In 1939, a small mechanic shop was built on North Alameda Street in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Over the years, the 1,250-square-foot building remained steadfast as the streetscape around it evolved—along with the use of the building. In 2015 it was used as an acupuncture clinic and later became a bar. Today it is occupied by Café Tondo, a morning-to-night cafe. Abraham Campillo, partner of design office Mouthwash Studio is also Café Tondo’s creative director who leads the vision for this cultural hub alongside Mouthwash Studio partners Mackenzie Freemire, Alex Tan, and Ben Mingo, and Mike Kang of Locale Partners. They tapped multidisciplinary design office Aunt Studio to create an inviting atmosphere for guests to dine and slow down in. To do so, the studio embraced layering intentionally exposed materials that were revealed after peeling away the previous lives of the building.
Aunt Studio preserved and exposed the scuffed concrete slab floor that continues throughout the entire building, brick walls, now coated in a soft eggshell paint, and wooden Douglas fir ceiling in the saloon, a departure from the metal-clad ceiling found in the rest of the cafe.
But the original, structural elements are juxtaposed with warm accents. This is true upon entry, where guests enter the building through a glass- and metal- encased room, lit with candle light accompanied by wooden stools. This duality continues throughout the cafe’s six rooms.
Custom-designed furniture by OMBIA Studio, fabricated in Mexico, adds hospitality too. Included in this selection are wooden stools with soft blue circular caps and side tables; wooden dining tables and chairs with tied-on cushions; and metal bar stools with ruffled cushions. The custom ceramic art hung on the walls by Isabella Marengo of Bugambilia from Mexico ties nicely to the one-of-a-kind furniture.
Noam Saragosti and Juhee Park, cofounders and principals of Aunt Studio, provided more insight into Café Tondo’s interior design. Together they told AN Interior, “Several design moves reinforce that sense of connection and discovery. We lowered the saloon curtains by one bay to create a kind of ‘clerestory,’ revealing glimpses of the Metro A Line trains as they pass overhead. We added small moments of surprise, like the Roman sculptures tucked into the water closets.”
The cofounders continued, “We worked with materials and details that invite people to slow down and look: textured plasters, layered curtains, and framed sightlines between rooms.” New materials also include the floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls that surround the kitchen with a small cut-out so people can see the buzz in the kitchen, as well as earthen red plaster.
The plaster is Saragosti and Park’s favorite design element in the entire project. They shared, “It threads through the rooms: framing windows, becoming a bench, marking thresholds, and creating small niches for the owners’ artifacts. It’s the primary new layer we added to the existing building, and it’s meant to feel both fresh and strangely familiar, almost like something you might encounter in a ruin. It grounds the whole project.”
The resulting effect is, as Park and Saragosti described, “Unpretentious. The space feels designed but never precious.” Casual, warm, and richly textured, the interior captures the history of the building, just waiting to be stripped back from the walls.