How did the look of the hotel from the outside come about?

We knew that we were going to need an exterior of this hotel location and on the first season we shot an episode entitled I Fall To Pieces at a building on Wiltshire Boulevard that we all liked the look of. It�s called the Los Altos apartments, it�s a famous old apartment building where Marian Davies, William Randolph Hurst�s girlfriend used to live.

David Greenwalt said "I like the exterior of that apartment building. If you want to model your interior off that a bit, we�ll have a place we know we is more or less film-friendly" .

Once we�re inside the hotel, that world exists only on stage, but we matched the front doors, they�re exact duplicates, and the back garden is reminiscent of the back garden in the apartments. So we can go to the apartments and film the cars coming and going, Angel, Cordelia, Gunn or Wesley coming and going out of the front of the exterior, and then we cut to the interior of the hotel, and it all works fairly seamlessly.