Whimsy and Wonder Brew at Lumen Coffee’s First U.S. Outpost In L.A.

Good things really can come in small packages. But sometimes that package takes a lot of vision. Fortunately for Los Angelenos, developer Redcar identified a quartet of creatives with boatloads of vision: Breland-Harper architects Michael Breland and Peter Harper and twin artists Nikolai and Simon Haas, who together transformed a tiny former garbage and water pump–booster enclosure into a golden gem of a café and debut U.S. location for Lumen Coffee, founded in Armenia in 2020.

“Intention can produce the unexpected in a dusty corner of a parking lot,” Breland reflects. “It’s as if the building has been folded inside out,” Harper adds, referring to their total interior gut job that encompassed installing a bathroom, sinks, and refrigeration, among other necessities for the establishment to operate, and such exterior improvements as steel window systems framed in bright-red mullions, Portuguese marble sills, and lush plantings (in addition to architecture and interiors, the firm specializes in landscape architecture). “Cool cats floating in coffee,” is how the Haas brothers describe their contribution to the project: cladding the entire facade in thousands of tiles glazed with animated felinelike creatures, some donning L.A.-appropriate sunglasses.