WHILE WAITING TO check into The Standard, restlessness is rarely an option. You can, for one, eavesdrop on a staffer confirming a casting call for a guest. Or accidentally glance at the moonlighting model sprawled in a vitrine behind the front desk. For the sheepish, a piece of art behind her doubles as an excuse for leering.

This being L.A. and The Standard heralded as an accessible embodiment of the town since it opened in 1999, the guests’ other senses are engaged with equal gusto. If you arrive in the evening, a deejay spins non-intrusive beats as the lobby fills with Sunset Strip carousers looking to plop down with a strawberry martini on the floor-to-ceiling shag carpeting while waiting for the Sky Bar or Viper Room to heat up.

The hungry queue at the 24-hour Standard Café peruse menus and sake lists. Take the long way to your room to overhear tales of pilot audition strikeouts, or how Lenny Kravitz is coming by later, or to get a quick view of the City of Lights from the blue Astroturf deck, complete with heated pool. Art films project on the walls, turning the converted retirement home’s three floors of clean, white hallways into living extensions of hotelier André Balazs’s vision that hotels are not hideaways, but theatres with casts of hundreds.

It doesn’t matter that you’re from the suburbs, because for US$125 you can feel like a hip, insider right up until checkout. While Angelenos get the bouncer once-over at the glass door, your navy room key is your pass to VIP-dom.

Rooms range from US$125 to US$215. Suites start at US$650.