ARCHITECTURE : Designer Captures <i> Esprit </i> of L.A. With an Eye-Catching Simplicity

Esprit is so cool, it doesn’t even look like a store.

In fact, you may have missed the concrete bunker on the northeast corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Cienega Avenue. It remains mute in the confusion of billboards, flashy mini-malls and complicated spaces around it. Only a curved blank rectangle gestures across the wide intersection. A mysterious hole has been cut through the wall to the sky, and a small black sign says the name of the store.

But the absence of eye-catching colors or distinguishing forms is the point: the place is so anonymous, it must be hip; so unassuming, it must be grand, and so cool, it has to be hot.

Such understatement doesn’t come cheaply. In 1983, Esprit gave designer Joe D’Urso the 30,000-square-foot former bowling alley and an unlimited budget. Fifteen-million dollars later, D’Urso had coated the building in four inches of new concrete, gutted the inside and inserted an array of black-painted gadgets that give the cavernous building all the excitement of a supermarket turned into a discotheque.

D’Urso--an interior designer who is known for only working on one or two projects at a time, living with each detail until it is done absolutely right--didn’t play around with grand forms or fancy materials. Instead, he exploited the sheer luxury of space and the elegance of natural light, catching them in a geometry of understated black steel.

The theme of the building is announced by the display windows facing Santa Monica Boulevard: The black steel and glass assembly frames a black steel square.

In plan and in appearance, the Esprit is dominated by these black steel grids. The grandest of all of them is the shoe sale area, a vertical cage defined by open scaffolding, surrounded by a concrete moat and rising up to a square skylight at the middle of the store.

In front of this oasis of order, the main store is a vast sea of concrete inhabited by movable black clothing racks and the original bow-string wood trusses, here revealed and interspersed with more black-painted theatrical lights than you find on the set of the Tonight Show. The back is a more refined realm of carpet and bird’s-eye maple where D’Urso has accentuated the muscularity of the original building into a grid-work covered in Zolotone, a speckled wall covering, and shot through by bridges, skylights and display cases.

Esprit is a place of moments of order revealed in strong light and lost within a sea of confused, but highly refined bits of technology zooming through raw space. As such, it is an effective, if highly stylized, microcosm of Los Angeles.

It does offer one variation on the theme: A three-level parking garage was added onto the building, covered with the same concrete and molded to the site with sensual steel bridges and ramps. You actually have to walk through all of these connectors and onto the street and then enter through the curved corner of the store into the carefully choreographed sequence of spaces inside.

D’Urso has written a script for a store that not only ranks up there with the best Hollywood production, but involves you with the reality of construction, the beauty of natural light as it washes over highly machined objects, and the confusion and vitality of the street.

By the way: they also sell clothes there.