Studio City, CA

At its meeting on July 27, the Los Angeles City Planning Commission voted to green light a proposed multifamily residential development just north of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City.

The project from Goldrich Kest, slated for a Los Angeles River-adjacent property at 4260 N. Arch Drive, calls for the construction of a six-story building which would feature 129 studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments above a two-level, 145-car underground parking garage.

Lahmon Architects

Goldrich Kest filed for entitlements using density bonus incentives to permit a larger structure with more housing than the site's zoning rules would normally low. In exchange, 17 of the apartments are to be set aside as deed-restricted affordable housing at the very low-income level.

Lahmon Architects, is designing the apartment complex, which is named "The Crescent." The building would notably incorporate a new publicly accessible entrance to a future segment of the Los Angeles River bike path.

"The front façade features pleated sections that lightly touch the ground at the yard, which gives a feeling of lift and reveals a warm wood underside that welcomes visitors and residents to an inviting ground floor," reads a narrative from the Lahmon Architects website. "The tiered balconies and roof decks to the north allow residents to take advantage of the great Southern California weather and provide an ample outdoor expanse."

The project, in addition to housing, would include amenities such as a pool and spa, an outdoor kitchen, a club room, roof decks, a media room, and a business center.

Lahmon Architects

The approval by the Planning Commission for the site at 4260 N. Arch Drive is the second received by Goldrich Kest, which obtained entitlements for a smaller 106-unit development with commercial space on the property in early 2020. The developer changed directions in early 2021, submitting plans for the current site to the City of Los Angeles for review.

Goldrich Kest, best known for its developments in Marina del Rey, is also planning new housing next to the historic Hotel Green in Pasadena. That project would recreate plans for a property at 86 S. Fair Oaks Avenue which date to the early 20th century.

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Radford Studio Center, a storied movie lot in Studio City that has been home to generations of landmark television shows — including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld” — is set to get a $1-billion upgrade to expand its facilities and bring them further into the digital age.

The owners of the lot formerly known as CBS Studio Center submitted plans to Los Angeles officials Friday to revamp and enlarge the aging studio and broadcasting complex, adding as much as 1 million square feet of new soundstages, production facilities and offices.

Founded by movie comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. Current shows include “Big Brother 24” and “Physical.”

“It’s got this mystique that if you come there you’re going to make it,” said studio President Mike Klausman, who has worked on the property since he started there as a CBS page in 1971.

The Radford complex was the very studio lot that gave rise to the name Studio City. It’s had numerous incarnations, including decades as Republic Studios, home to such screen legends as Roy Rogers, John Wayne and Joan Crawford. Among Republic’s popular movies were “The Quiet Man,” “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Johnny Guitar.”

The current state of the 55-acre studio is less glamorous than its heritage would suggest, having evolved like an old city where new additions, often built on a tight budget, were layered over and around existing structures.

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“There was never really a master plan,” Klausman said. “You would never tear down anything, just add on. We had to work around what was there.”

Bungalows for writers and stars — often quaint structures from Hollywood’s Golden Age on other historic movie lots — are clusters of mobile homes delivered in the 1990s when times were lean, he said. The vast roofs of soundstages used to drain rainwater directly onto the asphalt roads below.

“You almost needed a boat to get from one studio to another,” Klausman said. “It was like a river in that place.”

The drainage issue has been fixed, and times are no longer lean as the rise of streaming has escalated demand for soundstages and other production facilities and prompted the development of new studios in the Los Angeles region. Radford and other studios are booked year-round.

Though it is outwardly unassuming with its main entrance tucked around a corner from Ventura Boulevard on Radford Avenue, the Radford studio is among the most valuable in the world based on price. It sold in 2021 for $1.85 billion to Hackman Capital Partners, one of the largest providers of entertainment production facilities, and New York real estate investor Square Mile Capital Management.

“The history of hit shows that have been produced at Radford trace the trajectory of culture and entertainment in Los Angeles,” said Zach Sokoloff, a senior vice president at Culver City-based Hackman, who plans to complete its makeover.

Its location in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood near other illustrious movie studios beloved by filmmakers made Radford highly sought after when it hit the market nearly two years ago, said real estate broker Carl Muhlstein of JLL, who represented seller ViacomCBS in the deal. There were multiple bidders for the property, he said.

“Between Studio City and Burbank there are four iconic studio lots. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal haven’t changed hands for over 100 years,” he said. “Here was an opportunity to buy something that only became surplus with the merger of CBS and Viacom” in 2019.

In addition to the real estate assets, ViacomCBS (which now goes by Paramount Global) turned over its lucrative studio operations business at the former CBS Studio Center, which includes stage rentals, facilities management and production support services on the Radford lot.

ViacomCBS sold another former CBS property, Television City in L.A.’s Fairfax district, to Hackman for $750 million in 2019. Paramount Global controls legendary Paramount Studios in Hollywood.

CBS’ two L.A. television stations, KCBS-TV (Channel 2) and KCAL-TV (Channel 9), are housed at the CBS Broadcast Center on the Radford lot, and the local news operation will stay put as part of a long-term lease-back.

CBS, which acquired the property from Republic Pictures in the 1960s, will continue to occupy stages and produce content on the Radford lot. CBS-produced shows there now include “SEAL Team,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Neighborhood” and “The Talk,” which is recorded before a live audience.

In its present form, Radford Studio Center offers tenants 18 traditional soundstages and four other stages. The site also has about 210,000 square feet of production office space and its own mill to provide carpentry services and special effects, a commissary and a carwash.

It has a backlot with a “Central Park” and a “New York Street” with 11 building fronts, including four brownstones. It also includes simulated residential neighborhoods with a hodgepodge of houses in different architectural styles, including a facade used as the Cleaver residence in the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.”

Hackman’s proposal calls for creating a largely new studio with 2.2 million square feet of buildings, including up to 25 soundstages and 300,000 square feet of production support space such as wardrobe, storage and a mill. There would be 725,000 square feet of offices to support productions and an additional 700,000 square feet of offices available for rent to companies in the entertainment industry.

Historic structures, including the Mack Sennett Building and Stages 9 and 10, would be preserved.

To improve access, an entrance off Ventura Boulevard at Carpenter Avenue would be “resurrected,” Sokoloff said. The studio once had an entrance there, but it closed several decades ago.

Also planned is a new bridge over Tujunga Wash at Moorpark Street that would make Radford Avenue a through street. Only vehicles going to the studio could cross the bridge, but it would be open to members of the public on foot or on bicycles. The Los Angeles River Greenway, a 51-mile bike and pedestrian path, is currently interrupted at Radford Studio Center and a new bridge would close that gap.

Hackman owns five studios in the L.A. region, along with facilities in New York, New Orleans, Ireland, Canada, London and Scotland.

The company plans $1.25 billion worth of improvements to Television City that will add soundstages, production support facilities and offices for rent.

Though the Los Angeles area has the largest number of soundstages of any city in the world, studios are operating near 100% capacity with waiting lists as long as five film productions deep for those spaces, financial advisor Deloitte said in a 2021 report.

“To meet the booming demand, supply would need to more than double in Los Angeles County” in the next few years, Deloitte said. Planned projects for more studio space fall far short of that.

The Radford Studio project would add more than 4,000 workers upon completion, doubling the number of people employed there now, according to a study by the L.A. County Economic Development Corp.

A Starbucks in Studio City will serve only to-go orders after management removed its guest seating last month out of “safety concerns” for customers and employees.

It’s unclear if a specific incident prompted the change or when the coffee shop in the 10900 block of Ventura Boulevard removed its seating, but complaints posted on social media over the decision date back to late April. The move comes nearly a year after the popular coffee chain closed six stores in the Los Angeles area due to “challenging incidents that make it unsafe to continue to operate.”

A sign posted at the entrance of the Studio City store said “due to safety concerns for our customers and partners, we have removed seating temporarily at this location,” according to KTTV-TV News.

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A Starbucks spokesperson said Thursday that the sign has been removed but declined to answer questions about when the seating might return or if other stores in the region might take similar action.

“We use various criteria to ensure we are meeting the needs of our customers, and have a variety of store formats in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, including drive-through, pickup and cafe,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement, the Seattle-based coffee giant said it prides itself on “creating a safe, warm, and welcoming Third Place environment,” meaning a place that is separate from a person’s work and home. But the statement said store managers are “empowered to use the many resources at their disposal to modify store operations and create the best experience for our communities.”

“Our first priority is to make sure our partners are safe at work,” the statement said.

Several stores in the San Francisco Bay Area have also seen their furniture disappear in the last year, including a store in the Castro neighborhood, according to reports on the online publication Hoodline. The approach forced customers to grab-and-go with their coffee, much like the Studio City Starbucks.

While the company has not announced plans to close the Studio City location, it previously shut stores over safety concerns.

When it closed the six L.A. stores and 10 others across the nation last year, Starbucks cited “a high volume of challenging incidents that make it unsafe to continue to operate,” according to a Starbucks spokesperson. The company cited mental health issues, drug use and chronic homelessness as contributing factors to their decision.

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who represents the district where the Studio City outlet is located, said her office has heard from numerous business operators who say that mental health and homelessness are the biggest issues they’re facing.

“For a very long time, the city didn’t do enough to address our homelessness crisis,” Raman said in an interview Thursday. The lack of response has forced employees, like baristas at Starbucks, to become the “front-line response to the ongoing crisis,” she said.

Raman said she is working to expand the Crisis and Incident Response through Community-Led Engagement (CIRCLE) program, which is an alternative to non-emergency 911 calls involving people experiencing homelessness.

“We are laser-focused on ending homelessness,” Raman said. “We need to be acting with greater urgency on this.”

Sarah Hymanson and Sara Kramer maintain a firm position in Los Feliz after introducing Kismet in 2017 and debuting Kismet Rotisserie on the same block in January 2020. The latter proved so promising that the chefs plotted two additional locations for Southern California; Kismet Rotisserie Studio City opened at the Sportsman’s Lodge over the weekend, and a forthcoming location is headed for Culver City. This time, the duo are opening the two spots as independent operators.

Hymanson and Kramer formerly operated under the Joint Venture Restaurant Group umbrella, which is operated by Jon & Vinny’s Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo. The pair recently secured new capital partners with Karpreilly, whose portfolio includes the Habit Burger Grill, Pitfire, and California Fish Grill. Hymanson and Kramer are now ramping up operations with an expanded Kismet Rotisserie Studio City kitchen while implementing their own approach to the business by giving bigger roles to longtime management and employees, working with local farmers and produce growers, and using sustainable packaging.

“[We] are growing this organization in alignment with our values,” says Kramer. “We got rid of the service charge at Kismet when we changed ownership. Anyone who is working an hourly position in any of our restaurants gets the same share of tipped earnings based on hours worked.”

The Studio City location features a larger 1,200 square-foot space and kitchen to service walk-ups and what Hymanson and Kramer hope to be a robust takeout and delivery program. There’s ample outdoor seating right in front of Kismet Rotisserie’s takeout window and scattered throughout the retail and other restaurant areas.

Amongst the bright interior — designed by Lovers Unite — the Studio City menu remains the same as the original with whole and half chickens, pita sandwiches, hummus, chicken salad, chicken sandwich, those schmaltzy potatoes, and an emphasis on market vegetables for salads.

Hymanson and Kramer share that Kismet Rotisserie Culver City will open in the coming months. This location — which is next to the Sony Studios lot — will be the only to feature indoor seating.

Kismet Rotisserie Studio City hours are 10 am. to 9 p.m. at Sportsmen’s Lodge next to Erewhom, 12833 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City, CA 91604.

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Kismet Rotisserie Studio City

4220 Coldwater Canyon Avenue, Studio City, CA 91604 Visit Website

CONSTRUCTION is underway at Vanderpump Rules alum Jax Taylor's new LA sports bar which is set to open soon and can be revealed in exclusive new photos.

Pictures obtained by The U.S. Sun give a first look at Jax's spacious watering hole on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, near plenty of foot traffic.

The bar, which is linked to the popular Rocco's Tavern next door, was formerly a cocktail lounge, Seventy7, until a few months ago when it closed its doors.

A giant sign, first shared by Jax on the venue's new Instagram account, now reads: "Coming soon 2023 Jax's Studio City."

Snaps show the old yellow signage for the bar is still up, with the building painted dark grey and a traditional-style roof and wooden fence at the front of the property.

Old Instagram photographs of Seventy7 show a classic lounge look with bold patterned wallpaper, chandeliers, and burgundy Chesterfield-style pattern sofas and chairs.

Jax Taylor

According to property records viewed by The U.S. Sun, the 1,898-square-foot space was built in 1950 and the two bars are linked and owned by a company called Mba Enterprises LLC.

The new one-story sports bar has a listed market value of $309,163 but it is thought Jax and his business partners are renting the space.

Jax, 44, and his wife Brittany Cartwright are preparing to return to Bravo alongside a slew of other reality stars in a brand new Vanderpump Rules spin-off show.

The dad-of-one was seen doing some construction work at the site last week as they get to work on revamping the space in time for its opening later this year.

PODCAST REVEAL

Jax rocked a white T-shirt and blue jeans with a black baseball cap, pairing the look with a red, black, and white pair of Nike sneakers.

At one point, he was seen carrying a large tube from a nearby vehicle to the construction site while a film crew captured his movements.

He was also seen at his house in nearby Valley Village on Monday morning taking out the trash, while workers delivered food produce to the venue, suggesting the opening date may be soon.

Photographs also show wooden decking which is yet to be put together, along with piles of tiles.

Jax and Brittany, 34, detailed their new venture on their When Reality Hits podcast, revealing that construction would be starting up last week.

"I am opening a sports bar. It is going to be called Jax's Studio City. We started construction on Monday and I am really excited," he said.

"We are finally going to have a neighborhood sports bar."

Jax went on: "I know in the past I said that owning a bar is basically a marriage killer but the difference is [Brittany is] involved just as much as I am.

"My wife is involved just as much as I am. We have 100 percent say in what is going on and she is doing the decorating.

"The difference between some other people that we know that did a bar without their significant others is that I am involving mine."

Brittany then chimed in, saying: "He said [owning a bar ruins relationships] many times and it has freaked me out ever since this project came to be a possibility for us.

"It's called Jax's but it is mine too."

She went on to say: "And you are not going to be there 24/7. It is going to be kid-friendly during the day."

BEER CHEESE

Brittany also teased the bar's menu, revealing: "What we are planning on doing is finally having Mamaw's Beer Cheese on the menu so people can come and pick up their own little tub there.

"We couldn't sell it here in California, but now that we have a kitchen, I am going to fly my [grandmother] out and have her help with the menu so that it has a lot of southern charm."

Mamaw's Beer Cheese became popular after Vanderpump Rules fans were introduced to Brittany's family on the show who hail from Kentucky.

In June, Lala Kent confirmed that Bravo was working with Jax and Brittany on a spinoff series.

Rumors have been swirling about who will appear on the show but Bravo has not shared any details so far.

Vanderpump Rules is currently filming scenes for Season 11, in which Lala will also appear.

It was previously reported that Jax, Brittany, and Kristen were returning to Bravo in a spinoff series but little was known about the show at the time.

It's since been revealed that Bravo ordered eight episodes of the new reality show.

The series will focus on a group of friends, who used to work for restaurant mogul Lisa Vanderpump, leaving their partying ways in the past and living in the Valley.