White palm trees

If you’re an avid social media user  or follow a lot of bloggers, you’ve most likely seen many of them making photo shoots or taking pictures of a white building and/or white palm trees, right? Well, that’s actually how I found out about them too and wondered, “what is this place and why is it all white”?

So, I started looking into it. This place was previously the Sunset Pacific Motel but better known as the ‘Bates Motel’ (yes, like the one in the movie Psycho) to locals because it is located on the corner of Sunset Blvd and Bates Avenue.

When the Sunset  Pacific Motel existed, it was known for drugs, prostitution, and murders.  At the time, it was known as one of Los Angeles’ most dangerous spots and after local complaints, authorities finally closed it as a nuisance property in 2002.

Since then, the property was an eyesore and every time French artist Vincent Lamouroux passed by the run down property, he wanted to do something with it as part of his art projects. Eventually he decided to completely (including the billboard sign and the palm trees) cover them in lime wash as part of his piece of art called ProjectionLA. You can read more about that here.

So when I was planning my girls day out for my previous post, I decided to visit this place since I would be in the area. We went and took some pictures. The pictures look awesome because of the contrast between the white building & white palm trees against the blue sky. We were actually lucky that there were no clouds that day which made for a better contrast in pictures.

The color of the sky shows as different shades of blue because of the angles and of how the sun was positioned at the moment.

In some of the pictures you can see how the lime wash is starting to fade away already. The motel will eventually be torn down and replaced with a new development so if you’d like to check it out, now is the time!