Guided Tours  •  Self-Guided Downtown Tour
 

When it opened to great fanfare in 1923, the Biltmore Hotel was the largest hotel west of Chicago. The firm of Schultze and Weaver, which was also responsible for New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel and several other prominent downtown Los Angeles buildings, designed the Biltmore in the Beaux Arts style with Renaissance Revival touches. To this day, the Olive Street façade of the hotel remains one of Los Angeles' best examples of this type of architecture.

The hotel's grand meeting rooms are an opulent mixture of European styles including Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical and Moorish. Italian muralist Giovanni Smeraldi decorated many of the luxurious interior banquet rooms. The original lobby (now the "Rendezvous Court") contains a Moorish beamed ceiling and a giant Spanish baroque staircase leading to a 350-foot long galleria. Various ball rooms, each lavishly decorated, lead off the galleria.

The Biltmore has undergone several major renovations during the latter part of the 20th century. In the mid-1970s, architects Phyllis Lambert and Gene Summers reversed years of decay and neglect with a renovation that received a 1981 National Trust Honor Award. In 1984, new owners undertook an additional renovation and added an office tower to the site. At this time the reception area was moved to the Grand Avenue side of the building. Extensive mural restoration and repainting also took place at this point under the guidance of A.B. Heinsbergen, son of one of the building's original decorators.

Millennium Hotels purchased the property in 2000.