as the last high-rise permitted on this stretch. The coda came in 2018, when Gruen Associates, the firm behind the 1958 Wilshire Terrace, completed The Liddel, a seven-story mid-rise of fifty-six residences at 10777 Wilshire. Sixty years separate the corridor's first tower from its newest building, and the same firm's name is on both.

The first generation built in the slab-and-balcony language of postwar Los Angeles. Gruen's Wilshire Terrace staggered its balconies so every home received a two-story outdoor patio roughly seventeen by eighteen feet — a mid-century attempt to carry the single-family California lifestyle into a tower — and it remains the corridor's architectural benchmark. Leon Glucksman's Wilshire Regent of 1963 announced the scale to come at twenty-three stories. These early buildings run denser than what followed, up to nine homes per floor, with floor-to-ceiling window bands doing the work that amenity decks would do later. The outlier is Wilshire Thayer of 1981, clad in red brick — described on listing sites as one of only two brick buildings on the corridor — and often compared to New York apartment houses.

The specific plan reshaped the tower form after 1981. Its seventy-five-foot east-west width cap forced slender floor plates, so the boom-era buildings carry few homes per floor and most residences take light on two sides. Maxwell Starkman's Mirabella of 1982 faceted its facade to angle every home toward the view; the Dorchester of 1989, by Vitro Architects with Starkman's firm, crowned itself with multi-story arches; Blair House, credited on broker sites to Abraham Shapiro, brought limestone-toned cladding with copper accents the same year; and The Wilshire of 1991 — its design generally attributed to Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz, though the attribution rests on listing sources — closed the boom with a tiered, Deco-derived silhouette in limestone and copper behind a fountain motor court.

The 2000s generation builds differently and lives differently. The Californian wears roughly 95,000 square feet of integrally colored precast concrete with marble and granite cast into the panels, quoting a 1930s idiom in a 2006 building; The Carlyle's crescent is enclosed in precast clad partly in Egyptian limestone. Both organize around private elevator entry — The Carlyle gives every residence a keyless private landing, which strips the internal corridor from the floor plate entirely, and The Remington and The Wilshire offer direct elevator arrival as well. The Liddel of 2018 changes register altogether: a Gruen Associates mid-rise with interiors by Jamie Bush + Co., trading marble formality for natural materials across fifty-six homes.

Ownership form is the first question on the corridor, before floor or view. Most buildings are conventional condominiums — deeded title, an HOA, ordinary financing. Wilshire Terrace is the exception that defines the category: a housing cooperative, one of very few in California, where buyers purchase shares in the corporation, take a proprietary lease, face board approval and have historically leaned on cash; leasing is barred, which keeps the house owner-occupied and turnover low. The Wilshire Regent began as a co-op and converted decades ago. A small number of corridor buildings also sit on underlying ground leases, which lowers purchase prices but changes financing and long-term value; tenure should be confirmed in the title report before any offer is written.

Within a building, value moves on floor, line and light. South-facing homes look over Century City to the ocean on clear days; north lines take the Bel-Air hills and, at the eastern end, the country club's fairways. Between buildings, generation matters as much as height: the 1960s towers carry the corridor's smallest and most attainable homes, the 1980s wall its widest floor plans per dollar, and the 2000s buildings its private elevators and current systems. Renovation condition often moves price more than elevation does. And headline dues are not comparable across the street — older master-metered buildings frequently fold utilities, sometimes even earthquake insurance, into the monthly charge, while newer towers bill owners directly, so the number means little until you know what it buys.

Buy the building first, then the home. The diligence list is consistent: tenure, whether fee simple, co-op or ground lease; the reserve study, which California law requires at least every three years; seismic status, since concrete towers permitted before January 1977 fall within the city's non-ductile concrete evaluation program while later buildings do not; rental rules, where state law now floors any cap at twenty-five percent of units; and the pet and renovation rules that live in the CC&Rs rather than online. Inventory in the boutique buildings is genuinely scarce — a year can pass between listings at some addresses — which is why serious corridor buyers work with representation that hears about openings before they reach the MLS.