Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel

A corridor at the Downtown L.A. Proper is vaulted and painted to its crown with birds and leaping animals, and two tall cacti stand at its mouth in old clay jars, over a floor of pink and white stone laid like a chessboard. And that is only the corridor. Kelly Wearstler did the interiors, inside a Renaissance Revival building put up on Broadway in 1926, and she has not held back with colour: the lounge is plastered pink, and above its velvet banquette hang small abstracts and a great green and red coil of woven fibre. The building was a YWCA once, and two suites keep the evidence. The Pool Suite has the old indoor pool, 35 feet by 12, under a ceramic mural by Ben Medansky, a local artist. The Basketball Suite fills the original court, with a ceiling still high enough for the game, should anyone have packed a ball.

Recommended for grown-ups who come to Los Angeles for its downtown rather than its beaches, and mean to walk some of it: Grand Central Market and the Bradbury Building are twenty minutes on foot, the Walt Disney Concert Hall half an hour. Breakfast is downstairs at Cabrillo and runs until noon, which is generous, and Dahlia pours classic cocktails on the same floor. Families get connecting rooms but no kids club, so the roof does the entertaining: Suzanne Goin's Cara Cara, with al pastor tacos and seafood paella from the wood fire, beside a heated pool among fire pits. After dark the towers of downtown light up on every side, the one thing in view Wearstler had no say in.