The first thing we noticed when we walked into 5975 Santa Monica Boulevard in 2023 was the ceilings. Thirty feet of wood-trussed open space, factory-glass windows along the entire north wall pulling in afternoon light, polished concrete floors stained the color of dried bourbon. The building had been empty for years. The realtor, who had clearly given up on it, mentioned almost in passing that the original use — the use the building was actually built for, in the early 1920s — was as a mortuary.
We bought it that week.
1920–1938: the original use
Hollywood in the early 1920s was a small, ambitious neighborhood at the western edge of an LA that hadn't yet sprawled. Santa Monica Boulevard was the southern edge. The block we sit on was, at the time, a stretch of light-industrial buildings serving the working population of Hollywood — print shops, mechanic garages, a few small warehouses. And one mortuary, built around 1922, with the high ceilings and natural light that mortuaries in that era required for embalming work.
The building served the neighborhood through Prohibition, the Depression, and into the back end of the 1930s. We have copies of two of the original signed certificates of death the mortuary processed, which we've framed and hung in the staff room. Reading them is a strange experience. They're so quiet — just names, dates, addresses we recognize.
1938–97: prop house, sound stage, paperwork
By the late 1930s, the mortuary closed and the building was bought by a family in the film industry who used it as a prop and set storage warehouse. The high ceilings that worked for embalming worked equally well for storing oversized props — painted backdrops, period furniture, the bones of small soundstage sets. Over the next sixty years it served as set storage for production companies whose names are mostly forgotten now. Then it became, briefly, a sound stage. Then a courier company's depot. Then office storage. Then — for almost a decade — nothing.
Long-vacant Hollywood industrial buildings have a particular look. Dust on every surface, a small flock of pigeons in the rafters, a few decades of pencil graffiti from teenagers who broke in. We bought it as it was.
2024: the rebuild
The decision to put a copper pot still in the room came before we'd finished the lease paperwork. The room felt distillery-shaped. We spent most of 2024 doing seismic retrofitting, electrical, fire suppression that's compliant with a working still, and a slow, careful refurbishment of the tasting room — long communal tables, a rebuilt bar, the factory windows cleaned and re-glazed.
We bought a 1,000-gallon copper Vendome pot still from Louisville, Kentucky. Vendome is the legendary American copper still maker, and they've built equipment for most of the major Kentucky bourbon producers and a wave of craft distillers across the country. The still arrived on a flatbed truck in September 2024. It took three days to get it through the front door, which is the right size for moving caskets but not the right size for a twenty-foot column of polished copper. We had to remove the front façade temporarily.
2025: the door opens
We opened in 2025 — the first working distillery inside Hollywood in nearly a century. Tours run Thursday through Sunday. The space feels different at every time of day: the morning light through the north windows is shadowless and cool, the afternoon light comes warm through the west, the evening tasting room glows under Edison-bulb cafe lighting strung across the ceiling.
We don't dwell on the building's first use. It comes up on tours, sometimes, when a guest asks about the high ceilings or the unusual proportions. We tell the story honestly: a mortuary became a prop house became, after eighty-five years of various uses, a distillery. The bones of the room have been doing slightly different work for a hundred years.
What we like about the story is the continuity. The building has always been a place where careful, slow work happens. The work just has different inputs now — grain and dates and copper instead of caskets and embalming fluid. And the result is something we can put in your hand and you can taste.
If you want to see the room, our visitor guide walks through what to expect on a tour, or you can book one directly.