Alfred Coffee, Venice Beach, Los Angeles – USA

Alfred Coffee creator Josh Zad came to Los Angeles firm Studio Sucio with a growing brand known for high energy esthetics, and his own fanaticism for design. Alfred already had a few distinctive interior elements in its bag of tricks—floral wallpapers, square ceramic tiles, neon, and some homey touches. Studio Sucio partners Fernando and Leslie tasked with building the brand’s interior design language took a look at the Venice Beach location felt the neighborhood calling. Fernando had lived many years in the neighborhood as a student at SCI arc and came pre-wired to channel the area’s history of the punkish deconstructivism that changed architecture in the 80s. Leslie knew that the Venturi Scott Brown’s floral pattern known as ‘Grandmother’ had to be the wallpaper. Studio Sucio reached out to DSB, and amazingly, the nonagenarian was game to lend her pattern to the project. What’s more, she offered her own photography of the neighborhood from the 60s as the artwork framed on the walls. The Alfred/Sucio team’s minds were blown.
The bones of the interior were lifted from the neighborhood; a hotbed of 70s and 80s post modern architecture where little beach bungalows from the 1920s got chopped and added to. Frank Ghery’s metamorphosis of a 20s bungalow into a shredded fantasy of raw wood studs and tile provided a key precedent. The designers turned the store front into a hang-out porch (in a building designed by later legends Konig Eisenberg, where Fernando once worked) of plywood and tile and created a new beach house style entry façade within. Raw joists and plywood provided stripped elements against the painted paned glass cottage doors. Off the shelf basic 4×4 ceramic tiles gilded the space in the cheap construction language beloved by the post modernists of the 70s and 80s area. On the walls, Denise Scott Brown’s photos of the banal living beauty of early capitalist decline provided the baseline and the punctuation. Post Modern junkies Studio Sucio had the monument they longed for. Alfred Coffee got the neighborhood anchor they were looking for.