The Art Room Café & Bar

The Art Room Café & Bar by AUX Architecture occupies 3,500 square feet of a 1915 brick building in downtown Los Angeles. Completed in 2023 for The Art Room, the day-to-night café received a 2021 Restaurant Design Award from AIA Los Angeles. Original warm red brick walls frame a fifty-foot stained walnut bar seating fourteen, flexible indoor and outdoor seating for forty, and a bespoke installation of 150 bottles set at varying heights behind the bar.

Diners sit amid art, light, and air, connected to a pair of naturally lit galleries at the building’s center. The café shares the multi-use adaptive reuse with The Art Room Gallery and AUX Architecture Studio, testing how an all-day café, gallery, and office can serve artists, designers, musicians, chefs, and performers in one block.

At the entrance, a moveable kinetic façade—an operable three-part custom aluminum screen—identifies and secures the building in four configurations that control daylight and ventilation. Hospitality, cultural, and adaptive-reuse categories all apply. Structural engineering by Nous Engineering; operable wall system by PanoramAH!; Bluestone Contracting listed among consultants.

Seating metrics include fourteen seats at the walnut bar and flexible seating for forty indoors and out, within a total published area of 3,500 square feet. The café’s kinetic aluminum screen is both identity and security device for the shared multi-use block.