Brightside
Location
Los Angeles, CA
Year
2023
Size
2,700
sf
Photography
Clark Dugger Photography
Brightside
The project consisted of the development of a new concept prototype, an infrared Yoga and Sauna Studio, and the implementation of the concept into a first Culver City location.
The design goals were to deliver a built environment that would deliver on the power and potential of the bright and colorful brand ethos. The 2,700 sf project included reception, retail, a flexible yoga studio, private sauna rooms, an open locker room, and support spaces.
experience.
As always, the user experience was an important focus of the design. Given both the operational requirements and branding goals of Brightside, careful attention was paid to light, color, and temperature throughout the space.
Customers move between bright, natural light-filled circulation spaces that feature clean white walls and colorful graphics, and darker, warmer yoga and sauna spaces that feature color-changing lighting and the benefits of Chroma therapy. In between spaces like the open locker room provide a transitional hybrid – bright white spaces with surprise and delight moments of color.
The simple white lockers have colorful graphic messages that are revealed once the door is opened, the bathrooms feature occasional tiles with a reflective, iridescent finish, and stepping past the simple white door of the changing rooms puts you in a fully immersive graphic mural.
design.
The existing space – with its irregular shape and multiple storefront exposures – presented an initial challenge to the implementation of the prototype plan, which had been developed for a more typical, rectilinear retail space. By clustering the various program elements that required more privacy (sauna rooms, bathrooms, and open locker room components) towards the center of the space, the design shifts all of the circulation spaces to the storefront perimeter. Here, they are activated by retail, reception, and various amenity elements to create a dynamic connector between spaces that is anything but a residual hallway. As customers and staff move through the space, they are constantly connected to the natural light of the exterior – a subtle reminder of the promise of the Brightside.
brand.
Brightside presented a great opportunity to partner with Cam Webb and his agency (CWA) to replicate the fully integrated brand and physical environment experience that was first achieved at drybar.
Like drybar, the Brightside’s branding and physical environment designs were developed together in parallel– allowing each to inform the other. Ideas and progress were regularly shared back and forth between the respective creative teams so that the end products of both were unified and consistent. Key elements of the architectural design – like the millwork arches that frame the studio entrance and amenities offerings – are rendered in the signature brand colors and coded to the different parts of the program. Elsewhere, the architecture has been simplified to frame a blank canvas for integrated graphics located at key points in the customer journey.
Project Team
Josh Heitler, Kimberly Coca, Alex Korby, Edgardo Cadiz, Chris Stewart
