With a diversified tenant base, whale's not just blue anymore.

WEST Hollywood's outsized, multihued Pacific Design Center is in the process of becoming a bit busier.

Over the next four months, an additional 1,000 workers will arrive in the center's 450,000-square-foot Green Building, as public relations and advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group of Cos. consolidates its West Coast headquarters.

With Interpublic striking a 12-year, $40 million deal earlier this year for 145,000 square feet, occupancy in the Green Building--less than half full for 15 years--vaulted to more than 95 percent.

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Along with the office users, New York-based Charlie Palmer Group is opening Lounge@Astra, an 80-seat bistro on the bottom floor of the Blue Building this month and reconfiguring its white-tablecloth ASTRA West to a cafeteria-style venue.

The center's owner, New York-based Cohen Bros. Realty Corp., has begun construction on a gazebo-shaped cafe that will serve lunch outside the Melrose Avenue entrance to the Blue Building.

Outside, surrounding the cafe, mobile kiosks will house a newsstand, a florist and some other smaller shops.

"It's always been the plan to diversify the tenant base," said Charles Steven Cohen, president of Cohen Bros. "We always felt if we brought in the right mix of uses the whole thing would click."

But that's been challenging over the years, with the project's imposing facades and a lingering reputation as a white (or green or blue) elephant. "They still have their work cut out for them," said Charles Feuilherade, who works in the home furnishing showroom of Janus et Cie.

"Before, this place was only for designers but now they want to open it up to everyone," he said, leafing through a copy of Hamptons magazine on a recent slow Friday afternoon. "But when I tell my friends where I work they still ask if they're allowed to come in."

Cohen said the renovations were meant to make the buildings more accessible to the public. Space has been rented out for events and there are art exhibits in the center's corridors.

"It's all about turning pedestrian traffic into customers and converting them," he said.

The design center was developed on a 16-acre site that was once a switching station for Pacific Electric trains running between downtown and Santa Monica along Santa Monica Boulevard. It was intended to be the West Coast's largest wholesale merchandise mart for home furnishings and fabrics.

When the rail system was dismantled in the late 1950s, Southern Pacific Railway took possession of the site. For more than a decade, it sat fallow until Catellus Development Corp., a division of the railroad, established a partnership with Laguna Niguel-based Birtcher Real Estate Ltd. for the project.

Designed by famed architect Cesar Pelli as a three-building complex of studios that would stand out with bold colors, the Green Building was constructed after the 750,000-square-foot Blue Building filled up quickly (even if a Los Angeles Times architecture critic once described it as a whale hiding in a back yard).

A slump in the 1990s caused the project to fall behind on its payments to lender TIAACREF, which took the properly and sold it to a partnership of Cohen Bros. and Cheslock-Bakker Associates for $157 million in 1999.

Before Cohen bought out Cheslock-Bakker for an undisclosed sum in 2002, the partnership sunk $30 million into renovations.

Much of that was spent on the Green Building, where windows and elevators were added to change the use to offices from design studios. Money was also spent upgrading the Blue Building, where a showroom was converted into a fitness center for tenants.

Only now, with the Green and Blue buildings at close to 90 percent occupancy, is Cohen planning for a third, 400,000-square-foot, $100 million Red Building, as originally envisioned by Pelli. The building has been approved by the West Hollywood City Council.

Cohen said he was putting together sales materials to market the property to prospective tenants, with construction to start in spring 2005.

Before construction begins, Cohen said he would like to have a third of the Red Building pre-leased. "But I don't expect that to take long at all," he said. "We've created a critical mass."