Marrying the comfort of a friend’s living room with the chicness of a bar and lounge, NOUN, a new day-to-night cafe in Los Angeles’s Marina del Rey, offers a warm yet stylish place to gather. Alums of cult coffee brand Menotti’s tapped Warkentin Associates to outfit the 1,500-square-foot space. The design studio, based in Los Angeles and New York and established in 2023, was tasked with delivering a design that transitions from daytime espresso to nighttime imbibes.
The designers mixed and matched references to achieve an eclectic kind of comfort. Postmodernism, ’90s coffee shops, and the ideal artist living room were all points of inspiration. This informed the equally diverse furnishings that make up the seating and working areas in the space, from the two main soft seating areas to the more formal desking peppered around them. The furnishings blend “low” design, or design with more industrial materials with elevated selections, with “high” or more recognizable design.
Of the latter, the studio used a Noguchi pendant, a custom blue-lacquered table that forms the communal seating, a rug by Nordic Knots that defines one of two seating zones, a 1970s smoked glass and chrome coffee table by Gianfranco Frattini for Cassina, vintage Italian postmodern chairs from the ’90s, a 1970s De Sede leather sofa, and custom wood totems which refer to the playfulness of Ettore Sottsass.
On the other hand, lower-end design utilizes commonplace materials: the side tables were made from inexpensive concrete pavers, window treatments rely on painters’ drop cloth normally used by contractors, and found objects round things out.
The main counter sits beneath white panels, pierced through with sloping, striped columns. The bar, made up of builders bricks and stainless steel, houses NOUN’s bottled espresso. (There are no traditional espresso machines on premisis, rather the coffee concept prefers to do all extraction beforehand.)
Tropical plants and portable lights are the finishing touches to the lived-in yet elegant interior. The mismatched approach creates a balanced whole to accommodate myriad social or working interactions.