Hotel Bel Air

Location: 701 Stone Canyon Road, Los Angeles, (310) 909-1644, http://www.hotelbelair.com/wolfgang-puck-bel-air Price: Dinner appetizers, $15 to $26; main courses, $28 to $55; four-course tasting menu, $110; six courses, $145. Wine pairings are an additional $75 to $90 per person. Details: Open 7 to 10:30 a.m. daily for breakfast, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Saturday for lunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for Sunday brunch, 6 to 10 p.m. Sunday to Thursday for dinner, and 6 to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday for dinner.

The 103-room Hotel Bel-Air reopens its doors Friday after a two-year redesign .  The inn blends its former Spanish Colonial architecture with elegant new themes. Its signature oval swimming pool and swans remain . . . .    Prime polar bear viewing season is beginning in Churchill, Canada, where the animals gather to cross Hudson Bay in their fall search for food . . . . As of this weekend, three Colorado ski resorts will be open : Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Wolf Creek.

The Hotel Bel-Air closed quietly Wednesday, shutting for two years of renovations without agreeing to a severance package with its unionized employees. The garden-shrouded resort -- for more than 60 years a retreat for presidents, movie stars and others -- has refused to commit to rehire 250 union employees after its multimillion-dollar face-lift is complete in 2011. Leaders of Unite Here Local 11 have accused the hotel's managers of using the renovation project to rid itself of the union.

Prepare to dream. The Conde Nast Traveler's 2012 Hot List of new hotels, resorts, spas and restaurants is out -- offering lots of travel fantasy fodder. Editors, not travelers, compiled the list of the best 121 new (which includes the seriously renovated) hotels in the world. These in the West made the cut: -- Hotel Bel-Air , 701 Stone Canyon Road, L.A., which just emerged from a two-year renovation. Its Prairie spa also won a best-spa mention. -- Mr. C Beverly Hills, 1224 Beverwil Drive, L.A., scored high marks for its high-rise style.

It’s been little more than a year, but to fans of the Hotel Bel-Air , the elapsed time since the iconic hideaway closed for renovation might as well have been in dog years. There’s an end in sight: July 2011. When the 64-year-old Los Angeles hotel welcomes guests next year, the face-lift will have changed not just the look but the feel and function of this luxury lodging. The multimillion-dollar effort aims to maintain the hotel's residential sensibility, using a decorating scheme that draws on the best homes of Bel-Air and other Los Angeles areas through the decades.

In preparation for the start of demolition this summer of the now-closed 936-room Wilshire Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the hotel will reopen its doors Thursday for the start of a massive sale of its furniture, plates, towels and television sets, among thousands of items in the building. Everything must go, including the kitchen sinks, which are priced at $350. "But our kitchen sinks are a little bigger than most," said Frank Long, president of International Content Liquidations Inc., the Ohio firm that is running what is expected to be a $2-million liquidation sale starting at 9 a.m. Long lines are expected.

When the Hotel Bel-Air reopens next week after a two-year renovation, the resort's mascot swans — Chloe, Athena and Hercules — will still occupy the lush 12-acre property visited by presidents, movie stars and other dignitaries. But absent will be most of the union workers who washed dishes, made beds and laundered towels at the hotel. They were laid off when the hotel closed, and many of them will return only to march and protest outside the hotel entrance. The historic hotel, closed in 2009 for the multimillion-dollar upgrade, will reopen Friday with only about a dozen of its former union workers on the staff of 275, dealing a blow to the hotel workers union and its members.

After a two-year renovation, the iconic Hotel Bel-Air in West Los Angeles reopened to a spirited protest by about 300 activists and former union workers who were laid off when construction began in 2009 and were never rehired. As guests arrived, they were greeted by the demonstration Friday afternoon organized by Unite Here Local 11, whose leaders contended the hotel used the multimillion-dollar upgrade to force union workers out. The union activists were joined by protesters from Occupy L.A., who rode two buses from downtown Los Angeles, where they have been demonstrating against corporate greed.

For nearly half a century, the UCLA Hannah Carter Japanese Garden in Bel-Air has served as a serene stopover for visitors from locations as varied as Newhall, Nashville and the Netherlands. But the decision by UCLA to sell the steep hillside property and an adjoining house to raise money for endowments and professorships has the garden world in an un-Zen-like uproar. The Garden Conservancy, an organization based in New York and San Francisco, has lambasted the university's transfer to the Fowler Museum of a five-tiered stone pagoda and other garden objects and has urged the public to contact UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.

The legendary Hotel Bel-Air, a bougainvillea-bordered haven for show business celebrities and European royalty seeking privacy and elegance, is being sold to a Japanese investment group for more than $100 million, the hotel's current owners announced Monday. The per-room purchase price of more than $1.2 million shatters the old record of about $757,000 per room, established when the Sultan of Brunei bought the nearby 260-room Beverly Hills Hotel for about $200 million in 1987. Investor Donald Trump paid $496,000 a room when he bought New York's Plaza Hotel last year.