Villa Riviera, French Gothic residential building in Long Beach, California.

Villa Riviera is a 16-story steel-framed building at Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach, completed in 1928 at a cost of $2.75 million. Architect Richard D. King's prize-winning design mixes Tudor Gothic with French and Italian Renaissance detail. The facade is a grid of rectangular windows above a row of tall arched openings, topped by a steep verdigris copper roof with dormers and a central white octagonal tower and cupola.

Built in 1928 at a cost of $2.75 million, the Villa Riviera opened with a grand party in January 1929 as a luxury cooperative apartment-hotel. The Great Depression soon cut demand, and control passed to the mortgage company, which rented out many units. Its steel frame, designed by McClintic-Marshall, came through the 1933 Long Beach earthquake with only cracks and fallen plaster.

The name Villa Riviera and the 1928 brochure's promise of "Tudor Gothic" with French and Italian Renaissance touches shaped how residents and the city described the building. Its lobby was known as the "Umbrella Room," and residents once had a private beach and food stand. The four grotesque types on the upper corners are a bear with a shield, a cougar, an eagle, and a winged chimera with a wolf's head and bird's body.

The building stands on Ocean Boulevard in the Alamitos Beach neighborhood, its 277-foot tower visible from much of the surrounding area. It is a private condominium residence of about 134 units, so interiors, the roof garden and the garage are not open to visitors; the facade and grotesques are seen from the street.

The steel skeleton was built by McClintic-Marshall, which used 1,000 tons of Bethlehem steel, more than required, and encased it in concrete. The firm went on to design the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. The foundation used a central trench with radiating side trenches filled with concrete, topped by 45 stepped bases for the vertical beams.