Manuela at Hauser Wirth

Manuela, a farm-to-table restaurant in Downtown LA, features elements crafted from salvaged trees, including Coast Redwood beams for a raised garden and Deodar Cedar benches. Angel City Lumber sourced materials from local parks, creating a natural oasis that enhances the restaurant's urban setting.

Manuela is a farm-to-table restaurant in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles, inside the Hauser & Wirth gallery.

Angel City Lumber salvaged trees from Griffith Park, Los Feliz, Hollywood, and Pasadena to fabricate a variety of elements for Manuela. Coast Redwood beams for a raised garden, Deodar Cedar timber benches for the open-air courtyard and large Deodar Cedar planters all unite to create a natural oasis amidst the restaurant’s urban surroundings.

Manuela restaurant Executive Chef Kris Tominaga has an ethos: celebrate seasonal ingredients sourced from the best farms and producers in Southern California. When Tominaga needed planter boxes built to grow ingredients, he turned to urban lumber. We sourced Coast Redwood logs from Los Angeles Recreation and Parks that would otherwise have been sent to the dumps. We cut, dried, and milled those trees into sustainable, locally sourced 4’ x 6’ timbers before handing the lumber to Brightview Landscaping for box assembly.

It’s been a tragic relationship between Manifest Destiny and the mighty Coast Redwoods and Giant Sequoias. Early settlers decimated old-growth forests and unscrupulously cut down the giants for decades. Coast Redwood is almost perfect. Impossibly red (deep crimson with a wood finish), Coast Redwood’s texture and smell may even upstage its beauty. Its velvety latewood invites the touch, and it smells like sweet nutmeg when cut. The wood is bug and rot -esistant, void of pitch and resin, lightweight and strong--perfect for exterior use. The trouble is, it’s most happy in its native Northern California, where coastal clouds and mist make for a much different climate than Southern California. Its quick initial growth and its perception as unmistakably Californian have caused folks in Los Angeles to plant them without considering its needs. It’s a sad sight to see a Coast Redwood struggle in the arid, Mediterranean climate of LA. Tree selection leaves a lot to be desired moving forward with Urban Lumber and urban planning. In the meantime, we are doing our best to utilize as much of this gorgeous California wood as we can.