Carnation Co. building faces Art Deco renovation.

Carnation Co. building faces Art Deco renovation

The stark-white, Miracle Mile-district tower that has served as the Carnation Co.'s national headquarters since 1948 will be gutted in October and transformed into a $50 million Art Deco-style highrise, the Business Journal has learned.

Barker-Patrinely Group Inc., which bought the property last year from Carnation for an undisclosed price, will strip the existing 135,000-square-foot building down to its poured-concrete frame, and will demolish the adjacent 15,000-square-foot Carnation Coffee Shop.

In its place will rise an Art Deco-style structure roughly twice the size of the existing nine-story office building.

The new structure will also be nine stories tall, but will contain 179,000 square feet of office space and a seven-level parking structure.

Most of the office space will be contained within the frame of the existing building. But attached to that existing frame, where the coffee shop and adjoining surface parking lot now sit, will be an added wing with four floors of office space atop a seven-level parking structure. The top four floors will extend all the way across the entire length of the building.

The underlying seven-level parking structure will be attached to the existing structure's first five floors of office space. Since parking structure ceiling heights are lower than office ceilings, the seven levels of parking will parallel the five stories of office space.

A "mock" facade will be placed on the incorporated parking structure to make the entire structure look like one continuous nine-story office building.

Barker-Patrinely expects to begin demolition on its Miracle Mile site in October, just after Carnation bails out of the Miracle Mile landmark for its new headquaters building in Glendale.

The new Art Deco building, which was designed by the architectural firm Dworsky Associates, is scheduled for completion in the fall of 1991.

The project, called the 5055 Wilshire Building, is a joint development between Barker-Patrinely and USAA, the nation's 13th largest insurance company.

Project manager Geoffrey Sears said an Art Deco style was decided upon to make the building consistent with Miracle Mile's other distinctive architecture.

"This part of Wilshire (Boulevard) contains some of L.A.'s best examples of Art Deco architecture, most of which were built during the 1930s when Art Deco was in vogue," Sears said. "But by the time the Carnation Building was built, they (architects) had stopped using all this wonderful detail and had switched to the very-plain-looking modern style."

The plain, stark-white plaster skin of Carnation's existing building will be replaced with a colorful new skin comprised of granite, ceramic tile and plaster on Barker-Patrinely's Art Deco building.

The building will also contain all new electrical, mechanical, heating, air conditioning, and plumbing systems.

One unusual aspect of the new building will be operable windows.

"We felt that offering windows that opened and closed provided tenants an attractive alternative to paying for afterhours heating and cooling for people who work nights and weekends," Sears said. "Besides, sometimes people just want to open their windows."

Sears said his firm is already negotiating with prospective tenants for its new building. Monthly asking rates range from $2.20 to $2.50 a square foot, compared with the $3 asking rates at some new buildings in nearby Beverly Hills, Sears reported.

Separately, Barker-Patrinely is developing another, much larger project in downtown Los Angeles - the $280 million First Street North project.

That project tentatively involves the construction two new office buildings, with a combined 700,000 square feet of space, a 400-room hotel, a large retail component, and hundreds of new housing units.

PHOTO : The Carnation Building: Will be given granite, ceramic tile and plaster exterior