Gulla Jónsdóttir Takes Home a Best of Year Award for Esperanza

2021 Best of Year winner for Hospitality – Fine Dining

Los Angeles architectural designer Gulla Jónsdóttir has a thing for biomorphic shapes, the legacy of her study of both mathematics and biology. See the upside-down garden that meanders on the lobby ceiling of her 2017 Interior Design Best of Year Award–winning Macau Roosevelt hotel. Or, in her latest hospitality project, the cresting stucco facade sparked by the white sand dunes of Los Cabos, Mexico, at Esperanza, a hip new Sonoran-style restaurant in Manhattan Beach that Jónsdóttir worked on via FaceTime from her native Iceland during the pandemic. “My background inspires me to look into the DNA of plants and trees and extract their forms into design,” she says. That’s particularly evident in Esperanza’s carved plaster wall that references agave genes.

In the 2,000-square-foot eatery, diners can imbibe pineapple-serrano-cilantro margaritas at the 12-seat bronze-backed bar or feast on ceviche seated in muted yellow-leather chairs—a 1964 design by Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Whitewashed clay pendant fixtures made in the Oaxacan town of Santa María Atzompa glow overhead, their hand-cut perforations playing on motifs carved into the stone at Mitla, a nearby Mesoamerican archaeological site. Pinched dishes and chain sculptures by Kym Gold are the final touch, styled using skills Jónsdóttir honed long ago as a set designer for Disney.

Gulla Jónsdóttir: Gulla Jónsdóttir; Nozomi Kamizono; Rebecca Mahgerefteh; Alina Razgoniaeva; Alys Maquet; Felix Srecko