Sun Mun Way Cool

Adaptive reuse of historic buildings in Los Angeles, both officially sanctioned and ad hoc, often results in odd juxtapositions, with none odder than the nutty provenance of Dan Bernier and Amy Finn Bernier’s loft in Chinatown. In 1939, their building was born as the Rice Bowl restaurant, a politically incorrect "palace in the sky" that served a stiff Mai Tai and was home to the only Asian cabaret in town. Later, it became Madame Wong’s—which, to any cool kid raised in the post-punk 1980s, occupies a place as seminal as CBGB but as obscure as Machu Picchu: Once, the Berniers’ 1,200-square-foot living/dining room held a stage graced by then-junior-varsity bands like Blondie, the Go-Go’s, Oingo Boingo, and the Police. Dan Bernier tells his favorite story about "Madame" Esther Wong (1917–2005), who was nothing if not adaptable: A failing restaurateur who got into music for the beer sales, she roamed the club’s audience to sniff out marijuana smokers. In her most infamous Chinese-grandma moment, "Madame Wong stopped the Ramones in the middle of their set, because someone had written graffiti in the girls’ bathroom, and she made them go clean it up," Dan says with a laugh, sprawling on a sun-drenched couch in the former West Coast temple of New Wave.

From the mid-1980s until the Berniers bought it in 2003, the building on Sun Mun Way was a 4,000-square-foot furniture warehouse upstairs and a series of low-rent merchants downstairs, all moldering in concert with the declining fortunes of the master-planned, tourist-friendly shopping village north of downtown once known as New Chinatown. (Old Chinatown had been bulldozed and redeveloped several times over by the 1930s.) Today, just-plain-Chinatown is experiencing a renaissance, with bars and art galleries occupying formerly empty storefronts, new housing and light-rail nearby, and a multicultural 24-hour street scene that exists nowhere else in urban Los Angeles. Some call it gentrification, but there may not be a word for the repopulation of a fake place with real residents. For the Berniers, it’s like raising a family in the middle of Colonial Williamsburg. Weird, but fun.

By the time the Berniers got the property, the only remnants of its fascinating past were a disused kitchen in the back—now a bedroom for their sons Maurice (Moe), five, and Lewis, eight—and a distinctive circular opening between the show lounge and dining room, now an open living/kitchen area and lofted sleeping/bath quarters. The "big circle" still serves to separate the front of the house from the back: "We wanted this big public area where people could be eating, cooking, talking—a shared space," says Dan, "and on the other side of the circle is  really ‘our’ space. It exists as another realm." A couple of swings for the boys are bolted into a beam just beyond the circle, and while homework, playtime, and bedtime occur in the back rooms, the whole house is a free-fire scooter zone.

Kid-friendly touches pop up throughout the space. In the bathroom, a sink for shorties is placed next to one for adults; the bathtub is ensconced below the overhang of the sleeping loft to keep it warm and cozy, while the tooth-brushing area opens up all the way to the skylights. Moe and Lewis’s bedroom looks out on the not-so-scenic rear of the Hop Louie restaurant next door, but it also has a great view of Dodger Stadium; in the summer, the boys can watch July 4 fireworks from their beds.

In addition to the big circle, the most prominent design elements are the 14-foot-tall ceilings painted bold green, red, orange, and blue, and the golden southern light that flows through the double-hung windows, some of them new, some of them originals buried under decades of stucco and drywall. "It was a club, so they didn’t want any natural light, and when it was a furniture warehouse, they were afraid of people breaking in," says Dan. French doors open up onto an original balcony that runs the length of the eastern edge of the building, allowing parents to keep an eye on kids scooting around the concrete plaza below. An IKEA kitchen features red plastic panels that riff on the faux-Chinese lacquer seen in Chinatowns everywhere, and a bargain-priced green granite countertop that Dan considers retail waterloo (but in a good way).