FATTY MART

Size: 5,000 sf
Location: Mar Vista, Los Angeles, CA

Fatty Mart is a chef-forward marketplace for food, culture, and community. It’s our fourth collaboration with restaurateur David Kuo and his vision for soulful Taiwanese food—and more—in the center of Los Angeles’s Mar Vista neighborhood. The design adaptively re-uses a 1939 timber-framed storefront that has anchored an elegant but underutilized presence in the neighborhood. A simple set of edits energized the 5,000-square-foot structure. Along the front façade, we punched out exterior windows and pushed a glass storefront deeper into the floor plate, creating a new front porch on Venice Boulevard. We retained the building’s characteristic bow trusses and skylights while clarifying the interior scheme to accommodate multiple dining options. A busier perimeter for food prep or online order pick-up wraps around a slower core for shopping, optimizing both digital and physical retail experiences. Visitors can comfortably pick up food to go, browse high-quality ingredients from around the world, or dine al fresco, without disrupting the rhythm of different activities.

We designed Fatty Mart’s logo and visual identity to capture the brand’s exuberance—a medley of personalities and cultures in playful but well-crafted harmony. Hand-painted super graphics on the exterior announce it to the street, welcoming people in. Inside, Taiwanese-American muralist Josh Cochran’s whimsical icons animate the walls in a rich palette of primary colors drawn from flags around the world: vermilion, goldenrod, royal blue, emerald. Fatty Mart’s signature red—the color of good luck and prosperity—accentuates and threads the space together.

Fatty Mart’s multicultural take on the convenience store is set to become a new fixture of the neighborhood.

Architecture+Interior Design/ Branding Design & Spatial Integration: Design, Bitches

Muralist: Josh Cochran

Sign Painter: Marjory Garrison

Structural Engineer: TEG- Teuscher Engineering Group

Mechanical/Plumbing Engineer: David Kroesen- Engineered Solutions

Electrical Engineer: TEK Engineering Group, Inc.

General Contractor: Curato Design/Build

Custom Millwork & Display Fixtures: Nicomia Custom Design & Fabrication

Photography: Yoshihiro Makino (Fatty Mart), Laure Joliet (Little Fatty + Accomplice)

D,B Architecture+Interior Design Team: Catherine Johnson, Rebecca Rudolph, Gitta Bartelt

D,B Branding/Graphic Design Team: Catherine Johnson, Rebecca Rudolph, Sharleen Chen, Hanchen Xu