Santee Court is one of the earliest and largest adaptive-reuse projects in Downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District — a block of brick, mid-rise textile-industry buildings originally constructed in 1912 for garment production and warehousing, brought back to life as a residential community while preserving the original early-20th-century architecture.
The structural challenge was the heart of the project: bringing century-old unreinforced masonry buildings up to modern life-safety standards through seismic rehabilitation per the City of Los Angeles Building Code, without destroying the historic fabric that made the buildings worth saving. That balance — strengthening original structures rather than replacing them — is precisely the work that qualified the project for Mills Act historic-property tax abatement and made the conversion possible.
The completed three-building, 165-unit apartment complex preserved the qualities of the original industrial architecture — 12-to-16-foot ceilings, exposed brick, sealed concrete floors, and floor-to-ceiling windows — while integrating a central cobblestone courtyard, rooftop amenities including a pool and fitness club, and 38,540 square feet of ground-floor retail. Existing tunnels beneath the block were integrated for secure internal circulation across the multi-building campus.
Santee Court helped shift the Fashion District from garment manufacturing toward mixed-use residential living, pioneering the courtyard-plus-tunnel urban-campus model and preceding the broader Downtown LA residential boom. It remains a flagship example of how disciplined structural engineering makes historic preservation and modern density possible on the same site.
Historic and redevelopment facts drawn from contemporary reporting and public redevelopment records. Engineering of record by Greg Riley.