Noah's First Los Angeles Store Is a 5,000-Square-Foot Skate Bowl, Community Space, and Shop All at Once
Summary
- Noah has opened its first Los Angeles location at 911 North Orange Drive in the Sycamore District, marking the brand's fourth store globally and its first on the West Coast
- The 5,000-square-foot space was designed by cofounders Brendon Babenzien and Estelle Bailey-Babenzien as a multifunctional environment combining retail, community, and cultural programming
- The store includes a skate bowl and is programmed to host intimate dinners, panel discussions, book clubs, film screenings, and live performances
Noah has opened its first Los Angeles store at 911 North Orange Drive in the Sycamore District, its fourth location globally following the Mulberry Street flagship in New York and stores in Tokyo, Osaka, and Seoul. Designed by cofounders Brendon Babenzien and Estelle Bailey-Babenzien, the 5,000-square-foot space is built around the idea that a store should function as a cultural venue first and a retail environment second.
The layout reflects that priority. A skate bowl anchors the space physically, giving the store a feature that has no precedent in Noah's existing locations and signals clearly what kind of place this is meant to be. Around it, the design accommodates the full range of programming the founders have planned: intimate dinners, panel discussions, book clubs, film screenings, and live performances. The retail component sits within that framework rather than leading it, consistent with the community-space philosophy Noah has applied to its other locations but executed here at a scale the brand hasn't had access to before.
The Babenziens designed the space themselves, which means the store's physical language is a direct extension of the same sensibility that shapes the clothing. Noah's design approach has always operated at the intersection of function and cultural reference — preppy construction meeting skate, surf, and music influences — and the Los Angeles store applies that logic to architecture and programming rather than garments. The result is a space that doesn't look or function like a conventional retail environment, which is the point.
The Sycamore District location puts Noah in a neighborhood that already operates as a destination for considered retail and culture, sitting near the Jeffrey Deitch gallery and within a corridor that includes Nili Lotan, Officine Générale, and Jacques Marie Mage. The address makes sense for a brand whose customer is not looking for convenience but for a specific kind of encounter. Babenzien has spoken directly about California's formative influence on his perspective growing up on the East Coast: "Every magazine was featuring skaters and surfers in California," he told WWD. "The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone were doing something we'd never heard before. All of what California was offering us got absorbed, compounded, and layered on top of a basically preppy, and sometimes punk, sometimes hip-hop, style, defining a new Northeast attitude." The Los Angeles store is, in that reading, less an expansion and more a return.
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