The coolest bathrooms in Los Angeles provide more than a rest stop they thrust a person into worlds of intrigue and humor.

There are the spooky bathrooms, like the Mondrian’s, with its stark, unsmiling portraits and eerie lighting. Or like Cafe La Boheme’s, with surreal paintings and haunted-house charm.

There is the cheerful kitsch of Buca di Beppo, offering hair-care products and the chance to eavesdrop on animated conversations in Italian. Nature lovers should check out Cha Cha Cha’s rainforest refuge, complete with leafy murals and piped-in birdcalls. Or visit Fred 62’s pop-art outhouse complete with stuffed birds flying over a full moon.

So join us in a tour of L.A.’s finest restrooms.

Beverly Hilton International Ballroom

Beverly Hills

Women’s Room

When Christine Lahti’s name was announced for Best Actress during the 1998 Golden Globe Awards, she wasn’t in the room. It turned out the “Chicago Hope” star was in the women’s room at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom, leading to a furious spate of ad-libbing by the show’s hosts.

After checking out this elaborate pink-marble sanctuary, it’s easy to see how she might have gotten distracted. Perhaps she was consumed in her own myriad reflections in all the mirrors surrounding the eight-sided room. Or maybe she was perfecting her makeup in the separate powder room, with large mirrors and padded chairs. Or reclining on one of the couches lining an interior hallway.

Install a refrigerator and shower and a person could live here.

Josh’s Mobil Service & Mart

Hollywood

When using the facilities at the average gas station, one does not expect to see faux-marble columns with gold-leaf accents, cascading artificial plants and walls painted pea green, with plaster plaques of Grecian beauties and a framed still-life of flowers. But Josh’s is not the average gas station. Owner/manager Eytan Rosenberg created the decor, which also includes a battery-operated air freshener, to show respect for customers.

“I was hoping people would go the extra mile to use the bathroom,” Rosenberg said. Sure enough, he said, sales have increased in the five years since he spruced up the john.

Cha Cha Cha Caf & #233;

Silver Lake

When you close the doors, you’re in the midst of a jungle. You hear birds twittering and the gentle fall of rain coming from a speaker. On the wall, a monkey howls as it scampers along the base of a banyan tree, a wasp’s hive threatens nearby and a tree frog perches on a branch, watching a toucan and parrot on the opposite wall.

Dagoberto Perez, 21, a waiter and cousin to General Manager Javier Anaya Prado, painted the murals. While the small side-by-side rooms don’t afford much privacy, they’re a hit with customers. Shawn Sylvian finds the bird sounds “very soothing. I like the fact that it’s green but enclosed and safe. You feel like you’re in nature.”

The House of Blues

West Hollywood

A reddish glow lights the six bathrooms here, including the foundation-level rooms of dark wood and floor-to-ceiling stalls, where you can wash your hands in leopard-skin print and mortared stone sinks and examine hand-carved Indian chests. The bathrooms at the music hall and restaurant levels feature colorful, hand-painted African and primitive art murals, stalls and sinks of non-skid steel plating, and mismatched cabana and barn doors. Evenings, a bathroom attendant sells gum and cigarettes and offers complimentary perfume and cologne.

The Mondrian

Perhaps the most unsettling restrooms in L.A., beginning with the illuminated “W” and “M” on the doors seemingly coming from nowhere. As you enter the rooms, an eerie pink or blue glow (depending on whether you’ve walked into “M” or “W”) washes over you, as stark black-and-white portraits embedded in the walls silently judge your bathroom activities.

“Sitting on a toilet, it’s like they’re watching you,” confides a hotel employee, who at dusk sets votive candles on the marble wash basins. Even the plumbing seems to have ghosts it flushes automatically.

Woe be to the woman who has to endure the stares of 17 portraits in the handicapped stall. If they desire, patrons can always express their discomfort, or anything else they want to communicate, on the orange-and-green writing walls, with chunks of colored chalk.

Mirabelle

West Hollywood

No bigger than a hall closet, this whimsical men’s room designed by Jay Payne features a sink that seems to be floating above the floor, made of hand-blown Italian blue glass with a light below that shines up through the bowl. There’s a mirror shaped like a woman’s torso and other strategically placed mirrors that allow patrons to see themselves from all angles.

The women’s bathroom offers equally good reflections, including those from a kidney-shaped mirror lined with green rope lighting that snakes its way into a steel fixture, reminiscent of a dentist’s lamp.

The Standard

The video of a businessguy flying over skyscrapers projected onto a lobby wall and two clocks labeled “Here” and “There” with a three-hour difference offer clues to the world you’re entering. Open the bathroom door and you find yourself in a yellow-lit Never-Neverland, where a wallpapered Tinkerbell flitters above Peter Pan, Wendy reads bedtime stories to the perpetual children clad in skunk-and-raccoon jammies, and a kid in a bunny suit charges forward with a toy sword.

Buca di Beppo

Pasadena

You’ll love these lavs for their kitschy humor. The men’s room, labeled “Goomba” Italian for guy offers a stall door adorned with a yellow-and-red volcano labeled “Pompei.” The room is a celebration of bare butts, with framed photos of guys dropping their trousers (memo to Beppo: You might think about adding male butts to the women’s room). Near the urinals, photos include a toddler relieving himself in the grass beside his sleeping mother. And several nuns read newspapers, while one wipes a kid’s behind. Michelangelo’s “David,” with a close-up of his privates adorned with a mouth and sunglasses, decorates the door.

The women’s room is reminiscent of grandma’s house, with flowered pink wallpaper and paintings of Cupid and Greek goddesses. In a vintage ad posted near the sink, a woman dances with a man, her face twisted. “Rancid Hair,” it accuses, “Are you guilty of this offense?”

Both the women’s and men’s sinks sport beauty products after shave and hair tonic for the guys, and clay mud pack with lemon cream facial cleaner for the ladies. And each gender gets the illusion of eavesdropping on conversations in Italian.

In the men’s room, speakers pipe in the voices of three women enthusing about the food, making it seem as though you’re listening to a conversation at a nearby table. And ladies get to hear Buca’s executive chef, Vittorio Renda, sing the praises of scaloppine marsala and break out into “That’s Amore.” Mouth watering.

If the Buca di Beppo outlets in Pasadena, Redondo Beach, Encino and Brea aren’t close enough, two more are opening in April in Santa Monica and at Universal CityWalk.

Caf & #233; La Boheme

West Hollywood

Like the bathrooms at the nearby Mondrian Hotel, these might make you shiver. In the men’s room hangs a painting of a blue moon crescent, melting into ghostly fingers that end in green-eyed cat visages. A companion piece in the women’s room both were painted by the owner’s wife, Cathy Berg depicts a red mask ending in tentacles with tiny sinister faces. Each features a mosaic-tiled sink, antique wall lamps, ornate mirrors and moldings, along with harlequin copper-and-green-striped walls in the men’s chamber. Gomez from “The Addams Family” would be pleased.

Fred 62 and Vida

Los Feliz

The first thing confronting the bathroom-goer at Fred 62 (founded by two guys named Fred who were both born in 1962) is a bit of gender confusion. On one side of the restaurant is a bathroom whose door handle is a Ken doll, with the initial “H” on the door. On the other is a Barbie-doll door pull and it also has a letter “H.”

So are men supposed to go to the Ken room while women go with Barbie? Not necessarily. The “H” stands for his or hers. These unisex pop-art lavs, co-designed by owners Fred Eric and Fred Sutherland, include Japanese pinball machines, and the larger Ken room exhibits a framed silkscreen by Devo keyboardist Mark Mothersbaugh depicting ’50s-style kids and this suggestion: “Make money while staying home, learn custom drapery in spare time.” Look up, and you’re confronted with an open ceiling featuring a strange tableau: a blossoming cherry branch surrounded by stuffed birds.

At Vida, also owned and designed by Eric, walking into the bathroom feels like stepping into an alley. The restrooms are dimly lit, with brick and faux-concrete walls and a window-framed mirror. The sinks are fashioned from Haitian bronze pots, with faucets made from pipes. There are shadow boxes in each room filled with curios, including the watch Eric’s mother wore on her wedding day and an old-fashioned shaving brush.

Eric says the ersatz outdoor settings “heighten the awareness. It’s the appreciation of the unexpected.”