For years, if you lived in the pocket of West Hollywood south of Santa Monica Boulevard, the Design District kept trade hours. The Pacific Design Center opened its doors to the public Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and shut entirely on weekends. Outside its doors sat a single walk-up coffee kiosk, Community Goods, which handled the morning rush for the showroom crowd and not much else. Once the design reps and their client meetings cleared out for the day, the streets around La Peer Drive and San Vicente Boulevard went quiet.

That pattern held for a long time. It stopped holding this past spring.

Between March and May of 2026, three very different food and drink concepts opened within a few blocks of each other in the Design District: a rooftop restaurant, a grocery market, and an all-day bistro. None of them were built to compete with the other two. Each one was built to fill a specific hole in the neighborhood's daily schedule, and together they've done something the district's retail-and-showroom model never managed on its own. They gave it a seven-day rhythm.

Three Openings, Three Different Jobs

The easiest way to see what actually changed is to look at what each place is for, not just what it serves.

None of these are duplicates of each other, and that's the point worth sitting with. A neighborhood doesn't get a full week of usable hours from one splashy restaurant opening. It gets one from an errand stop, an occasion spot, and something in between landing at roughly the same time.

The Errand Run: Laurel Supply Market

Laurel Supply opened its doors on Friday, May 8, 2026, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Olive Drive, tucked between Barney's Beanery and the Emser Tile building. The project comes from Dean McKillen and Phil Howard, the pair who opened Laurel Hardware a few blocks east in 2012 and who also run Ysabel and Laurel Grill. This is their first foray into retail grocery, and they didn't build it quietly. The building itself has a history worth knowing: constructed in 1942 for Ritts Company Furniture, owned by the parents of photographer Herb Ritts, it later spent the dot-com years as the home of the Hollywood Stock Exchange before sitting as creative office space for years.

What McKillen and Howard put inside is closer to a market hall than a conventional grocery store. There's an organic produce section, a smoothie and matcha bar, an organic butcher counter, a sushi station, gelato, and a health and beauty section stocked with imported goods. Howard has talked up the in-house flour mill most, since it's what feeds the pizza and pasta program. Out front, a patio lined with young olive trees and oak benches runs along the Santa Monica Boulevard frontage, with gas fire features already installed for cooler evenings.

The comparisons to Erewhon, which operates about a block away, were inevitable and not entirely off base. Both are upscale grocery-and-prepared-food hybrids in the same stretch of boulevard, and Laurel Supply sits within walking distance of Gelson's and Bristol Farms as well, meaning this corner of West Hollywood now has four grocery options inside a short walk of each other. Early visitors have noted that Laurel Supply's prices, while not cheap, tend to run lower than Erewhon's. The trade-off residents are already flagging: the market's own parking lot is small, which has pushed overflow parking onto Olive Drive.

What matters for the daily-rhythm argument is the hours. Laurel Supply runs 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. That's not showroom scheduling. That's a business built for people who live here, not people visiting for a design consultation.

The Occasion Table: SUSHISAMBA

SUSHISAMBA's rooftop opened in March 2026 at 639 N La Peer Dr, and it marks the brand's first United States location in more than a decade after a run of openings in London, Dubai, and Singapore. The space is genuinely large for the neighborhood, an 11,000-square-foot rooftop under a retractable roof with views toward the Hollywood Hills, run by executive chef Maxwell Terheggen alongside corporate chef John Um. The menu leans into the brand's Japanese-Brazilian-Peruvian mashup, with dishes like the Samba LA roll, built on A5 wagyu and soft-shell crab tempura, alongside truffle-topped toro tiradito and a robata-grilled scallop plate.

The detail that separates SUSHISAMBA from the other two openings is its posted hours. The restaurant doesn't open for lunch on Mondays or Tuesdays, and even on weekends it doesn't seat guests before 11 a.m. This isn't a place designed to catch a resident on a Wednesday lunch break. It's built for the reservation you make a week out, the kind of destination dinner that pulls people in from across the city rather than serving the block it sits on every day.

The In-Between Hours: Très LA Bistro & Café

Très LA opened inside the Pacific Design Center in May 2026, the same month as Laurel Supply, and it's the piece that actually threads the gap between the other two. The concept comes from Alan Dunn, founder of Très LA Group, a hospitality and catering company known for venues like Carondelet House and The Ebell of Long Beach. This is the group's first permanent restaurant, and it's built to function across the whole day rather than at a single mealtime. Guests can walk in for Intelligentsia coffee and a pastry after a lap through West Hollywood Park, or stay through the evening as the room shifts into cocktail service under Beverage Director Brad Lewandowski, whose menu includes a gin-and-raspberry spritz called the Nuit Blanche.

Executive Chef Julio Castorena runs a French-Californian kitchen, and the space itself, with lacquered green walls and a checkerboard floor, was designed to read as somewhere between a Parisian salon and a California living room. What makes it relevant to the neighborhood's schedule rather than just its design blogs is that it's the one venue among the three actually built to cover the hours nobody else touches. It's not an errand stop and it's not a special-occasion reservation. It's the place that's open when you just want a coffee at 9 a.m. or a glass of wine at 6.

What Changed for Someone Who Already Lives Here

Put the three next to each other and the shift becomes obvious. Before this past spring, the Design District's food options ran almost entirely on trade hours, tied to the Pacific Design Center's Monday-through-Friday schedule and closed altogether on weekends. A resident living in the blocks bounded by Santa Monica Boulevard, Doheny Drive, Beverly Boulevard, and La Cienega Boulevard, the same footprint that makes up the Design District's business improvement district, had to leave that footprint for at least one of three things: a daily grocery run, a coffee that wasn't a walk-up kiosk, or a dinner reservation worth dressing up for.

That's no longer true. A few things worth knowing if you're in that pocket now:

• Laurel Supply's 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. hours mean the grocery run no longer requires a drive to Erewhon or Gelson's, though street parking on Olive Drive is tighter than it used to be.
• SUSHISAMBA's rooftop is worth booking ahead for, not walking into. Its weekday lunch closures on Monday and Tuesday are a real scheduling detail, not a formality.
• Très LA is the one open across the widest stretch of the day, making it the practical stop for a morning coffee or an early evening drink without a reservation attached.

None of this required a rezoning or a City Council vote. It happened because three operators, working independently, each identified a different hour of the day the Design District wasn't serving and built for it. The Pacific Design Center itself is still closed to the public on weekends. The blocks around it no longer are.

If you're weighing whether now is the moment to sell a Design District-adjacent property, or you're simply curious what your home in this stretch of West Hollywood is worth given how much the corridor has changed this year, John Giddins has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of shift on the Westside. Reach out for a straightforward read on your home's value, no obligation attached.