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Architects: Design, Bitches
- Area: 4000 ft²
- Year: 2015
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Photographs:Laure Joliet
Text description provided by the architects. Program
A full-service restaurant and bar with a vintage arcade. Button Mash is intended to be an integral and vibrant neighborhood hub for all ages with a design that showcases a careful curation of arcade games and stellar creative cuisine.
The layout is segmented into three distinct areas that are visually interconnected and geometrically interlocking; each with varying seating types that encourage interaction, exchange, and shared experiences.
Design
Located in a ubiquitous strip mall along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, the neighborhood is rich with a varied history and recent transformative change. The overall design is rooted in multiple LA-centric time periods with nods to the 1980s and 1990s in material and color choices, mixed with the local haunt feel resonant in film noir classics like “Chinatown”. These inspirations and influences intertwine with post-modern design and pop cultural references to create a maximal timeless experience- an Elysian Drift.
The bold exterior paint color is historically common in the neighborhood where a variety of bright spots punctuate this stretch of Sunset Boulevard. A kaleidoscopic journey through layers of transparency, reflectivity and pattern pull you in through a portal cut into the strip mall’s exterior, past the hand painted Talavera tiles and round window that bring visitors into an otherworldly tunnel filled with a dense custom wallpaper by artist Joseph Harmon.
On the interior banquettes are covered with camel colored vinyl and plywood paneling; smokey mirror, marmoleum, and dark brown are all nods to the noir mystique and a contemporary version of police academy haunts of the past. Interior details reflect a mash-up of both local real and fictionalized influences juxtaposing post-modern laminate with brass foot rails, marmoleum and oak wood paneling, and vermilion powder coated steel with camel colored vinyl. Unusual material exploration is playfully scattered throughout the space from painted battens on wood paneling, hand-painted artwork to pyramidal acoustic foam and 3D coffered ceiling patterns made of homosote.
“This part of Sunset Boulevard is home to colorful punctuations in an otherwise unassuming and unspectacular streetscape,” Johnson and Rudolph explained. “A vibrantly eccentric internal life has always marked what we love about the neighborhood.”
