The Last Party at Bootsy Bellows

Three lives of a Sunset Strip nightclub: dark vaudeville, a mid-era refresh, and a Palm Springs dream that kept the puppets alive.

The reopened Bootsy Bellows interior with pastel seating, plants, and a mirrored bar.

Bootsy Bellows after its 2019 Palm Springs-inspired redesign. Photo by Elizabeth Daniels via Eater LA.

Bootsy Bellows deserved a better goodbye than a quiet dark room on Sunset. For 14 years, the club at 9229 West Sunset Boulevard shape-shifted through three distinct identities, each one a snapshot of what Los Angeles nightlife wanted at the time.

The original Bootsy Bellows opened in 2012 as a partnership between h.wood Group founders John Terzian and Brian Toll and actor David Arquette, who named the club after his mother Mardi “Bootsy” Arquette, a former burlesque dancer and pinup model. It took over the corner of Sunset and Sweetzer that had previously housed Trousdale, Foxtail, and before that, Bar One — the same room where tabloids once tracked the Brat Pack. The first iteration was pure Weimar-meets-Rat Pack: dark Art Deco interiors, velvet banquettes, a hidden VIP room, and live burlesque dancers alongside the puppet shows that became the club’s signature calling card. It was the kind of place where Katy Perry and Robert Pattinson could be in the same room without anyone making it weird, and where the rope outside felt exclusive without being hostile.

A wide view of the Bootsy Bellows lounge with banquettes, greenery, and ceiling fixtures.

The whole room at Bootsy Bellows after the 2019 reopening. Photo by Elizabeth Daniels via Eater LA.

By 2015, the room was due for a refresh. Eater LA reported in February of that year that Bootsy Bellows would close for a summer relaunch — a “Volume 2” that moved the DJ booth, reupholstered the booths, and tightened the layout without changing the fundamental formula. At that point the club had been open for three years, which in nightlife terms is an eternity. The refresh worked well enough to buy the room another four years, but the bones were the same: dark, clubby, and built around the idea that celebrities wanted to slip in through a back door and disappear into a private corner.

That assumption fell apart by 2019. When Bootsy Bellows closed again in August 2018 for a full-scale renovation, the h.wood Group made a bet that the old model was finished. Brian Toll told the Hollywood Reporter that celebrities had stopped wanting to hide. “They want to be on Instagram, they call the paparazzi on themselves,” he said. So the VIP room was gutted, the velvet and black were stripped out, and the entire space was flipped inside out.

A Bootsy Bellows seating area with painted walls, potted plants, and pastel upholstery.

Greenery and pastel seating inside the final Bootsy Bellows redesign. Photo by Elizabeth Daniels via Eater LA.

John Sofio of Built, Inc. led the redesign, and the result looked nothing like what had come before. The third Bootsy Bellows, which reopened in April 2019, replaced the dark Art Deco lounge with a desert modernist fantasy straight out of Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs compound. Peach walls, pastel couches, house plants everywhere, custom hand-painted wallpaper featuring bird-of-paradise plants, mirrored bar faces bouncing light across the room, a sloped ceiling, chandeliers, and a layout that funneled everyone into a single open room instead of sequestering celebrities in back. Drake’s personal sound engineer tuned the DJ booth. The puppet shows stayed — that was the one thread Arquette insisted on keeping — but everything else was new. The room had gone from a burlesque hideaway to a bright Palm Springs living room where the party was the point of being seen.

That third era ran from 2019 until early 2025, when Bootsy Bellows went dark for good. The h.wood Group later confirmed the space would become Little Luck, its first Japanese concept, but the story worth lingering on is the club that made the room famous.

Bootsy Bellows had a longer run than most nightclubs get, especially on the Sunset Strip, where venues cycle faster than the headlights on the boulevard. It managed to die three different times and come back as something the room had not tried before. That is the interesting part. Most clubs pick a lane and stay there until the crowd moves on. Bootsy kept remaking itself until the building itself was ready for something else entirely.

Go For

  • A reminder of what Sunset Strip nightlife looked like across three different eras.
  • The puppet show lore — Arquette’s vaudeville fixation was genuine and weird and gave the room its only throughline.
  • The rare nightclub that kept reinventing itself without sanding off the strange part.

Know Before

  • It is gone. Do not show up at 9229 Sunset expecting a drink.
  • Treat this as a remembrance, not a current recommendation.

Sources And Photo Credit