Perfumary & Café for Elorea

Koreatown, Los Angeles
2024

Studio Paul Chan has transformed a 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival bell tower in Los Angeles’s Koreatown into a perfumery and café where scent, materiality, and ritual quietly converge. Designed for the fragrance house Elorea, the project explores the poetic tension between cyber-industrial precision and ancient craft, layering high-performance surfaces with deeply elemental materials.

“The challenge was to translate something as intangible and fleeting as scent into architectural form, I wanted visitors to feel the space in layers as they would a perfume’s top, heart, and base notes.”

At the center of the space, a sculptural perfume display unfolds in a figure-eight, a looping geometry that suggests ritual, repetition, and orbiting memory. Visitors are invited to meander beneath the historic dome, encountering fragrance as a sequence of spatial moments rather than static products. Materiality becomes narrative. The perfume bar front, clad in hand chiseled Nakdong, a traditional Korean wood technique, evokes coastal village craft, while its inverted ziggurat form speaks to ceremonial altars. The charred surface is paired with a monolithic stone bar top, its leathered texture full of natural valleys and ridges, reminiscent of ink-wash landscapes where light and shadow play across terrain.

At night, underlit perfume bottles shimmer beneath the dome like votive candles, turning the space into a place of quiet reverence. The café continues this sensory dialogue. Positioned against three arched windows overlooking Koreatown, the bar offers drinks inspired by ingredients in the perfumes themselves. It becomes another act of translation — where scent becomes taste, and ritual becomes shared experience.

Collaborators

Jeremy Kim, Will Carlson, Krystal Chang

Photography

Yerin Mok

Publication

Dezeen