AHLEM, the global luxury eyewear brand founded by French-born Ahlem Manai-Platt, recently opened a fifth boutique. And just as with its other locations—in Paris’s St. Germain, San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, New York City’s Nolita, and L.A.’s Venice—the latest atelier is housed in a space as relevant and chic as its eyewear. Designed to be the flagship, the new Melrose Place store offers a quiet oasis in buzzy West Hollywood.
AHLEM isn’t the typical eyewear brand (is there another that would namecheck Bauhaus as a guiding creative principle?)—nor is its newest boutique the average optical store. Eyeglasses rest on minimalist inset wall shelving with gallery-like lighting. And the store’s design, spearheaded by architect Maja Bernvill, was inspired by not one, but three rather high-brow source materials.
First is architect Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Odawara Art Foundation in Japan. When Manai-Platt visited the museum, she experienced, she says, “the absolute stillness—almost sacred—and the raw emotion” of walking through a suspended space between matter and light.
Second is Richard Serra’s masterpiece at LACMA, a curving monolith of Corten steel. “I wanted the Melrose space to offer that same emotional resonance: a quiet intensity, where architecture invites you to feel rather than simply see,” says Manai-Platt.
And third, and perhaps most significantly, is the influential work of Rudolph Schindler, the mid-century architecture great who, in many of his projects in L.A., elevated authentic, humble materials like wood, plaster, glass, and steel, all of which are spotlighted in AHLEM’s Melrose location. “This space is not about recreating Schindler, though,” says Bernvill, who was brought on to turn Manai-Platt’s heady ideas into concrete plans. “It’s about being in dialogue with his theories and the Californian context he worked in.”
“Ahlem and I share a belief in precision, restraint, and atmosphere, so the design becomes a kind of quiet choreography between form, light, and material,” says Bernvill.
For more on AHLEM, visit ahlemeyewear.com; to a book a consulation at the new Melrose Place atelier, go here.