property

There’s a cross on the roof, stained glass in the windows and a choir loft upstairs, but this whitewashed three-level building near Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake is no longer a house of worship.

It’s the Hotel Lucile, a 25-room boutique lodging that opens Sept. 14 with a restaurant and bar in the high-ceilinged sanctuary where churchgoers once gathered. This opening follows more than a decade of controversy and transformation, including a community debate, bankruptcy and the arrival of a new hotelier in 2020.

It also brings further energy to the Sunset Junction area, Silver Lake’s main, walkable hub, which is already home to stylish spots including the Silver Lake Farmers Market, Taiwanese restaurant Pine & Crane, sports bar 33 Taps and the Photobooth Museum.

Dining room in Sous Sous restaurant.

The new hotelier is Los Angeles-based Casetta Group, which specializes in adapting older structures and has six properties in California and New Mexico, including the Surfrider Hotel in Malibu and Casa Cody in Palm Springs.

When guests arrive at Hotel Lucile, they will find many reminders that the building was constructed as Bethany Presbyterian Church in 1931. But those guests will also see plenty of updates, including 25 guest rooms in the space that once held a church school; a small pool (about 15 feet square); and a rotating display of more than 100 contemporary artworks (many for sale). The organ loft is now a meeting space. The choir loft is retooled as a zone for coffee and drinks. The rooftop is a lounge with downtown views.

After serving as a church for most of the 20th century under varying names, the building was informally adapted for multiple uses, including spells as an antique shop, filming location and the backdrop for interactive horror theater experience “Delusion.”

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1. Bathroom inside a suite. 2. Desk inside a premium king room. 3. Sitting area inside a suite. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

“The building has lived several lives,” Hotel Lucile general manager Anthony Gutierrez said in an email. “It has always been a place for people to gather.”

The establishment fell idle as developer Dana Hollister took over the lease and sought city permits to convert it into a hotel with alcohol and dancing. Despite opposition from many neighboring homeowners and businesses alarmed by possible traffic impacts, those permits were approved in 2014.

But Hollister declared bankruptcy in 2018 and sold her interest in the property in 2020. That’s when the Casetta Group took over Hollister’s long-term lease from the Presbytery of the Pacific, which owns the property.

This church-to-commerce transition isn’t entirely unique. Across the city and the country, declining attendance has idled many religious buildings, often leading to conversions. In DTLA, the restaurant and event space known as Redbird + Vibiana was previously St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, deconsecrated by the Catholic Church after suffering damages in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. In Beachwood Canyon, the Monastery of the Angels was built as a private mansion and rebuilt by the Catholic Church in 1948 as a monastery. In early 2026, Homeboy Industries bought it from the church and began remaking it into Home of the Angels, a “recovery campus” for people impacted by trauma, substance use disorders and involvement in the justice system.

More church conversions may follow, thanks to California law SB4, passed in 2023 to allow faith-based groups and nonprofit colleges to avoid some local restrictions when converting buildings into affordable housing.

Meanwhile, the Hotel Lucile begins a new chapter, retaining interior arches, masonry, woodwork details and a rooftop cross that the hotel will keep alight at night. (The old church bell, however, will remain silent.)

Because the hotel has no on-site parking, it will rely upon valets and street parking (already tight in the neighborhood) to accommodate the cars of overnight guests and restaurant diners.

The rates begin at $441 nightly, plus a $50 amenity fee. To start, management is offering a “locals rate” of 15% off for guests who can show a California state ID.

“We did preserve as much as we could of the original beams and stained glass,” said Laney Langenstein, who oversees strategy and marketing for Casetta. Though guest rooms have minibars (curated by Erewhon and other partners), Langenstein noted that hotel staffers will also push a martini cart that will “go through the hallways and see if anybody thinks it’s cocktail hour.”

The dinner-only restaurant, Sous Sous, will draw upon cooking traditions of southern France and the American South, seating up to about 120, with occasional live music on the room’s stage. A hotel cafe will be open to guests for breakfast and lunch.

The new look of the hotel was produced by Casetta Hotels and design firm Electric Bowery. Children are permitted at the hotel, but not encouraged by the layout. (Of 25 rooms, 24 have a single king bed and one has two queens. Most rooms have showers, not tubs. There is one suite, which has its own courtyard patio and fountain.)

With an eye to potential expansion later, hotel management has also bought up one of the three immediately neighboring properties.

Meanwhile, now that the hotel is about to open, feelings among neighbors are mixed.

A booth at Sous Sous restaurant.

“When they tried to get a permit for the hotel, we all went to speak against it. But they got the permit,” said Jin Chang, longtime owner of nearby Big Mac’s Liquor on Sunset. Now, Chang said, he’s neutral about the hotel opening and relieved that his mini-mall has its own parking lot.

“What’s the definition of progress?” asked VJ Kesh, a longtime neighborhood resident. “Is this hotel a reflection of Silver Lake? Hell, yes. So I’m in favor.”

After more than three years behind bars, José Ignacio Moreno Suárez said he walked out of El Rodeo I prison last Friday with nothing to his name. “I have no house. These are my clothes; this is what I have left after three years. They took everything from me, everything I have,” he told reporter Maryorin Méndez at the prison gates, gesturing at what he was wearing. Moreno Suárez, the legal representative in Venezuela for Canadian miner Gold Reserve, was arrested in June 2023 for defending the company’s international arbitration claim for over $1 billion in expropriated assets. He was freed in the first round of political prisoner releases since the beginning of the US-brokered talks between the Rodríguez government and the opposition. 

Although we know no further details about Moreno Suárez’s case, we do know that it is one of many cases of this kind of systematic punishment against political prisoners and dissident figures. While the Rodríguez-Figuera table gets to boast about the releases, the regime has yet to answer for the houses and personal property it raided or seized from dozens of political figures and their relatives. Among them is Dinorah Figuera herself, president of the Delegate Commission in the ongoing negotiations with chavismo. As they begin releasing prisoners and readmitting exiles to take part in the talks, the question remains about whether these negotiations will give any of the houses back.

Charity in a stolen home

In May, chavista officials gathered in Los Palos Grandes to inaugurate the Casa de los Abuelos y Abuelas Indio Chacao, a new branch of the Gran Misión Abuelas y Abuelos de la Patria program for the elderly. Footage of the opening (and backlash against it) spread quickly, as the building they chose was once the family home of Lilian Tintori and Leopoldo López, the exiled founder of Voluntad Popular and once-popular opposition leader.

Back in March, Tintori had reported that authorities took over the house, emptied it of their belongings and started demolishing parts of it. The raid happened after López said in an interview that he supported the US military operation that captured Maduro and Cilia Flores.

“They took my house from me for assuming the presidency of the 2015 National Assembly,” Dinorah Figuera said recently.

The day after the inauguration, López answered with a video walking through what was done to his house. “This is the house where my children grew up, where we hold the memory of our family, the photos, the sheets, the furniture, the toys. This is the house where I spent a year and a half under arrest,” he said. The video, originally posted on May 30 to Leopoldo López’s account in collaboration with Voluntad Popular, was deleted this week. Tintori had already reported, in March, that the home was looted and structurally damaged, with personal objects removed, interior walls knocked down, and even the family’s pets disappeared. 

López clarified that he was not against this kind of assistance program, as he inaugurated similar centers during his time as mayor of Chacao. He condemned, however, that Rodríguez’s administration is now presenting this action as an ‘act of justice’ when, in his view, it represents a message of intimidation. “Recovering democracy also means recovering every citizen’s right to live, work, and return home in freedom and safety”, López wrote in his post.

House by house

Magalli Meda, campaign chief for María Corina Machado, had her family home raided in May 2025, days after she escaped from the Argentine embassy where she sheltered for over a year. Agents returned in February 2026, tagging the property “secured” and “seized.” GNB agents had raided Meda’s mother’s apartment in May 2025, stealing her car in the process. Machado’s personal assistant, Laura Acosta, also saw her main residence taken by force in March 2025, and formally confiscated a year later.

Those close to Antonio Ledezma— the former Caracas metropolitan mayor— lost multiple properties. In 2023, the National Anti-Corruption Police of Venezuela (PNCC) raided the Santa Rosa de Lima apartment he shared with his wife Mitzy Capriles, where Ledezma had lived under house arrest from 2015 until 2017, when he escaped the country. Neighbors told Ledezma that hooded men with long guns forced the lock, entered, and carried off boxes of his belongings. They left a sign on the door that read clausurado, sealed. Ledezma’s father-in-law’s vacation home in Naiguatá had already been seized before then. His stepdaughter Isabel González Capriles and her husband, former Chávez minister Andrés Izarra, were forcibly removed from their Quinta Los Gnomos in Caraballeda in 2020 and given a 15-day notice to remove their belongings. Three years later, the head of the DGCIM, Iván Hernández Dala, celebrated his wedding at the confiscated property. 

Diego Arria, the former governor, minister and UN ambassador during the Carlos Andrés Pérez administrations, faced two expropriations back in 2010 under Chávez’s guerra al latifundio policies: his Hacienda La Carolina in Yaracuy and Finca Los Azahares in Carabobo. Julio Borges’s home was raided in 2018 over his alleged link to the drone attack on Maduro, which stripped him of parliamentary immunity. Bony Pertiñez, wife of the jailed police commissioner Iván Simonovis, lost her home in 2019 through a precautionary seizure issued by a terrorism court and executed by the SEBIN.

But confiscations and raids are not confined to the country’s household-name dissidents. 

Former presidential candidate Enrique Márquez described the same process: “The police arrested me leaving my house, took my keys, and went in. They took my computer and personal effects… They stole money, kitchen appliances, clothes, paintings. They left us bankrupt.” When approached for an update on the state of the stolen goods, Márquez told Caracas Chronicles those belongings were never returned. 

And then there’s Dinorah Figuera, the opposition’s co-chair at the current negotiating table. In January 2023, the DGCIM raided her home and that of Auristela Vásquez, second vice president of the 2015 National Assembly. “At this moment my home in Los Rosales, Caracas, is being raided. Regime security agents, continuing their strategy of State terrorism, are adding one more act to their long list of human rights violations”, she tweeted. In June, Figuera confirmed she returned to Venezuela “having been stripped of a home” in an interview with Luis Olavarrieta: “They took my house from me for assuming the presidency of the 2015 National Assembly,” she recalled when asked about those who consider her a divisive figure within the opposition.

But confiscations and raids are not confined to the country’s household-name dissidents. 

José Breijo was a Uruguayan-Venezuelan former hotel manager held in Tocuyito Prison for two years on a terrorism charge. His alleged crime was taking a picture of a flag in an office where he believed Islamist groups met. The detention drew little attention until this May: after being granted house arrest, a photo of Breijo lying on a mattress at the entrance of his home started circulating on social media. One of the officers who arrested him had moved a family in. “It’s a very common police practice,” Breijo said. “They pick you up on the street, ask you a lot of questions, and if they realize you live alone, they send you to prison and take your house.” Unable to occupy the house the court ordered him to remain in, he risked being sent back to prison for failing to comply. He slept in the hallway for three days until, after several human rights organizations and activists denounced the situation, State authorities opened the doors to his house and handed José the keys. He passed away this month in that same apartment, at 71.

Even some chavistas were stripped of their property once their loyalties faded. Raúl Baduel was the general behind Chávez’s return to power after the 2002 coup, and then became his Minister of Defence in 2006. After breaking with Chávez the following year over proposed constitutional reforms, he was arrested in 2009, convicted on corruption charges and stripped of all his material goods. Baduel insisted the charges were pushed as a tool for political persecution. More recently, Tareck El Aissami, Simón Zerpa, and Samark López were deprived of their property because of their involvement in the PDVSA-crypto case of 2023.

The laws laundering the theft

Article 116 of the Venezuelan Constitution forbids confiscation, permitting it only by final judicial sentence and against those convicted of crimes against public property or enrichment through illicit trafficking. Still, the State built itself loopholes by declaring statutes to route around that protection.

Officers invoked one of three laws for the seizures (at least, whenever a legal basis was provided at all). The Organized Crime and Terrorism Financing Law, passed under Chávez in 2012, is used to target exiles: Article 58 allows a court to move from “preventive seizure” to permanent forfeiture after a year if the owner is deemed to have “abandoned” the property. On the other hand, the 2024 Libertator Law “against the imperial blockade” explicitly authorizes the confiscation of assets as a criminal penalty against anyone who supports or requests international sanctions against Venezuela.

The 2023 Asset Forfeiture Law (Ley de Extinción de Dominio) was born out of Maduro’s anti-corruption purge of El Aissami. The chavista National Assembly issued it to “establish mechanisms to identify, locate, and recover assets tied to illicit activity.” The law was first applied in February 2025 against an alleged corruption network within PDVSA, when a single court gave roughly 400 assets belonging to more than 100 people over to the State. The 462-page ruling never established when the alleged crimes took place, and inverted the presumption of innocence by forcing the accused to prove their assets were clean.

The US-sponsored negotiations are advanced by an opposition cohort of mostly exiles who have been permitted to return to take part in the talks, premised on “reconciliation” and on “verifiable” steps toward a restored democracy. While Figuera can now re-enter the country whose legitimate Assembly she once led, the properties seized from her circle have not been restored.

Restitution is a direct measure of whether “reconciliation” means anything concrete or is simply another buzzword to back transactions that leave the regime’s loot intact. A transition pushed by the US to partially restore investor confidence cannot leave the confiscations unaddressed. Doing so would ratify the theft and reward those behind the seizures with fresh capital. If the Trump administration intends to sell this process as a genuine opening, it must be prepared to say whether the property the regime took will be given back.

Almost three decades ago, Joe Timko and Randy Neece were wandering through Disneyland, saw Goofy trailing around the gardens and made the connection.

This, but for dogs?

A Disneyland-inspired wonderland for their canine counterparts is what they were thinking. Timko, who Neece describes as “the most impulsive person in the world,” had no hesitation.

“That’s what we should do!” he says.

Dogs run around at the Wonderland yard.

That offhand vision has since expanded into Canyon View Ranch, a five-acre luxury retreat tucked into the hills of Topanga that its clients refer to as Disneyland for canines. Designed by married couple Timko and Neece, who worked as a trainer and TV game show director, respectively, this dog boarding retreat is like no other. Think multiple bone-shaped pools, a chauffeured shuttle service, behavioral and weight loss programs, 35 feet of underground tunnels and dedicated lands à la Disneyland, including Adventureland for the bigger hounds and Munchkinland for the little ones and older sports.

Dogs here wake promptly at 5 a.m. for morning exercise, eat breakfast at 6, take scheduled naps at 8, enjoy a “biscuit break” at 5:30 p.m. and are finally tucked in for “lights out” at 8. Ranch activities include hurtling through agility courses, swimming beneath a massive artificial waterfall and roaming sprawling fantasy playgrounds built expressly for their entertainment.

A map of the ranch drawn by Nina Rae Vaughn, the same artist who illustrates Disneyland’s official park maps.

(Canyon View Ranch)

Dog owners say that as soon as they pull into the driveway, their pups realize exactly where they’re headed and “start going bonkers,” says Neece. When they’re let loose, they enter Canyon View Ranch with the abandon of children running down Main Street, U.S.A.

Getting to the ranch requires a journey up winding hills, past signs that read “Please Be Kind,” on roads flanked by cacti, chaparral and coastal sage scrub. It looks nothing like the city.

Today, Canyon View Ranch boards around 60 dogs at once, often with a waiting list stretching six months or longer. There is no limitation on how long they can stay, and many of the dogs I meet today have been here for several weeks, totaling thousands with the ranch’s $100 nightly rate. Dogs travel from all over to get here, from Las Vegas to Dubai. Their owners include schoolteachers and secretaries alongside some of Los Angeles’ wealthiest families.

“We could be watching over all the jewelry in their safe,” Neece says, “and it wouldn’t matter as much as their dog.”

On this Wednesday morning, Neece and Timko lead the way through the property. Neece is calmly and casually kind, like a faithful bloodhound without jowls. Timko is sprightly, a live-wire Chihuahua. The two of them live on-site in what looks like a family home straight out of a 1990s Disney film, a white colonial home with blue shutters. There are 20 staff on-site. For Neece and Timko, the job is 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Munchinkland is for smaller and less energetic dogs at Canyon View Ranch.

Dogs follow animal care specialist John Highland.

“I have the best job in the world,” says John Highland, former veterinary technician and now one of the ranch’s animal care specialists, as the dogs stream into Adventureland.

A great many dogs run up to me, tails wagging, tongues lolling. Neece and Timko lead me eastward of Adventureland toward the dandelion-headed alpacas, Stumbelina and Sparkle. Other animals on-site include a stable full of horses and Cowboy the tortoise, who is about the size of a lawnmower and whose head protrudes from what looks like a Venus flytrap made of bone.

“They help bring the flavor of fun, and that’s exactly what we want to do here,” Neece says. “We want it to be an escape, just like Disneyland.”

Neece was raised 15 minutes away from Disneyland and developed an obsession with it early on. “I’ve read every book imaginable,” he says. “I have this really deep appreciation for Walt Disney’s vision.”

Every detail of Canyon View Ranch evokes the legendary Anaheim theme park. The property has its own illustrated map, drawn by Nina Rae Vaughn, the same artist who illustrates Disneyland’s official park maps. The dogs’ sleeping quarters are modeled after the park’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with its fort-like corridors made of sun-dried brick, the walls strewn with overgrown jungle vines. At Christmas, snow machines cover the grounds while lights are strung through the trees and holiday music plays all day.

The Disney vision has now come full circle. Several members of the Disney family are clients: Roy P. Disney and his wife, Sheri. His sister, Susan Disney Lord, is also a client, along with her children.

Canyon View Ranch even has what Neece describes as its own “Mickey Mouse”: Max the Tibetan terrier. A statue of him sits out front, honoring the first dog Timko and Neece owned together. “Usually, Tibetan terriers come in black and white, but we wanted Max, who came in earth tones, because he matched the furniture,” says Neece. The terrier, it turned out, was a champion, and the owner wouldn’t sell him unless the couple promised to show him. They agreed, and in 1997, Max won best of breed at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. “All of this started because we made the decision to buy that dog,” says Timko.

Randy Neece, left, and Joe Timko spent years creating a “doggie Disneyland.”

Neece and Timko gaze over the canyon view from which inspired the ranch’s name. After 26 years, they’ve watched three generations of dogs come and go. “One of the things we didn’t count on when we started this was the emotional toll,” says Neece. “Yeah,” Timko adds, “every loss hurts.”

“When Max died, Joe struggled for weeks,” says Neece. “I later realized that a lot of it translated into him worrying about losing me next.”

In the late 1980s, while still working on TV sets, Neece learned he was HIV positive. “It was a death sentence then,” he says.

Larger dogs play in the Wonderland yard.

He survived, one of a comparatively small number of his generation who did. He returned to television briefly, working on two more game shows, one of which included one of his biggest paychecks. (“‘Match Game’ built Canyon View Ranch,” he laughs.)

But something had shifted. “When you go through something like that,” he says, “you really start taking inventory of your life. There’s something about that that frees you up to take a risk. I was ready to reinvent myself.”

The couple sold their house in Laurel Canyon and bought the Topanga property in the late ’90s from Melissa Sue Anderson, who had played Mary Ingalls on “Little House on the Prairie.” Slowly, year after year, they planted every tree alongside ranch foreman David Barrios, dug every tunnel, built every waterfall and themed land, until the place began to resemble the idea they’d first imagined while watching children crowd around Goofy.

Now, late in this hot August afternoon, dogs of every size race through underground tunnels and emerge from the other side even more manically happy than when they entered. The Pomeranian munchkins in Munchkinland skitter around, sniffing wagging butts. A Labrador sprays his friends with water soaked into his fur from the bone-shaped pool. If there is such a thing as the Rainbow Bridge, Canyon View Ranch must be what it looks like on the other side.

Dogs dip in a pool and follow John Highland at Canyon View Ranch.