"Venice Place Project" featured in The Argonaut Online
The Argonaut has a feature about the Abbot Kinney Hotel by David Hertz, which has been redesigned and renamed to better reflect its future role in the community:
Abrams has rechristened his proposal as the Venice Place Project to better elaborate its intended mix of hospitality, creative office space, retail and restaurant components among amenities such as a rooftop garden and a bicycle-sharing center. The project is centered around a 4,000-square-foot communal “Outdoor Living Room” shared by the hotel’s lobby, a new restaurant/bar, an office suite and the existing Primitivo restaurant.
“In reality, it’s more than just a hotel,” Abrams said. “Certainly the most significant [component] of the development that is coming to Abbot Kinney is the hotel, but from a lot of what we’d heard, we felt that a lot of people thought that the entire project was a hotel. But it was always intended to be a mixed-use project.”
Abrams worked with prominent Venice architect David Hertz and Culver City-based contextual builders REthink Development to design five detached buildings on nine lots and connect them through a series of walkways, a move Abrams described as the most significant alteration to the prior design.
“By separating buildings, we found that it actually fits in better with the neighborhood and sort of echoes some of the walk-street experiences that you have around Venice,” said Abrams, a Venice resident who has maintained an office above Primitivo for more than a decade.
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