A historic-theater VRF retrofit, and what it took to do it.
Judy Garland was discovered on this stage.
In 1933, an eleven-year-old Judy Garland walked out onto the stage at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. By the end of the performance, she had a contract with MGM. The Ebell has hosted Amelia Earhart, Stravinsky, and Michelle Obama in the years since — but the Judy Garland story is the one that sticks.
The Ebell of Los Angeles is one of the oldest and largest women’s clubs in the United States, founded in 1894 — by women, for women. The 83,000-square-foot Clubhouse and 1,238-seat Theatre were designed by architect Sumner Hunt, built in 1927, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
Until early 2019, it also had a cooling problem.
The original system — a water-cooled chiller, cooling tower, and boilers — served separate air handlers for the theater and a small dining room. Two zones, one inadequate plant. The facility team had to leave one space vacant to cool the other, forgoing the rental income from whichever room they sacrificed that day. The rest of the building wasn’t on the system at all. Portable air conditioners had been doing the work for years. As Philip Miller, then the Ebell’s general manager and COO, put it: “warm, swampy atmosphere, and when you’re hosting a special event such as a wedding, that’s not a good thing to happen.”
The Ebell hired Athena Engineering as the design-builder. For a woman-owned firm working with one of the oldest women’s clubs in the country, the honor wasn’t lost on us.
“As the sun-load hits this massive concrete structure, it basically stores all of the heat and releases into the space. We needed a system that could handle this.”
Richard Chiera, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Athena Engineering
The constraints made the problem harder than it looked.
Historic register status meant the easy answer — outdoor units on the roof — was off the table. The architecture is the protected feature. Visible equipment on the exterior, even back-of-house, wasn’t going to fly. The new system had to fit inside the basement footprint where the old chiller was, with condensers tucked discretely around the building exterior.
And the building is essentially a concrete heat sink. The walls absorb solar gain all day and release it into the interior — including a theater that’s empty one night and packed the next. A system sized for average load fails at the peaks; a system sized for peak load cycles wastefully the rest of the time. Dehumidification was the third constraint — that cavernous theater generates moisture loads that swing radically by occupancy.
Why VRF was the right call.
Athena specified LG’s Multi V 5 VRF paired with LG AHU Conversion Kits. Four reasons: modular zoning matched the building’s wildly variable occupancy; compact condensers fit the spots the historic designation allowed; deep-coil dehumidification handled the moisture load; and VRF’s variable-speed compressors could ramp from off to full capacity in hours — critical for a building that sits cold between events.
Athena partnered with DMG Corporation (LG’s manufacturer rep) on the equipment specification. DMG brought the LG expertise; Athena brought the design and integration.
What we built.
Athena worked as the design-builder alongside DMG Corporation and M. Weber & Associates, self-performing both the HVAC and building automation work. The result was the largest LG Air Handler project completed in North America at the time.
Outdoor: four Multi V 5 systems, twelve condensing modules, tucked into the building’s exterior pockets. Indoor: custom AHUs sized to the existing basement footprint, with stacked coils delivering over 42 tons of heating and cooling capacity per handler. DMG and LG engineered a custom coil arrangement that let each AHU run the full airflow through both VRF systems simultaneously — capacity and turndown in the same package. The deep-coil setup handled the dehumidification.
The building automation layer is Schneider EcoStruxure. Athena’s controls team installed and programmed the front-end, integrated to the LG equipment via LG’s MultiSITE Communications Manager. The interface was modeled after the old system the operators were used to: one big on/off button, with the complexity hidden underneath. The theater team needed to worry about the production on stage, not the HVAC equipment running it. (For the lineage behind EcoStruxure — Andover, TAC, Continuum, and Athena’s EcoXpert partnership going back to the TAC era — see the Schneider Electric Brands Insight.)
One more wrinkle: running new control wiring through a historic-register building means damaging preserved interiors. Athena specified Zigbee-protocol battery-powered wireless sensors throughout. No wire runs. No drilling through plaster. The historic interior stays untouched.
“With our old chiller system, the various spaces throughout the property would experience a warm, swampy atmosphere. Now with LG’s new system in place, we can easily set individualized temperature settings for each room to create peak comfort for our occupants through the entire property.”
Philip Miller, then General Manager & COO, The Ebell of Los Angeles (retired)
Why this project ended up everywhere.
LG published a video white paper on the project in August 2019. The full case study followed in early 2020. LG carried the Ebell to the 2020 ASHRAE show in Las Vegas as a featured exhibit (right before COVID shut everything down). Yahoo Finance ran a piece. KTLA covered the Ebell during Women’s History Month with the new system as backdrop.
LG doesn’t put many projects on the national stage. The Ebell made it because the design solved several problems most retrofits don’t have to confront simultaneously — preservation, capacity variance, humidity, ramp-up speed, controls integration, and a footprint constraint that ruled out the rooftop. And because it was, at the time, the largest LG AHU project ever completed in North America. Scale and constraint, in one project.
What we took away from it.
Seven years on, the Ebell remains the cleanest example we have of the work Athena does best — projects where the constraint set rules out the easy answer and the engineering becomes the differentiator. The design started with the building, not the equipment. LG Multi V 5, custom AHUs, EcoStruxure controls, Zigbee sensors — every choice followed from a constraint.
Athena still maintains the system today. Same controls team that programmed the EcoStruxure front-end. Same service techs that installed the VRF condensers. The Ebell prefers it that way. So do we — the system was designed by the people who still know how it works.
The pragmatic takeaway.
Historic buildings are a particular kind of HVAC problem. The shell is fixed. The infrastructure is whatever the previous era left behind. The path forward usually has more constraints than options. The engineering job isn’t to find the most efficient system in a catalog — it’s to find the most efficient system that fits the actual building.
If you’ve got a building like the Ebell — historic, complicated, full of constraints — that’s the kind of work Athena was built for. Email info@athenaengineering.com or call 909-599-0947.
