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flo cafe
LOCATION:
SIZE:
PROGRAM:
COMPLETION:
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Venice, CA
600 ft²
Cafe, Gallery
2025
Commercial
Located on a discreet parcel just off Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Flo Cafe operates as an active community anchor. The project is an adaptive reuse of a former utilitarian garage, reprogrammed into a hybrid gallery and hospitality space. Deliberately preserving the site's raw character—including the original mechanical infrastructure and mature creeping vines—the architectural intervention introduces a series of clean timber volumes to organize the cafe operations and integrated art displays.
Mounted directly to the exposed cinderblock shell, minimalist floating timber shelves stretch across the primary elevation. This integrated shelving system provides a clean, highly curated display for the cafe’s retail items and specialty coffee wares, maintaining the rigorous material logic of the interior without cluttering the visual space.
The primary service counter is articulated as a clean, monolithic plywood volume, establishing a direct material dialogue with the adjacent gallery walls. To negotiate the acoustic challenges of the hard-surfaced envelope, a custom, hand-dyed textile installation is suspended behind the espresso machine. This fabric backdrop functions as both a crucial acoustic baffle and a softening material counterpoint within the rigorous workspace.
Operating as a direct extension of the exhibition program, the interior eschews standard commercial furniture in favor of functional sculpture. Custom curved concrete chairs, designed by M Royce Architecture, anchor the seating arrangement with precise geometric mass. Interspersed among these are organic, glazed ceramic "boulder" seats by artist Hunchung Lee. These custom pieces act as functional art, introducing highly tactile forms and subtle material contrast into the raw environment.
Principal:
Design Team:
Matthew Royce
Swetha Arunkumar
Contractor:
Photography:
Alexo Construction
Sam Frost