Take a walk on the design side when you head to LA

I’m walking through a neighbourhood in LA. I know. It’s strange. That the West Hollywood Design District is walkable is its first marketing message: you can wander its streets, popping into boutiques such as Rag & Bone, luxe furniture shops such as Restoration Hardware (RH for short) and sceney restaurants such as Sur or Craig’s without getting behind the wheel.

This laidback neighbourhood, at the intersections of Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard and Robertson Boulevard, is LA’s beating design heart. It also has the highest concentration of furniture showrooms on the West Coast — not to mention the celebrities who visit them to deck out their homes.

WeHo’s Design District got a fancy design-focused hotel earlier this year with the opening of Kimpton La Peer, the fourth Los Angeles outpost of the hotel brand. The property, designed by local artist Gulla Jónsdóttir, looks like a bleached white adobe home from the outside and an Icelandic countryscape inside. The integrated pool patio and bar downstairs is painfully LA, while in the rooms, design accents such as Jeff Talk a walk on the design side when you head to LA Koons-esque rabbits reinforce that, yes, we’re in the most stylish area of the city. It has already hosted some high-profile parties to prove it.

On this trip, I was looking for design, rather than famouses. Let’s set off for a walk around the Design District with one of the hotel’s illustrated maps.

First up on the tour was the office of Ronald Kates on Robertson Boulevard. Kates is credited with shaping the district into what it is today by leasing a number of offices to pioneering design companies half a century ago.

Further along Melrose Avenue, 10 minutes’ walk from La Peer (perhaps stopping en route at fashion store Maxfield, tucked discreetly off Melrose, which stocks upscale and often scary streetwear; and gawping at the graffiti mural by artist RETNA opposite) brings you to the Pacific Design Center, which dates to 1975. It was once West Hollywood’s railyard but today is a 14-acre campus, made up of three blocky buildings in green, red and blue. Inside are 100 showroom brands, an events space and a branch of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art that hosts exhibitions.

This district has the typical mix of fashion and design boutiques, from glassy Helmut Lang and a gritty All Saints to posh kitchen appliance shops such as Poggenpohl and Instagram-famous beauty brands such as Glossier. But perhaps the most interesting retail concept is the Nike pop-up store on Melrose, stocked entirely according to big data. It’s as gorgeously vast as it is intelligent: Nike analysed the purchases of WeHo residents, and only showcases the apparel they want to buy. Oh, and there are treadmills in the dressing room, to check how the trainers fit (and how good your arse looks in leggings, presumably).

A studio worth popping into is that of Martyn Lawrence Bullard, the interior designer behind the Kardashians’ mega-mansions. The bulbous light fittings, green squishy chairs and foot stools in the shape of sheep are all sufficiently extra while at grown-up furniture boutique Restoration Hardware (anecdotally known as Ikea for rich people) there’s a roof terrace on the third floor, which is secretly a public space, with pinch-me views across the LA hills alongside its expensive rugs and important-looking sofas.

But we’re still in LA. And after all that walking in the dry heat, you’ll want to cool off with iced water and celebrity spotting at Urth Caffe opposite RW. LA might change its marketing messages but it can never change its clientele.

Double rooms from $425, lapeerhotel.com