How One Developer Created L.A.’s Newest Luxury Retail Destination Called the Sycamore District
Sprawling Los Angeles has a history of destination streets evolving into new retail thoroughfares. Abbot Kinney Boulevard and Melrose Place are among them. Now North Sycamore is poised to be the next.
At first glance, the entire 900 block looks like a Parisian neighborhood and, indeed, many of the tenants have a French connection. The trendy block is plopped down in the middle of an industrial area bracketed by a cement factory to the north and a 99 Cents Only store to the south and sits one block east of La Brea Avenue, a well-traveled commercial thoroughfare known for its plethora of pocket strip malls.
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This new luxury retail destination anchored by Just One Eye, which carries collections from The Row, Fear of God and Giorgio Armani, is attracting several new cutting-edge stores.
Officine Générale just opened its doors at 927 North Sycamore Avenue, and next door, Nili Lotan is getting ready to debut her first Los Angeles store. French-style bakery Tartine Sycamore is nearby, along with the popular restaurant Gigi’s Hollywood, the Heimat private club and nearby Jeffrey Deitch gallery, making the stretch a place to park and spend a few hours.
All this is no accident. Several years ago, the people behind the CIM Group, a major L.A. landlord and developer, started snapping up property to rebuild a neighborhood that was populated by nearly 100-year-old warehouses and newer structures that serviced Hollywood’s moviemakers and music industry.
One of the first tenants of the Sycamore District, as it is being called, was Deitch. The former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles said he was approached about seven years ago by Shaul Kuba, the cofounder of the CIM Group, who was looking for an art gallery tenant to help establish the area as a cultural destination.
Deitch said he was shown an old CIM Group-owned warehouse building a block over from Sycamore Avenue on Orange Drive that had been used to store lighting equipment rented out to the film industry. The interior was a mess. “Shaul showed me the building that he was thinking of for an art gallery, and I immediately said that I would take it, not even asking about the rent,” Deitch wrote in an email.
The art gallerist then brought in L.A. architect Frank Gehry to survey the space. “Frank recommended demolishing the entire interior and designed a brilliant renovation that emphasized the scale of the space and natural light,” noted Deitch, who has one other Los Angeles art gallery and a third in New York.
The Jeffrey Deitch gallery opened in September 2018 with an exhibition with Ai Weiwei and has featured Judy Chicago, Urs Fischer and the current Refik Anadol show.
Paola Russo, who is originally from France, was another pioneer. Thirteen years ago, she opened Just One Eye, a concept retail store and art gallery, when there was literally nothing on the street except industrial buildings. Originally, her venture was in a 5,000-square-foot space in the basement of the Art Deco Howard Hughes building, which sits at the corner of Sycamore Avenue and Romaine Street. (From 1930 to 1976, it was the headquarters for the eccentric Hollywood mogul. The building, now mostly vacant, was purchased last year by the Onni Group for $40 million.)
“The area was just a destination at the beginning with little foot traffic,” Russo recalled. “We were doing only appointments, and little by little we became a store.”
Then Russo noticed the development on Sycamore Avenue and wanted to be part of it. “I was in a smaller space with not that many windows,” she said. “Then the area started to grow, and I wanted to grow with it.”
She looked at what had once been an old factory on Sycamore Avenue and took 13,000 square feet for her store and another 17,000 square feet for offices, storage, a hair salon and event space. There is a private entrance in the back for VIPs.
After two years of construction, Just One Eye relocated in October 2019, months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The store survived the worst and now carries a high-end array of fashion labels, including Dries Van Noten, Khaite, Prada, Gabriela Hearst, Giambattista Valli and God’s True Cashmere, cofounded by actor Brad Pitt and friend Sat Hari. It also sells furniture, jewelry, vintage and contemporary art as well as Cartier jewelry.
The store has a mix of celebrity clients, (Jennifer Coolidge of “White Lotus” drops by occasionally) and fashion trend seekers. “We have a diverse clientele,” said Renato Alagao, the store’s brand partnerships director. “We have the starving artist looking for a T-shirt who wants to discover something different. We have an established client and a personal shopper-driven client. We get a lot of stylists who come in.”
Celebrity comings and goings abound on the block. Across the street from Just One Eye, in a new building constructed by the CIM Group, are the L.A. offices for Roc Nation, the music industry company founded by rapper and record producer Jay-Z. One block away, Beyoncé has her own studio in a dark-colored Art Deco structure, and SiriusXM occupies a CIM Group building where it is not unusual to see celebrities arriving in chauffeur-driven vehicles for a radio interview or to do a podcast.
On the ground floor of the SiriusXM building, Motor Cars L.A., a showroom for preowned luxury cars such as Bentleys and Rolls Royces, recently opened.
The music industry seems to be rapidly discovering the neighborhood. Sony Music Publishing said it would be moving from Culver City to a nearby location at 1024 North Orange Drive. The 48,571-square-foot building constructed in 1929 is owned by Occidental Entertainment Group Holdings.
The music and artistic vibes are pulling in new retailers. Officine Générale, based in Paris, opened its second L.A. location on March 25 in a 1,300-square-foot store at 927 North Sycamore Avenue, which sits next door to the luxury eyewear brand Jacques Marie Mage, in a building owned by the CIM Group. “My first visit to the neighborhood was love at first sight,” said the brand’s founder Pierre Mahéo, who was alerted by Paola Russo about the unique block. “The architecture, the vibe of the area was everything I was looking for.
Designer Nili Lotan is getting ready to open her first L.A. location on April 19 on the other side of Officine Générale. She will have a 1,200-square-foot space that will reflect the gallery mood of her other stores. Lohan said she was scouting retail locations when someone told her about Sycamore Avenue. “When I walked there, it seemed to be so far off from everything else in Los Angeles,” she said. “Everything was so cool. It was a little bit industrial but chic at the same time.”
Coupled with the luxury stores is a constellation of other retailers, including the Supervinyl record store and the Lizzie Mandler fine jewelry outpost.
The retail rents for the area are on par with other trendy retail neighborhoods. While CIM Group, which basically controls most of the retail property here, doesn’t discuss rent prices, real estate brokers estimate that lease rates range from $72 to $120 per square foot per annum. That is higher than the $70 to $80 a square foot rents in the mid-section of Melrose Avenue.
Complementing the retail is Sightglass Coffee and Mr. T Los Angeles, which like Gigi’s also has French cuisine on its menu.
Added to all this is a mix of luxury service-industry businesses such as Clover, a general and cosmetic dentist office; Pause Studio, which offers flotation therapy and LED light therapy, and Formula Fig, an aesthetic salon that will erase forehead wrinkles with Botox and plump up the skin with fillers.
“This is an area that was heavily developed by the CIM Group. Because they had control of the buildings, they were able to do an amazing job of curating and taking this street into the future in a really unique way,” said Jaysen Chiaramonte, who works for real estate brokerage Kennedy Wilson and is one of the leasing agents for the Howard Hughes building. “It is this kind of holistic block where you can live your life and do your shopping. And the 99 Cents Only store is surviving.”
The unusual path to this block started more than a decade ago when Shaul Kuba would cut through the neighborhood on his way home from his office, located at the time in Hollywood. All he saw at night were industrial buildings and not much foot traffic.
CIM Group, which has owned such high-end developments as the Hollywood & Highland shopping center, before it was sold a few years ago, started buying buildings in the Sycamore Avenue area about 10 years ago and slowly acquired an eclectic assortment. Many of those old structures were owned by Mole-Richardson Co., which manufactured lighting for the movie and TV industry. They moved to Sylmar, California.
Other buildings were owned by Occidental Entertainment Group Holdings, a commercial real estate developer founded by Albert Sweet, who passed away last year. His company had 160,000 square feet of soundstage and production space spread across the L.A. area.
The neighborhood piqued Kuba’s interest as a potential redevelopment project because of the assortment of architecturally distinctive quality buildings from the 1920s through the 1950s that were still standing. Surface parking lots could be repurposed with new structures. “It was literally a stone’s throw from West Hollywood and Hollywood,” Kuba said, sitting inside Tartine Sycamore sipping a coffee. “I thought it could be a really cool kind of industrial, creative office, retail neighborhood.”
The vision was to focus on the local design and art community as well as highlight fashion and food talent without making this area a retail high street destination. At the same time, it was essential to have offices with updated amenities in newly constructed projects or updated buildings.
The original dream to redevelop this one block of Sycamore Avenue is almost done. But more redevelopment is on the way. Last year, CIM Group bought the 1.6-acre property that houses the 60-year-old Cemex cement factory, which is still operating but will be relocating. CIM Group also owns two other structures north of the cement factory. Eventually, it is anticipated this area may include a full-service hotel, an apartment complex and an office building.
Around the corner from Sycamore, going east, CIM Group plans this fall to add ground-floor retail tenants to an existing office building it owns at 7007 Romaine Street. The new retailers could be another mix of art galleries and spaces for high-end home and lifestyle brands.
This kind of cohesive, neighborhood environment is what Kuba and his partners like to develop. “I enjoy doing projects I think will be good for the community and people will enjoy,” Kuba said. “To me this is not about building a big shopping center or a mixed-use project. This is more about adding little pieces, like you are creating a little artwork.”
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