Neil M Denari’s first built work in his hometown of Los Angeles, California, is a showroom for LA Eyeworks, a retailer that specializes in cutting-edge eyewear. For this store, the client wanted a showroom that could successfully accommodate ever-changing trends while providing the retailer with a fixed spatial identity. The relationship between the conventions of commercial retail space and the stability of architecture usually associated with institutional work, and the LA Eyeworks Showroom deals with the contrast between the permanence of architecture and the seasonal collections of fashionable glasses.

So, although fashion is by definition based on quick stylistic shifts, the clients specified that the architecture itself would not be changed while they occupied the building. Neil M Denari thus had to resist the fashion of architecture without resorting to a lack of expression. The renovation of this existing two-story building still keeps the upper, curved portion of the facade which wraps the corner between Martel and the main entry of Beverly Boulevard. In working with the basic parameters of store design such as the demand for transparency from the street and from the sales counter, the design shapes space and movement through a continuous suspended surface.

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