The Brief
Monarch Management Group are seasoned builders of San Francisco nightlife. When they brought me in to design the interior of their new bar and tapas restaurant in SoMa, they were coming to me as an artist, extending an invitation to bring a full creative vision to a space with a strong point of departure.
The building had been an actual pawnshop. The entry would keep that history alive. What I was commissioned to design was everything behind it, the dining hall, the bar, the full interior environment, and the construction concept for the pawnshop facade in front.
My first move was to construct a complete narrative. A Spanish colonial exterior, the kind of bright sun-baked facade you'd find in Latin America, crumbling and giving way to something older and stranger underneath. Dark, humid, and lush, 1930s tropical deco, the kind of room that belongs to a particular hour of the night. The concept was about threshold. The pawnshop entry is world one. The colonial facade is world two. The tropical interior is world three.
The Design
I was the principal designer for the complete interior. Everything I created was drafted by hand and then realized into a building plan.
One of the central design challenges was translating the speakeasy concept into a full restaurant environment. A speakeasy is built around secrecy and atmosphere, but a dining room needs something more, a reason for people to come back and to bring others with them. My solution was a two-way mirror installed in the rear wall of the pawnshop facade. From the pawnshop side it reads as a mirror. From the restaurant side, the entire dining room has a clear view of every new guest arriving. Every entrance becomes a live moment, a birthday surprise, a late arrival, a first-time visitor taking in the pawnshop for the first time, played out in front of a full house. The experience is designed to be so enjoyable to witness that guests want to engineer it for someone else. The return visit is built into the concept.
The Build
I led a small team of skilled artists drawn from my community to fabricate the key architectural elements. The crumbling facade, the centerpiece of the dining room, is a constructed theatrical prop built at architectural scale.
We built panels that held the silhouette and contour of the broken shapes we wanted, the irregular, jagged profiles of plaster giving way. Those panels were surfaced with plaster, then stucco, applied by hand. Once the base surfaces were complete, I began chipping, physically working the material to bring the language of genuine decay into the surface. The cracks, the fallen sections, the exposed brick visible underneath: all of it was designed and then enacted by hand.
As a designer who is also a fabricator, the question is never where to find it. The question is how to build it. I designed the bar with the carpenter, the railing with the weaver, the facade with my own hands, because I understood what each material could do before I asked it to do anything. Every element in this room is completely custom. That is what gives it cohesion.
The Result
The Pawn Shop has been operating continuously since opening, named among San Francisco's top speakeasies and hidden dining experiences.
My shop built the key artistic components that give this place its character. I managed the budget and the administrative work that kept the project on track, and my project management was the continuity that held every creative element together from first sketch to finished room. I designed through models and hand-drafted concepts, and then I worked with genuinely talented artists and incorporated their visions into the design. A weaver working with copper wire as weft and warp collaborated with me on the railing system. A professional sign painter lettered the pawnshop window. A neon bender made the large neon mirror frame in the dining hall. The room shows that it was made by artists. A contractor could not have built what we built.
What this project demonstrates
Monarch Management Group are experienced hospitality operators. They chose an artist to design their space, and they gave that artist full creative latitude. The narrative concept I brought them, three worlds in sequence connected by the logic of threshold, was accepted whole and realized completely.
Every hand-drafted design I produced for this project was conceived with its construction already understood. The design and the build were never separate conversations. That is the advantage of working with someone who has spent two decades making large-scale things by hand.
The two-way mirror is a design solution to a hospitality problem. It gives the dining room a live theater piece running every night at no additional cost, and it turns the guest experience into something people want to repeat and share. Good design solves problems. Great design makes those solutions invisible.
The Pawn Shop is a room that was made by artists. The copper wire railing, the hand-lettered signage, the neon bending, the chipped plaster facade. None of it was sourced, all of it was made. The cohesion of the finished space comes directly from the fact that a single creative director held the vision from concept through build.
The Pawn Shop is a room designed to be the topic of conversation. Every entrance through that pawnshop door is a live moment played out in front of a full house. The design is the dining experience.
