NMS La Jolla apartment tower debuts at 6401 Wilshire Boulevard
The 16-story tower is now complete in Beverly Grove
Steven Sharp
Urbanize Los Angeles
April 12, 2023
In Beverly Grove, construction is complete and leasing is now underway for a residential high-rise from prolific Santa Monica-based developer WS Communities.
NMS La Jolla, located at 6401 Wilshire Boulevard, is named for its location at Wilshire's intersection with La Jolla Avenue. The 16-story high-rise features a total of 112 apartments, seated above a podium structure featuring a parking garage and 6,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space.
According to a leasing website, the property offers a mix of studio, one-, two-, three-, and four-bedroom floor plans - including co-living arrangements. Monthly rents are listed as starting at $2,336 for a studio unit.
The complex, in addition to housing, also includes amenity decks at the rooftop and above the podium garage.
Steinberg Hart designed the roughly
193-foot-tall building, which has a unique look when compared to the older towers of the Wilshire corridor.
"Rethinking the typical relationship between building skin and balcony at a per unit level, the tower is conceived as singularly connected elements with the ability to respond to the two forces of program and/or view as required," reads a narrative from the firm's website. "The result is a geometric manipulation expressed along the exterior building edge, which allows for idealized programmatic distribution throughout every unit from the top the bottom. The form of the tower echoes the shape of a lens, with an irregular, undulating façade to add visual interest. The convex profile allows residents to easily access view corridors between the taller buildings along Wilshire Boulevard. The malleable building edge opens Los Angeles to residents, and reframes one’s relationship to the metropolis."
The tower at 6401 Wilshire Boulevard originated with an entitlement application filed with the City of Los Angeles more than 16 years ago. After the original plan to realize prior to the Great Recession, developer UDR, Inc. purchased the land in 2015, and later sold the site to WS Communities for $38 million in 2019, according to city records.
NMS La Jolla may be a sign of things to come in Beverly Grove, with the arrival of the D Line subway extension's two stops at nearby Fairfax Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard. An application was submitted last year to the Planning Department seeking approvals for a similar 20-story high-rise a short distance to the west.
Although it has previously developed projects in the City of Los Angeles, WS Communities is best known for a vast collection of mixed-use projects in its hometown of Santa Monica.