If you drive Ventura Boulevard past Coldwater Canyon, you've seen it: a stretch of chain link fence, some dirt, maybe a crew truck or two, sitting where the Sportsmen's Lodge hotel used to be. You've probably also heard a rumor at some point that Erewhon is closing, or that the whole shopping center is getting torn down along with it. Neither is true, and the reason why is the actual story here.
The fenced lot and the shopping center next to it are two separate legal parcels with two completely different fates. One is being demolished and rebuilt into 520 apartments. The other, the one with Erewhon, Reformation, and the rest of the retail you already use, is barely being touched. Once you see the property line, the whole confusing timeline of this project starts to make sense.
One Address, Two Parcels
The project everyone calls "Sportsmen's Lodge" actually covers 8.76 acres split into two pieces, according to Los Angeles City Planning's environmental review of the project. The split explains almost everything about what you're seeing from the road.
- Site A, the 97,807 square foot Shops at Sportsmen's Lodge on Coldwater Canyon Avenue where Erewhon anchors the retail, stays essentially as is. The only changes on this parcel are a relocated electrical transformer and a shift of some bike parking, both swapped for a small pocket of new open space.
- Site B, the roughly six acres where the 1960s-era hotel building sits, is where the entire 520-unit residential project is going. This is the dirt lot behind the fence.
After a lot line adjustment tied to the project, Site A will carry a floor area ratio of 0.87 to 1, essentially unchanged from what's there now. Site B jumps to 2.86 to 1. That gap in the numbers is the gap you're seeing in real life: one parcel getting a modest paperwork adjustment, the other getting a construction site.
What's Actually Rising on Site B
Once complete, Site B is set to hold 520 residential units, including 78 reserved as Very Low-Income affordable housing, spread across new four- and seven-story buildings. The design team is Marmol Radziner as design architect, MVE + Partners as architect of record, and Olin as landscape architect, working in a mid-century modern style that nods to the hotel's own history as a spot where Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Katharine Hepburn used to spend time, a detail ABC7 reported when the project cleared its final city vote.
Beyond housing, the plan adds close to 46,000 square feet of new ground-floor retail and restaurant space, split between roughly 18,000 square feet of restaurant use and 28,000 square feet of retail, plus around 23,000 square feet of open space accessible to the public, much of it in courtyards. There's also a new pedestrian path meant to connect Ventura Boulevard directly to the Los Angeles River, which currently has no direct public access at this stretch. For residents who already walk or bike the river path further east, this closes a real gap.
The Erewhon Lawsuit, and What It Actually Threatens
The Los Angeles City Council approved the project on a 13-1 vote back in April 2024, with Hugo Soto-Martinez casting the lone no vote and then-Council President Paul Krekorian absent, as CBS Los Angeles reported at the time. Before that vote, three separate appeals had been filed against the project: one from the Studio City Residents Association, one from Erewhon, and one from Unite Here Local 11, the union representing hotel workers. The city denied all three.
Erewhon didn't stop there. Its parent company went on to file suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, a move covered by the Harvard-Westlake Chronicle, the student paper at the nearby school whose own campus construction plays into this story too (more on that below). The lawsuit centers on the same concerns raised in the appeal: the height of the new building, preservation questions around the old hotel, and the environmental review process itself. It is not a dispute over Erewhon's lease or Site A. Whatever happens with the litigation, it's aimed at slowing or altering what gets built on Site B, not at whether the grocery store you shop at stays open on Site A.
That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out how worried to be about the retail center itself. The store isn't the target. The apartment project next to it is.
Why the Dirt Pile Looks Bigger Than One Project
Part of why this corner has felt like a nonstop construction zone for the past couple of years is that two unrelated projects are moving earth at roughly the same time. The Sportsmen's Lodge project alone involves moving approximately 430,000 cubic yards of dirt, according to reporting from ABC7. Separately, Harvard-Westlake School's athletics facilities project nearby is excavating an additional 200,000 cubic yards, a figure CBS Los Angeles noted specifically because residents worried the two would compound each other's truck traffic on already tight streets.
If your commute along Ventura or Coldwater has felt worse than a single project should explain, that's likely why. Two separate excavation timelines, adding up to well over half a million cubic yards of combined earth moving in the same general area, is a lot of trucks regardless of whose permit they're driving under.
The Realistic Timeline
The city's own environmental study projected a 43-month construction period for the Sportsmen's Lodge project, concluding in 2027, a timeline confirmed in Urbanize LA's coverage of the council vote. That clock is worth holding loosely. It was set before the Superior Court appeal was filed, and litigation has a way of adding months that no environmental study can predict.
It's also worth remembering the scale of what this represents for the neighborhood. The Ventura-Cahuenga Boulevard Corridor Specific Plan, which governs this stretch, hasn't seen a residential project of this size since it was written more than 30 years ago. Whatever your feelings about the height or the traffic, this is the first project of its kind here in three decades, which is part of why the appeals process took as long as it did.
What This Means for Your Next Few Ventura Trips
None of this changes your Sunday grocery run or your usual dinner spot on that stretch of the boulevard. Site A, where the businesses you actually walk into are located, isn't part of the construction. The fence, the dirt, and the years of hearings all belong to the parcel behind it, where a very different kind of Studio City is being built, one that swaps a 1960s hotel for hundreds of new neighbors and a walking path down to the river.
If you're curious about how a project like this tends to ripple through a corridor once it's actually finished, or you're weighing what a home near Ventura Boulevard looks like a few years out, Cindi Brodack has been watching this stretch of Studio City for years and is always happy to talk through what she's seeing on the ground. Let's connect.
