Kodō Hotel Arts District
About
Kodō Hotel Arts District is an eight-room boutique hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, housed in Engine Company No. 17, a fire station built in 1927 and in service until 1980. DOONT Studio designed 2,142 sq ft (199 m²) inside it: the lobby, an omakase restaurant with its own entrance patio, and the spa in Room 9
MORE
Nothing in the project was built on empty ground. Every space in it was something else first, and the design begins by taking the rooms the hotel was using least. Room 9 became the spa: a dry cedar sauna, a wet room lined in black travertine, showers, and a bed that folds down from the wall, so the room can still be slept in.
The restaurant is entered from the side patio, where bamboo is planted outside the original steel windows, and passes through its own reception before the room itself opens: a U-shaped oak counter lit from beneath its edge, a backlit wall of sake, two paper cylinders overhead. In the lobby the pressed metal ceiling stays where it is, and a single block of raw stone does the work of a front desk.
The palette is short and repeated across the three: raw plaster, oak, paper, raw iron left grey, black stone, polished concrete. The brick is not covered.
At the back of the same lot, on the site of a machine room and a laundry that were moved, Kodō Urban Onsen is drawn as a separate project and is booked separately from the hotel. 10/10 Burger occupies another part of the same building.
Kodō Hotel Arts District
Type: Japanese Bathhouse
Location: Arts District, Los Angeles, California, United States
Completed: In progress
Size: 199 m² / 2,142 SF
Scope: Interior Design, Branding, Design Audit & Construction Management
Architecture: OON Architecture
Interior Design: DOONT Studio
Developer: Bright Development
Branding: Monroe Works
Construction Administration: Analog Constructions
General Contractor: Analog Constructions
