For Lovers Unite, Architecture is About Lived Experience

Architect Alan Koch and artist-designer Karen Spector, founders of the multidisciplinary firm Lovers Unite, chose to use Portman’s iconic building on a t-shirt created for Los Angeles Design Weekend, where guests were taking the Bonaventure-as-sundae shirt design home from an ice cream social held at the firm’s studio. With the slogan “Los Angeles is for Lovers,” the whimsical design is a multi-layered homage to the city where they live and work. The afternoon was suffused with a genuine warmth and hospitality that Spector and Koch bring to their thoughtful restaurant and residential projects. “I love food, I love gathering,” Spector says. “I also have a need for third spaces.” 

The couple’s background as artist-focused designers proved invaluable when, in 2018, they began working closely with another distinctive category of creative professionals: chefs. Shortly before Spector set her sights on restaurant design, a mutual-friend introduction to Akira Akuto provided the on-ramp. “Konbi was our first shot out of the gate as Lovers Unite—the project where chef-driven restaurant culture met our sensibilities,” Spector says. The minimalist, counter-seating-only restaurant and walk-up window in Echo Park sparked a cult following in fall 2018 for Akuto and Nick Montgomery’s streamlined menu of pastries, pork tonkatsu, Japanese-style egg salad sandwiches, and other exactingly prepared dishes. (Konbi and a Culver City outpost closed suddenly in January 2023.) 

While Lovers Unite was simultaneously working on single-family residential projects that update the Southern Californian modernist vocabulary, more chefs and restaurateurs sought out Koch and Spector’s perspective to shape spaces spanning the casual-to-formal spectrum. Each evokes a mood simpatico with the culinary program while avoiding thematic tropes. Live-fire cooking in an open hearth and unapologetically robust fare are the heart of chef Brian Dunsmoor’s wildly popular eponymous bar and restaurant, which occupies the corner of a 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival bank building that once housed artists’ studios. Details such as cafe curtains by Macrame Lace, antique church chairs, custom designed tables and service stations fabricated by Dusk, dried herbs and flowers, and artfully imperfect Portola Roman Clay surfaces crackle together with tactile rusticity, suggestive of the owner-chef’s Georgia upbringing—minus any clichéd moments of Southern baroque. A calibrated grid of pendants makes the room feel simultaneously expansive and intimate.

Koch and Spector also navigated functional and aesthetic constraints within a subterranean restaurant space on the city’s Westside to shape the curved forms and sensuously rounded banquettes that beckon diners at Lielle. The transformed room sets the stage for Michelin-starred chef Marcus Jernmark’s Swedish-inflected, relaxed Californian twist on fine dining. 

Lovers Unite’s presence in certain circles of L.A.’s architecture and design community feels like a curious mix of sudden and decades-in-the-making—a dynamic partly explained by their many passions. Koch has deep family and professional roots in Los Angeles. He grew up in Ohio before returning to attend art school at Otis College of Art and Design, then earned an architecture degree at Cornell. Maintaining close ties to artists has been a longtime theme of his practice, which has included collaborations with Robert Irwin and Chris Burden, among others. Koch served as project lead for the adaptive reuse of Dia: Beacon while at Open Office in New York in the early aughts, before focusing on California-based work with Taalman Koch Architecture. 

Spector, a New Jersey native and daughter of an artist, is equally at home among creatives outside her own field. She studied at Columbia University and worked in several New York City artists’ studios before moving to L.A., where she landed a role at legendary journalist Robert Scheer’s Truthdig news outlet. During graduate school at UCSB, a course she taught exploring the boundaries between art and life helped crystallize her realization that “my work was never really about art for its own sake—it was always about people and space as the ingredients. Design as lived experience, not documentation,” she shares. Of their respective résumés, “that depth of experience across different office configurations is something we carry into everything we do,” Spector adds. 

Koch and Spector’s working partnership is fluid and adaptable, each attuned to collaborators’ idiosyncratic spatial needs and desires. The two met at a commercial design firm in 2013 and live in Mount Washington with their son, whose 2018 birth coincided with the official establishment of their firm. “The worst insult in my family is if someone is boring,” Spector says. So, she thrives when partnering with personalities who toss curveballs and is adept at tempering excessive seriousness with whimsy. (Her spud-shaped, cast-metal “hot potato” Hanukkah menorah is another example of her delight in exploring the intersections of food and life.) Koch, meanwhile, maintains architectural rigor while allowing for experimental detours, including in Lovers Unite’s residential projects, which currently encompass Eaton Fire rebuilds and the Modular model that’s part of the Case Study 2.0 program. “I love how weird it gets,” he says of the intensely personal process of home design.  

“They have an incredibly vast knowledge of design, and a very intimate relationship with Los Angeles,” says Jill Bernheimer, co-owner of Bar Etoile, located on the art gallery-rich stretch of Western Avenue that has come to be identified as Melrose Hill. Inspiration for the colorful yet restrained interiors of the French contemporary bistro and wine bar was drawn from Jacques Tati film posters, the tile mosaics at LAX, Schwab’s Pharmacy, and other unexpected references. The result “feels tailored to the space, and to what the intention of the business is,” she says of their approach. 

Whether for public-facing commercial environments or private dwellings, Koch and Spector bring complementary strengths and patience that prove well-suited to the particulars of each challenge. Take a current client who “is presenting things that are very difficult to achieve,” Koch says. “It’s going to be really different and interesting — and all worth it.” Call it another proverbial cherry on top.