Can a room love history without copying it?

Yes. We respect history and we enjoy it. We are not looking to reproduce it.

Pastiche is a room assembled from recognizable details of other places and eras, with no idea of its own holding them together. KPHD builds every room on one idea that belongs to the operator. History comes in where that idea calls for it.

Picture Parisian café chairs, Art Deco lighting and Italian marble in one room. Each is beautiful. Each has a story. Together, with nothing of the room’s own behind them, they read as other people’s rooms. It can be done with real affection. It is still pastiche.

So what holds a room together? One idea. A song, a story, an objective.

What did the song ask for?

A room that started with a song. The Barrelhouse Flat, Chicago. Design: Patry+Kline. Photograph courtesy KPHD.

The Barrelhouse Flat, in Lincoln Park, Chicago, started with a song. The client gave us one recording, “Barrel House Flat Blues,” written and recorded by Mary Johnson in November 1929 [1], and asked for that.

The song was the entire brief. It set the tone, and everything that followed became the thesis. We would listen to the music and think about the time and the place, then bring that conversation into the energy of now.

The other reference was a painting: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, from 1942, which hangs in Chicago at the Art Institute [7]. A blues and a painting. Neither one is a floor plan, and neither is a decade to furnish.

The building was late nineteenth century and had been a bar for most of its life [2]. My practice at the time, Patry+Kline, designed the room. What informed the design was the feeling of the barrelhouse era: the freedom in that music, and the history behind it.

The room that came out of it has a public floor downstairs and a more private one upstairs. History is all through it. It is there because the song called for it.

What does a line look like?

The line as counter, tile and bench. Equator Coffees, Culver City. Photograph by Fred Licht. Cement-tile mural by Thomas Williams.

Equator Coffees dates to 1995 and a Marin County garage, where Helen Russell and Brooke McDonnell began roasting [3]. Culver City was its first café in Southern California, opened in March 2022 at Ivy Station, beside the Metro [3][4].

There was no house look to carry south. Equator had never tied its cafés to a single design [5]. So we started with the name. The equator is a line. So is a coastline, a fault line, a freeway, a train line, a wave, the horizon. So is the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Then history came in, on the idea’s terms. The train next door led to steam. Steam led to motion. Motion led to Futurism, the early twentieth-century Italian movement that celebrated speed [5]. I showed Interior Design paintings by Tullio Crali to make the point [5].

None of that was reproduced. The counter takes the shape of a deco train. The espresso machine is the source of the steam. Wave-pattern tile is the coast and the steam at once. Equator Red is the main character. The café’s cement-tile mural was commissioned from Thomas Williams [5].

When the café opened I called it “Flapper Chrome morphed into Espresso Futurism, at a metro stop in Culver City” [3]. Metropolis later wrote about the concept under that name [6]. It isn’t a Deco room or a Futurist one. It is Equator’s room.

What do the two rooms share?

Nothing you could photograph. A 1929 blues and a line on a map are not a style. What they share is the method: one idea, history as a source, every reference with a job to do.

We test each reference three ways:

1. Where does it come from in your story?

2. If we took it out, would the idea weaken, or only the look?

3. Could it sit unchanged in someone else’s place?

What does this mean when you work with us?

We ask for your dilemma before your references. Why would anyone build a business this hard? That is usually where the idea is.

Bring the saved images too, and tell us what each one means to you. Our guide to briefing a designer asks what your concept refuses to be. This note is our own answer to that question.

We agree on the idea in one sentence before we draw the room.

When a detail you love doesn’t serve the idea, we make the case and show you what does. The brand decision stays yours.

The same idea has to hold behind the counter. We are an operator-first design firm: the room has to run as well as it reads.

What do you get from it?

• A place that can’t be mistaken for another.

• Decisions that go faster, because a finish or a fixture is either in or out.

• A budget spent on the few things that carry the idea.

• A room that ages on its own terms.

• Language you can use beyond the walls: on the menu, in the service, in how you talk about the place.

If you want a faithful reproduction of a place or a period, that is a legitimate brief. It isn’t ours.

We respect history. We enjoy it. We make something of your own with it.

That’s the position. That’s how we work.

Frequently asked questions

What is pastiche in restaurant design?

A room assembled from recognizable details of other places and eras, such as Parisian café chairs, Art Deco lighting and Italian marble, with no idea of its own connecting them.

Can a new restaurant or bar use historical references without becoming a theme?

Yes. Start with one idea that belongs to the business, then admit a reference only when the idea calls for it. The Barrelhouse Flat began with a 1929 blues recording. Equator Coffees in Culver City began with a line.

What should I bring to a designer instead of a finished look?

Your dilemma, your guest, and any song, story or objective that says what the place is for. Saved images help when you say what each one means to you.

Related projects: The Barrelhouse Flat and Equator Coffees