Entertainment & Hospitality
Wilshire Ebell Theatre of Los Angeles
VRF and BAS retrofit for a 99-year-old performing arts venue.
Client
The Ebell Club of Los Angeles
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Service Line
Judy Garland was discovered on the Ebell stage — eleven years old, 1933, signed to MGM by the end of the night. The Wilshire Ebell Theatre has hosted Earhart, Stravinsky, and Michelle Obama since. What it didn’t have, until 2019, was cooling that worked.
The Ebell of Los Angeles is one of the oldest women’s clubs in the country, founded in 1894, its 1927 clubhouse and 1,238-seat theater on the National Register of Historic Places. And it was cooling one room by leaving another empty. The original plant — a water-cooled chiller, a tower, and boilers — couldn’t serve the theater and the dining room at once, so staff gave up the rental income on whichever space they sacrificed that day. Portable units covered the rest. For a woman-owned firm hired by one of the oldest women’s clubs in America, the job came with a little extra meaning.
The historic designation ruled out the obvious fix. No rooftop units, nothing visible on the exterior — the architecture is the protected feature. The new system had to live in the basement footprint of the old chiller, with condensers tucked discreetly into the building’s exterior pockets. And the building is essentially a concrete heat sink: it soaks up solar gain all day and releases it into a theater that’s empty one night and packed the next, with humidity loads that swing just as hard.
Athena came on as the design-builder and specified LG’s Multi V 5 VRF with custom LG air handlers — modular zoning for the wild swings in occupancy, compact condensers that fit where preservation allowed, deep coils to pull the moisture down, and variable-speed compressors that could bring a cold building up to temperature in hours. Four Multi V 5 systems and twelve condensing modules outside; custom AHUs sized to the basement, each delivering over 42 tons of heating and cooling. We self-performed both the HVAC and the building automation, working alongside DMG Corporation and M. Weber & Associates. At the time, it was the largest LG air handler project completed in North America.
At the time, it was the largest LG air handler project completed in North America.
The controls run on Schneider EcoStruxure, programmed by our own team to look like the system the operators already knew — one big on/off button, the complexity hidden underneath. The theater staff has a production to worry about, not a compressor. And since you don’t drill through preserved plaster, we ran the sensors on battery-powered Zigbee wireless: no new wire, no damage to the historic interior.
Athena still maintains the system today. Same controls team that programmed it, same techs who set the condensers. Read the full case study here.
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