Is Sunset Boulevard Actually Back? Ask Santa Monica Boulevard Instead.
Sunset Boulevard reopened on July 24. If you live here, you already know that. What you may not know is that the reopening is temporary, and that the more interesting story about where West Hollywood is investing in itself right now isn't happening on Sunset at all.
For eight days in mid-July, a 36-inch LADWP water transmission trunk line broke beneath Sunset Boulevard near Holloway Drive, closing one of the most commercially dense blocks in the city while crews worked around the clock to weld, repressurize, and disinfect a new section of pipe. Businesses along the closure went more than a week without normal bookings or foot traffic. Some had no physical damage at all and still lost real income, which is why Laura Biery, the city's Director of Economic Development, and Jacob Shaw, interim president and CEO of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, spent the closure going door to door connecting affected businesses to LADWP's claims process rather than waiting for anyone to ask. When the street reopened, Mayor John Heilman thanked the crews and residents who got through it, adding that "we still have a lot to do to help our residents and businesses recover." That's the part worth sitting with. The paving on Sunset right now is explicitly temporary. LADWP still has to come back for permanent repaving and repairs to a bus pad and adjoining sidewalk, on a timeline the city hasn't set yet.
So the street is open. It isn't finished. And while everyone was watching a hole in the ground, the more telling development was happening two blocks south, on Santa Monica Boulevard, in a building most people drive past without a second look.
At 8445 Santa Monica Boulevard sits a structure built in 1942 for Ritts Company Furniture, a business run by the parents of photographer Herb Ritts. It later became office space for the dot-com-era Hollywood Stock Exchange, then sat as creative office space for the better part of a decade. Dean McKillen and Phil Howard, the team behind Laurel Hardware on Santa Monica Boulevard and Ysabel a few blocks south, bought the site in the late 2010s and spent years on it before finally opening Laurel Supply there on May 8.
That timeline matters. This wasn't a pop-up chasing a moment. It was a multi-year renovation of a building with an actual working past in the neighborhood, reopened by operators who already have two addresses residents know how to walk to. That's a different kind of investment than what's happening a few minutes north.
On March 16, SUSHISAMBA debuted at 639 N. La Peer Drive in the West Hollywood Design District, its first United States opening in more than a decade after years running only in London, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. The space is roughly 11,000 square feet on a rooftop with a retractable ceiling, a long marble bar, an open sushi kitchen, and private dining reached by its own dedicated elevator.
A retractable roof and a dedicated private-dining elevator aren't features you build for people who live four blocks away and want a Tuesday dinner. They're infrastructure for a destination, the kind of address that exists to be someone's first stop off a plane rather than someone's regular Thursday. The same logic shows up at the Parisian all-day café Très LA, tucked inside the Pacific Design Center, a building most West Hollywood residents pass on their way to somewhere else rather than walk into on purpose.
Keep heading toward Sunset and the pattern holds. Round 1 Delicious has signed a 19,300-square-foot lease at The Now, the mixed-use building at Sunset and La Cienega, for a Japanese food hall concept reportedly operating under the name Sora. The plan is eight separate restaurant stalls, including Tokyo-based Tempura Takiya and Sushikoma, most opening in the United States for the first time, spanning the building's first and second floors with no confirmed opening date yet.
A few blocks up, the h.wood Group, the team behind Delilah and The Nice Guy, announced Little Luck for 9229 W. Sunset, taking over the space that used to house their nightlife venue Bootsy Bellows. The concept is an elevated Japanese restaurant with an announced target of late July, though as of this writing an opening date still hasn't been confirmed and the space remains in build-out.
Neither of these venues can serve you dinner tonight. Both are explicitly designed around global firsts and industry buzz rather than solving what a resident actually needs on a Tuesday, which is somewhere to eat that isn't sold out three weeks out or built around a reservation system tuned for out-of-towners.
Dine LA Restaurant Week runs August 14 through 28 this year, and the city's own promotional list for West Hollywood leads with names like Ardor at The West and The Roof at The West Hollywood EDITION. Notice what isn't on that list: Laurel Supply, SUSHISAMBA, Little Luck, Sora. Some of that is simple mechanics. Round 1 Delicious and Little Luck aren't open yet, so they structurally can't participate in a program built around existing prix-fixe menus. But it also means that if you're trying to use Restaurant Week as your test drive for what's new in the neighborhood, you're going to come up short. Restaurant Week rewards places old enough to have a menu worth discounting. The newest arrivals, the ones getting the press, are mostly too new or too destination-oriented to show up on that list at all.
If you want to actually eat somewhere new this month without competing with a first-in-America opening crowd, Laurel Supply, open since May and already settled into its rhythm, is the better bet of the group.
Every Monday, rain or shine, the Helen Albert Certified Farmers' Market sets up in Plummer Park's north parking lot at 1200 N. Vista Street, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., organic produce and fresh flowers and baked goods, the same as it's run for years. It didn't close for the water main break. It isn't waiting on a rooftop build-out. It doesn't care whether Sunset's paving is temporary or permanent.
That's worth noticing precisely because everything else covered here is in motion. Two corridors are being rebuilt according to two different ideas of who West Hollywood is for: one betting on residents who already know the operators' other spots, one betting on a global audience that flies in for a first opening night. The farmers market isn't making either bet. It's just there, which is its own kind of answer to the question of what actually marks a neighborhood as lived-in while the rest of it competes for attention.
Sunset Boulevard being open again doesn't mean the Strip is back to normal, because normal was never quite the goal of what's opening there. If you want to know whether West Hollywood feels like your neighborhood again after a rough July, Santa Monica Boulevard is answering that question a lot more directly than the Strip is.
If a conversation about this market ever moves from where to eat tonight to something more permanent, Nancy Ellin Realty Group has spent years reading West Hollywood at exactly this level of detail. Reach out to request a private consultation when you're ready.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Whether you are relocating or an LA native, Nancy's knowledge, expertise and relationships will help buy or sell your home in Beverly Hills or Bel Air. Her full service approach, hand holding every step of the process while maintaining the highest level of attention to detail.