NeueHouse Venice Beach is an adaptive reuse project that sensitively preserves the character of the 100-year-old structure, providing a private workspace for the creative community of Venice Beach, California, as well as coworking areas, dining options, and elevated cultural programming. The firm was tasked with combining two neighboring, previously unreinforced masonry buildings with a shared party wall to create a single 17,000-square-foot campus. Open workstations are interspersed with lounge settings, and specialty programs include an art gallery, podcast studio, wellness room, surfboard storage, and other amenities. Great care was taken while orchestrating the seismic retrofit, establishing a new independent steel frame structure throughout.

Venice Beach has been an artist community for many decades, and the building itself retains a legacy of creative work. It was once the studio of pioneering Light and Space movement artist, Larry Bell, whose immersive glass sculptures took inspiration from the play between sunlight and marine fog which rolls over the coastal neighborhood. The redesign also took inspiration from the surrounding natural beauty. The project’s warm palette includes organic materials and locally crafted custom furniture, which were dialed in to complement the patinated brick structure. The interior walls were stripped of plaster and drywall to reveal the original red brick. All the bricks from the demolished party wall were reused to repair these interior walls. The building’s century-old brick façade remains almost perfectly intact.

Large ground-floor windows take up almost the entire street-facing façade allowing ample, filtered light into the lounge and reception area. Retrofitted skylights and clerestory windows in the coworking areas bring controlled natural light deep into the space. The windows lining the 2nd-floor restaurant space were retrofitted with highly efficient double-hung glazing while keeping the original frames intact, maintaining the historic character of the space while enhancing the warm daylight and assuring a comfortable and efficient atmosphere. The storefront glazing along the ground floor was also swapped out for super-efficient IGUs.

The firm executed the installation of a large folding glass garage door that opens up the gallery to the sidewalk, a gesture that extends cultural programming to the street and creates a more inviting relationship with the block. The flow between indoor and outdoor space continues on the rooftop patio, with NeueHouse’s in-house food and beverage program ‘Reunion.’ Mediterranean plants surround and a wooden trellis patio cover has been installed overhead to provide shelter from the sun.