A Hollywood spotlight
Apparatus, a New York City-based lighting and design brand, is demonstrating the understated drama of its designs in a custom showroom in a changing part of Hollywood.
Founders Gabriel Hendifar and Jeremy Anderson spent the past year-plus transforming a 5,000-square-foot former warehouse and production studio in the quasi-industrial zone south of Santa Monica Boulevard near Highland Avenue. For decades, this swath served as a base for the movie and television industries’ less glamorous nuts-and-bolts operations, thanks to the presence of companies including Kodak.
Given the area’s evolving identity as an art and design district, however, with neighbors such as Regen Projects, Blackman Cruz, Ralph Pucci and Jeffrey Deitch, the structure and setting are ideally suited for Apparatus’ first L.A. showroom.
“I’m always interested in how the things we make live in context,” explains Hendifar, who also serves as the firm’s creative director. “This particular space presented a context that felt like it required this statement,” he said of the final look, which was inspired by the “palette and architectural approach” of Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico.
Interiors designed in collaboration with Kamp Studios in Brooklyn exude a certain a sensual moodiness. Two arcaded corridors flank a central core that’s separated into partitioned rooms to display Apparatus’ high-end, meticulously crafted lighting pieces and installations that are works of art, as well as boldly geometric furniture and housewares.
Materials range from polished stone and metals to more experimental finishes, such as horsehair and black python.
Hendifar and Anderson have incorporated pieces on loan from nearby design, antiques and art dealer JF Chen and by local artists Robert Moreland and Amir Nikravan.
The building’s ample light interacts with delicate plaster finishes and neutral color schemes throughout.
Although Hendifar and Anderson will remain based in Manhattan, where they live just a few blocks from Apparatus HQ, they had good reason to expand to L.A.
Hendifar, an L.A. native and UCLA alum, points to “a creative and cultural moment that feels really alive.”
“That, coupled with the fact that it just makes sense for us from a market perspective; it’s kind of a no-brainer.” He adds, “and I grew up here, so it feels interesting to re-experience it this way.”