The corner of Beverly and Gardner (7470 Beverly Boulevard) has been under construction for more than a year…and has been in transition for even longer.
The last sign of life in the space (other than construction workers) was back in August of 2012, when Old Navy turned the location into a pop-up store where the retailer held a promotion for their jean collection and gave away free pairs of jeans to the public. That promotion took place over the course of a weekend and since then the building has been empty, stripped to the brick and surrounded by plywood boards and scaffolding.
Architectural firm NMDA, under the leadership of Principal Neil Denari, has been busy at work creating a special showroom for their client Twentieth – a premier contemporary design shop that is currently down the road at Beverly and Crescent Heights.
According to NMDA’s overview of the project:
Twentieth is a 6,000 sf furniture showroom with support spaces located on Beverly Boulevard, one of Los Angeles’ busiest thoroughfares. Founded in 1999 by Stefan Lawrence, Twentieth has become Los Angeles’ most respected seller of vintage and new modern furniture. Lawrence commissioned NMDA to renovate a single story bowstring truss building, a classic structural type in the city. Lawrence asked for a 3D panelized surface that would bring unexpected effects through materiality and geometry.-
The scheme revolves around large punched windows deployed between perimeter columns and the bronze aluminum cladding that dramatizes these transparent moments with the impasto of its deep patterning. Black steel window frames combine with black plaster column covers to produce a graphic edge to the bronze field. Together, the overall ambition is to make a visually weighted, rather warm surface out of light weight metallic elements, a contrast that occurs within the array of furniture inside the showroom.
According to NMDA, the project will be complete in March.
Architectural Renderings of Finished Twentieth Design Space (click through)
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Photo credits: NMDA Website Project Photos.
Read more:
Modern Luxury Angeleno – Twentieth’s Second Act
Thanks  to reader Beth Valandra for asking about this building! If you see something out there you are curious about, send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll get after it.
