Beverly Wilshire Hotel

About this property

The Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, commonly known as the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, is a historic, luxury hotel in Beverly Hills, California, located at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive. It was completed in 1928 and has been used as a shooting location for films and television series. The Beverly-Wilshire Apartment Hotel opened on January 1, 1928. It was constructed by real estate developer Walter G. McCarty on the site of the former Beverly Hills Speedway. At the time, the city had fewer than 18,000 residents. The E-shaped structure was built of Tuscan stone and Carrara marble in the Italian Renaissance style. It was soon after renamed The Beverly Wilshire Hotel. McCarty sold the hotel on November 1, 1944 for $2.25 million to Arnold Kirkeby, who made it part of his Kirkeby Hotels chain. Between 1946 and 1957, the hotel was renovated in stages, to designs by noted African American architect Paul Revere Williams. A ballroom was added to accommodate the popular big bands of the day. An Olympic-sized swimming pool was built and championship tennis courts were added, with tennis champion Pancho Gonzalez as tennis director. Kirkeby sold the hotel in 1955 to Evelyn Sharp. She sold the hotel in 1961 to William Zeckendorf's Webb and Knapp firm, along with the Gotham Hotel and the Stanhope Hotel in New York for $25 million. Later that same year, the hotel was sold again to a group of investors headed by Hernando Courtright, a Zeckendorf executive who had been in charge of the redevelopment of the Twentieth Century-Fox backlot as Century City. The hotel was rebranded as Hernando Courtright's Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Courtright added a new tower wing in 1971, on the site of the old swimming pool, doubling the size of the hotel. In 1985, just months before his death, Courtright sold the hotel for $125 million to Hong Kong-based Regent International Hotels, which renamed it The Regent Beverly Wilshire. In 1986, Regent International Hotels was bought by EIE, part of the business empire of flamboyant Japanese billionaire developer Harunori Takahashi. Regent gutted and renovated the historic Wilshire Wing in 1988 at a cost of $100 million, to designs by Gruen Associates. The newer Beverly Wing in the rear was renovated in 1989 for a further $60 million. In 1992, EIE sold Regent International Hotels to Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and the hotel was renamed The Regent Beverly Wilshire, a Four Seasons Hotel, though its ownership remained with EIE subsidiary Hotel Investment Corp. In February 1996, Hotel Investment Corp sold the hotel for $100 million to BW Hotel LLC, a Hong Hong consortium of eight companies, led by Lai Sun. In 2006, the hotel was again renamed following a renovation, dropping the Regent affiliation and becoming Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel. In January 2025, Four Seasons and BW Hotel LLC, owner of Beverly Wilshire, jointly announced that Four Seasons would conclude management of the hotel at the end of the term of its management agreement in December 2025, after which date the hotel would operate independently as The Beverly Wilshire. However, as of March 2026, it remains part of the Four Seasons chain.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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