Ritzing Silver Lake

DRIVE around Silver Lake and you quickly see why the neighborhood has become a geographic byword for hip. Old storefronts abut sleek new businesses, comfortably ramshackle bungalows sit next to million-dollar Modernist architectural gems. At night, you feel just safe enough to walk along Sunset or Silver Lake Boulevard from dinner at a new local restaurant -- one seems to open about every month now -- to a show at dingy, dependable Spaceland, or, if you like, to the new gelato parlor up the street, but just unsafe enough to make the walk a little thrilling. You might cross paths with musicians Beck or Flea or with "24" star Kiefer Sutherland, all local residents.

In other words, Silver Lake is a place prancing on that thin line between coolness and gentrification.

But Silver Lake is missing one sure sign of an up-and-coming high-end urban locale: a posh hotel. Hollywood has its Roosevelt and soon a W, downtown its Standard and soon the Gansevoort West, a California sister to the popular Gansevoort boutique hotel in Manhattan's meatpacking district. Silver Lake has a Holiday Inn.

That may soon change. In mid-June, the Department of City Planning approved the renovation of the Sunset Pacific Motel, a shuttered flophouse on Sunset Boulevard. Its proposed replacement is the boutique Silver Lake Hotel, which, according to the architectural plans, will be a stylish affair with a restaurant-bar, spa and rooms going for as much as $255 a night.

Behind the hotel is Dana Hollister, an entrepreneur who has made it her life's work to contribute to Silver Lake's face lift. She has two restaurants, two bars, a design boutique and a salon to her credit. She's renovated the Paramour Estate, Silver Lake's architectural crown jewel, and hopes to turn it one day soon into Silver Lake's first five-star lodging, the Bel-Air Hotel of Silver Lake, as she envisions it. A 5-acre spread that was built for oil heiress Daisy Canfield in the 1920s, the Paramour was later converted into a girls' school and was serving as a decrepit nunnery when Hollister discovered it 15 years ago.

Hollister likes to dust off old gems in a part of L.A. that is littered with them. Like her planned hotels, she is a symbol of a rapidly changing and conflicted place. She is a savvy businesswoman and a bleeding-heart philanthropist. She charges $24 for a piece of halibut at her newest restaurant, Cliff's Edge, a gorgeous space that was a forgotten hole-in-the-wall before she resuscitated it, but she gives the restaurant over at no cost for charity events. She has a knack for attracting crowds and making money, and she's made a lot of friends and a few enemies in Silver Lake.