AB design studio was asked to design a soothing yet chic interior space for the Wynn Day Spa. The Wynn Day Spa is a full service spa located in Los Angeles, California. The spa has three distinct programs: an acrylics station for manicures, a spa area for pedicures, and a massage area. The plan is laid out with the most frequently used areas located in the front and the private massage spaces toward the rear.
Located on the busy 2nd Street in Belmont Shoes (Long Beach), CA, this shoe store focuses on high-end women’s shoes and accessories. The founder gave us this task: \”display shoes in a new, modern, chic way…someway that I have never seen before!\” We began with creating a simple palette of colors and forms with soft edges and decorative lighting. Ipe wood was integrated into the design as a way to warm up the interiors and bring nature in from the exterior.
AB design studio creating a high-design | high-tech space for a new pediatric dental office in Southern California, named simply as “Sugarbug.” Our client wanted a fun, explorative, out-of-the box designed interior to provide services to his dental clients. The design of the interior was mainly directed by focusing on the experience of the child patient. Also important in the process of designing this interior was a focus placed on branding. Like many of our commercial tenant improvement projects, this project focuses on enabling the architecture of the space to contribute directly to the Sugarbug brand that the client is creating. The finished product will blend together all the aspects of the business of running a contemporary dental office through a well thought out and comprehensively designed architectural, functional, informational and graphical experience.
Sustainable design is at the heart of this house without being overtly expressed in the external aesthetic. The house is designed with photovoltaic cells hidden on the roof, grey water reclamation, artificial lawn, and rainscreen facades to help thermal stability, as well as flash hot water heating, bamboo floors and ponds of water to promote evaporative cooling in front of large expanses of glass. The residence is articulated as “boxes ” each finished in white plaster, and raised on steel pilotis.
As the most visible building on the campus perimeter, the studio building mediates between the public view and private use of the campus. The south façade is a horizontal, large-scale gesture to passing motorists that curves and wraps around the building. Varying patterns of concrete masonry units (CMU) compose this prominent wall. The stacked blocks create a large-scale, changing pattern of subtle shadings as the sunlight moves across the south façade during the day. Rios Clementi Hale Studios maintains continuity with the campus by using block colors and horizontal banding sympathetic to brick colors and patterning on existing buildings. Functionally, the south façade filters sunlight and traffic sounds from the adjacent city streets and freeway.
Windswept consists of 612 freely rotating wind direction indicators mounted parallel to the wall creating an architectural scale instrument for observing the complex interaction between wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and the environment.
The Openhouse is embedded into a narrow and sharply sloping property in the Hollywood Hills, a challenging site that led to the creation of a house that is both integrated into the landscape and open to the city below. Retaining walls are configured to extend the first floor living level into the hillside and to create a garden terrace for the second level. Steel beams set into the retaining walls perpendicular to the hillside are cantilevered off structural shear walls at the front of the site. Lateral steel clear spans fifty feet between these beams creating a double cantilever at the leading edge of the house and allowing for uninterrupted views over Los Angeles. Front, side and rear elevations of the house slide open to erase all boundaries between indoors and out and connect the spaces to gardens on both levels.
Step Up on 5th is a bright new spot in downtown Santa Monica. The new building provides a home, support services and rehabilitation for the homeless and mentally disabled population. The new structure provides 46 studio apartments of permanent affordable housing. The project also includes ground level commercial/retail space and subterranean parking. The density of the project is 258 dwelling units/acre, which exceeds the average density of Manhattan, NY (2000 USA Census Bureau Data) by more than 10%.
For the 2010 GLOW we are proposing a linear spatial construction that links the City to the Ocean. Working with the site of the Bay Street boardwalk, we intend to make visible the connection across the sand to the edge of the ocean. This is a physical “land bridge” connecting the urban landscape of Santa Monica to the edge of the water, but also a conceptual leap that transitions from the “logics” that define the city to the those of the ocean. Taking the vertical nature of the city and merging it with the horizontal impulses of the pacific, we are proposing a visceral and intense space.
This project is located in the Palisades, a hilly region between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains within an existing 1950’s housing development. The project consists of two twin houses sited adjacent to each other on a steep slope above a seasonal watershed. In this project we were interested in exploring the intersection of two classic California building typologies; the courtyard house and the hillside house. This intersection was then further complicated by the overlay of two unsynchronized jurisdictional height envelope parameters that very explicitly controlled the volumetric limits of the structures.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
