Larry Green's workday begins before sunrise, when construction crews gather around plans for One Beverly Hills and the decisions made before breakfast can affect one of the country's most ambitious development projects.
As senior managing director for Cain Development, Green is overseeing the 17.5-acre campus as it takes shape along Wilshire Boulevard. The project is slated to include the Aman Beverly Hills hotel and residences, a development that includes a reimagined Beverly Hilton, luxury retail and 10 acres of botanical gardens and open space woven into a single destination near Rodeo Drive.
The project — a venture between Cain and Eldridge Industries — has an estimated gross development value of roughly $10 billion, making it one of the largest mixed-use developments ever attempted in Southern California.
Cain recently secured about $4.3 billion in construction financing led by JPMorgan Chase and VICI Properties, one of the largest capital raises for a Los Angeles development in recent years.
Yet Green insists his role extends beyond buildings.
“People always ask me about buildings,” Green told CoStar News. “I do buildings and I do placemaking, but probably what I do best is put teams together and make sure they’re communicating well.”
That philosophy shapes much of Green's work. On any given day, he may meet with city officials, contractors, hotel operators, luxury residential buyers and retailers, all while coordinating construction around the still-operating Beverly Hilton.
For Green, One Beverly Hills is less a new challenge than the culmination of a career spent studying why certain places become woven into people’s lives while others remain just expensive pieces of real estate.
The architecture of everyday life
That lesson began at mall owner Westfield. Green's father, Richard Green, was the Australian company’s first U.S. hire, and Larry joined as the operator expanded from a small collection of shopping centers into one of the country’s most influential developers.
Unlike many competitors, Westfield designed, engineered and developed projects largely in-house, exposing Green to every stage of that process — from conceptual planning to operations after opening day.
“It was a training ground like no other,” Green said.
One of his early projects sat only a few miles away from One Beverly Hills, with the redevelopment of what is now Westfield Century City, widely recognized as one of the country's most valuable malls.
When the company transformed the aging mall into an open-air destination, it wasn’t simply adding retailers. It was looking to create an urban gathering place surrounded by offices, apartments and hotels while navigating nearby residents, active businesses and one of Los Angeles’ busiest commercial districts.
Many of those same challenges exist today at One Beverly Hills, where construction unfolds in one of the world’s most recognizable luxury corridors and alongside the Beverly Hilton, a property that continues to host the Golden Globes, the Milken Global Conference and hundreds of other events each year.
But Green says some of his most important lessons came from places outsiders might dismiss as simple shopping centers.
At the Brentwood Country Mart, where Green is a longtime partner through L Green Investments, mornings unfold less like retail and more like neighborhood theater. Parents stop for coffee after school drop-offs. Neighbors pick up packages at the post office before browsing boutiques. Someone gets shoes repaired while another buys flowers.
The roughly 60,000-square-foot property operates as a neighborhood crossroads where restaurants, boutiques, a post office, toy store and other daily-use tenants encourage visitors to linger. Its role in the community is so important, Green said, that ownership has resisted replacing lower-rent uses with more lucrative tenants.
"We could make a lot more money taking the post office out of the Brentwood Country Mart and turning it into a retail shop," Green said. "But we think we would lose an important element of that property and why people come there and rely on it."
Green believes the best developments succeed when they become part of people's daily routines rather than places they visit only occasionally. Beverly Hills doesn't currently have "that sort of place."
Building an ecosystem
Rather than treating the Aman hotel, branded residences, Beverly Hilton, retail and gardens as separate assets, Green’s team is attempting to create a single ecosystem where each component strengthens the others.
For Green, Aman provides the project’s defining ingredient.
The luxury hospitality brand has built an international reputation for resorts where architecture, landscaping and service are designed to create a feeling of calm. Cain’s ownership stake in Aman means the relationship extends beyond a traditional hotel management agreement and influences decisions throughout the broader campus.
“Aman is really the magic here,” Green said. “When you go into an Aman property, you feel differently. There’s a sense of calmness that comes over your body.”
The final test
For now, Green’s days are designed to remove obstacles before they reach the job site — clearing the way for what is now a projected 2028 opening.
“You know when a job is going well and you know when it’s not,” he said. “Right now we have a job that is really starting to hum.”
Still, he insists deadlines will never outweigh quality.
“We will not compromise on the quality of the delivery,” Green said. “This is a long-term investment.”
In many ways, One Beverly Hills is the largest expression yet of an idea Green has spent decades refining.
"The legacy is going to be all of the people that we've touched along the way that now take the lessons of One Beverly Hills and go do it again somewhere else," he said.