Cypress Equity to build 176 apartments in Echo Park
Design for hilly location features floors as “extrusions out of and up from the topography”

This post was written by Dana Bartholomew and published on 1/9/2023 on therealdealcom

Cypress Equity Investments has been cleared to build a 176-unit apartment complex in Echo Park.

The Brentwood-based developer has received a construction permit to build the seven-story building at 2225 Sunset Boulevard, just west of Alvarado Street, Urbanize Los Angeles reported.

Plans call for studio, one-, two-, three-, four- and five-bedroom units in a U-shaped building atop a two-story podium and basement garage to serve 203 cars. Construction is expected to take 28 months.

The development was approved by the City of Los Angeles Planning Commission in May 2021 and received a building permit in November, according to Urbanize.

Approvals include Transit Oriented Community incentives allowing a larger building than zoning rules allow in exchange for 18 affordable apartments for extremely low-income tenants. The ground floor will include an unspecified number of live/work units.

The project, designed by Downtown-based Ottinger Architects, would be sheathed in gray metal and wood and step down to four stories to the north on Elsinore Street. It would include a courtyard and a rooftop deck.

The building will include a work and business center, a gym that opens to the courtyard and two community rooms.

The building, with protruding floors, was inspired by its hilly location, according to the architect.

“The floor plates act as extrusions out of and up from the topography,” Ottinger says on its website. “Each floor plate is expressed as a continuous band of balconies or cornices that wrap around the building and the varied angles of the floors create movement and liveliness.”

The proposed development joins a handful of apartment buildings proposed near Sunset and Alvarado, including a mixed-use 170-unit complex approved for the longtime location of Taix Restaurant at 1911 Sunset.

Cypress Equity Investments, founded in 2001, has built apartments in California, the Pacific Northwest, Greater New York, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Las Vegas and in Florida, according to its website. The bulk of its local projects are in Santa Monica.

Last February, it teamed up with an affiliate of Balboa Retail Partners with plans to build a 521-unit apartment complex at 2601-2645 Lincoln Boulevard. The 10-building complex would replace a Gelson’s Market.

In April 2021, it sold a 494-unit apartment complex in Glendale to the state for $300 million, to be converted into workforce housing.

— Dana Bartholomew