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Sophistication, Sunshine and Sobriety
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Next door and in striking contrast to Anawalt is 3.1 Phillip Lim, a men’s and womens’s apparel shop worth a visit by anyone with a passion for contemporary design. The 5,000-square-foot store, a former auto body shop, is buffered from the street by a sculpted wall and a field of blocks rimmed by grass. Inside is an amoeba-like space, whose walls are lined with acoustic foam pyramids. Lim is open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
The sophisticated design of Philip Lim is dramatically contradicted by the splash of Sun Style Tanning Salon, a two-story, glass-fronted monument to vanity next door that wouldn’t look out of place in Miami Beach.
Sun Style is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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All this glamour and style now are interrupted by a couple of civic institutions. Most visually fascinating is the West Hollywood Lion’s Club, housed in a log cabin next to Sun Style. The building is better known for its frequent 12-step addiction recovery meetings and the celebrities who attend them (Demi Moore, Russell Brand, Selma Blair, to name a few) than for its Lions meetings on the second Thursday of the month.
Across from the Lion’s Club is a nondescript building that houses another refuge from addiction, the West Hollywood Recovery Center, which offers a full menu of 12-step meetings. It shares the building with two institutions that evoke West Hollywood’s gay and lesbian history. ONE Gallery and Museum hosts exhibits about LGBT history, and the June Mazer Lesbian Archives is a repository of the history of lesbian life and culture. ONE is open Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Mazer is open from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on the first Sunday of the month and every Tuesday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Entrances to both are on El Tovar Place, an alley that runs into and around the West Hollywood library parking garage.
Crossing El Tovar takes one to Tortilla Republic, not your father’s Taco Bell, which bills itself as a “modern Mexican grill and tequileria.” Its interior is dominated by a treelike sculpture and a patio whose canvas ceiling and draping ropes suggest the desert redoubt of a Saudi billionaire. Dinners are reasonably priced, though not cheap, with ancho salmon at $23. It’s open for lunch Tuesday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and for brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Dinner is 5 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, extending to 11 p.m. on Saturdays.
