Beachwood Café
2695 North Beachwood Drive
Los Angeles
Tel: 323.871.1717
Designer: Barbara Bestor Architecture

If you drive high into the hills of LA’s Beachwood Canyon neighborhood, you may or may not discover a hidden treat: Silver Lake architect Barbara Bestor’s newest creation, Beachwood Café. The project is a renovation of the former Village Coffee Shop, a local fixture that was badly in need of an update.

Bestor has become a specialist at creating low-key but hip neighborhood favorites, designing Silver Lake’s Intelligentsia Coffee and Hollywood’s Lou Wine Bar. For this project she employs a similar raw and modern yet somehow rustic/bohemian (although Bestor hates that word) architectural style combined with vivid use of art and graphics.

Exposed wood beams and a cottage-like interior, including menu blackboards, charming window seats, and Magnolia Cupcake–style wood furniture are offset with an edgier palette of bright geometric yellow-and-blue flooring, loud “Holly Hobbie” floral wallpaper, as Bestor puts it, hanging exposed bulbs, a few Chinese lanterns, and midcentury-style wood chairs. One important element: quilted white vinyl baffles hang strategically from the ceiling to provide much-needed sound insulation. Overall the architecture matches the neighborhood perfectly: a stylish clientele living amid the storybook houses of the original Hollywoodland development. It’s cooler because it doesn’t have to tell you it’s cool.