Sun Yat-sen mark the traditional gateway to Chinatown. "We can walk to a restaurant without having to cross a street, and they can ride their bikes without the fear of cars," Dan says, pointing to the courtyard of Central Plaza below, where Chow Yun-Fat’s shoeprints and a statue of Dr. Stymied by high prices, they helped make the Chinatown purchase, and in return, Amy designed them a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment on the western side of the building.Īnd the more time they spent in Chinatown, the more Dan and Amy realized it was a great place to raise their boys. The decision to actually live in the upstairs space, rather than convert it into multiple rental units as they had first planned, was a slow dawning.įirst came the intergenerational, and financial, appeal: At the same time the Berniers were considering buying the loft, Amy’s parents were looking for a condo in Los Angeles to be near their grandchildren. "I would often buy the wrong toilets," Dan admits.) But in the interim, they had time to think. A job that was supposed to take a few months stretched into a year and a half. But all had been small-scale projects the Chinatown building was a wholly different animal. They’d bought and sold a few houses before, living in some, rehabbing others for a profit. "I think we were very naive," says Dan of the undertaking. She designed the entire renovation of the Chinatown building, with Dan acting as project manager. Before working in housing and finance, Amy was an architect. This is not just a quirk of taste: After running a cutting-edge art gallery in Los Angeles during the ’90s, Dan retired from the economically mercurial art world at age 40 to go back to school and earn a degree in real estate. art stars like Martin Kersels and Steve Hurd. Fine art is everywhere, much of it by 1990s L.A. Vincent de Paul thrift store," Amy says with a laugh. And all the other furniture? "Everything else is from the St. There’s also a reupholstered Saarinen Womb chair, given to Amy by a formerly homeless client when she worked for a nonprofit that builds housing for people with AIDS. The entire place is lit by a cacophony of floor lamps, including a plastic snowman. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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