Kat Von D. Marc Jacobs. Bite Beauty. Fenty Beauty. Kendo is the brains behind some of the hottest beauty lines at Sephora. (It helps that both Kendo and Sephora are owned by LVMH.) Living up to its good taste, the product incubator’s new headquarters has just been completed in San Francisco with an eye on bold imagery and luxurious finishes.
Designed by Garcia Tamjidi Architecture Design, the interior is anchored by a gold wall that boldly encloses its meeting rooms. “The wall appears to hover just over the floor line, letting through a band of bright light at foot level, and the imprint of the Kendo logo at eye level,” the firm explains in its official press release. However prominent, the logo feels classy and sleek.
In fact, the brand statements woven throughout the scheme strike a balance between glam and sophistication. Inside one of the gathering spaces enclosed by the gold wall, an arrangement of Fenty Beauty lipstick tubes, some right-side-up and some upside-down, forms a compelling art piece-cum-advertisement. Inside other meeting spaces a hero image of the luxuriously tattooed Kat Von D, sporting an edgy bleached-blonde bob and her vibrant pomade brow treatment, takes over the walls. These different conference nooks play up different tones – “a soft blush pink in one room, an inky black in another” – to conjure shifts in mood.
Otherwise, the office is starkly minimal – and yet cozy in moments. The casual areas outside the wall – the lounge with its gold pouffes and modular black-leather seating system and the bar-height table simply furnished with stools – use matte and shiny takes on the gilded effect and subtle plays of light and shadow to make their statements. The lighting system above both zones houses conical fixtures of various sizes within a rectangular white box that ties together the two spaces across the length of the room.
This is the second office that Garcia Tamjidi has designed for Kendo, and it seems that the firm, like the brand, is staying on message with a style that is glossy yet sophisticated – and full of personality.
The cosmetics incubator for LVMH – which reps Fenty Beauty, Kat Von D and Marc Jacobs to name a few – boasts a polished San Francisco office by Garcia Tamjidi Architecture.