Design refresh for Hollywood's Sunset + Wilcox office complex

A proposed Hollywood office complex from developers Millennium Partners and Shorenstein Properties continues to inch toward reality.

A final environmental study released by the Los Angeles Department City Planning represents another milestone for the Sunset + Wilcox development, which would replace a Staples office supply store and several smaller commercial buildings at 6450 Sunset Boulevard. The proposed development, announced in March 2020, calls for the construction of a 15-story building featuring roughly 431,000 square feet of offices above 12,386 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

Gensler is designing the proposed 275-foot-tall building, which remains similar in form, but has undergone several revisions since last seen in late 2020. Per the environmental study, the project has made changes as a result of feedback provided by the city's Urban Design Studio, including swapping out the “distinctive, softly luminous material and wood screens," in favor of solid materials alternating between frosted and clear panels. Likewise, the mass timber wrapping the upper floors of the building have been discarded and replaced by clear and frosted materials, held together by a steel frame. Tiered building heights remain unchanged, providing a reduction in scale facing Sunset Boulevard, and approximately 22,000 square feet of landscaped terrace decks for use by tenants.

Other changes to the project include a slight reduction in the amount of proposed parking from 1,291 stalls to 1,179 stalls.

According to the environmental study, construction of Sunset + Wilcox development is expected to be completed in 2026, contingent on the approval of discretionary approvals by the City of Los Angeles, including a height district change and the approval of a vesting tentative tract map.

The project joins a number of ground-up developments slated for the stretch of Sunset Boulevard between Vine Street and Highland Avenue, including the $1-billion Crossroads Hollywood complex, a proposed Art Deco hotel at Cahuenga Boulevard, and an apartment tower which would rise at the former site of Amoeba Music. Likewise, the Sunset + Wilcox complex follows a string of new office developments in Hollywood, many of which have been built by Hudson Pacific Properties and Kilroy Realty Corporation.

Millennium Partners, the developer behind Sunset + Wilcox, is also seeking to build a $1-billion skyscraper complex adjacent to the Capitol Records Building and Pantages Theatre.

• Sunset + Wilcox (Urbanize LA)