New Balance

Santa Monica, CA
2010
Retail / Office
Photography: Tom Bonner

Commercial remodel of a prominent structure that once was a Home Savings Bank designed by Millard Sheets, a well-known California painter and architect. Aside from the building itself there were four pieces of art on the site that needed to be preserved – a large mosaic mural on the front façade by Millard Sheets, Bronze dolphin sculpture and fountain sculpture by Richard Ellis and an interior stained glass wall by Susan Hertel. Given the historical and untouchable exterior, the tenant improvement for New Balance Los Angeles’s flagship store and corporate headquarters needed the building interior to transform from a closed fortress for money into a light and inviting store.

The ground floor retail environment included a new suspended lighting device that allowed focused lighting on the store’s product and up lighting to help extend the space into the high ceiling. Major elements of the new second-floor office included increasing the sense of connection between the far-flung wings of the building with multiple communal and collaboration spaces.