‘Cinephiles are the best storytellers’: inside the LA offices of Neon Rated, designed to capture the ethos of filmmaking

The moment you cross the threshold of independent film distribution and production company Neon Rated, you enter a world that pays homage to the past, present and future of movies. A pair of low-profile 1960s ‘Djinn' chairs in the reception area echo their appearance in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reminder of HAL, the movie's artificial intelligence character, which seems eerily prescient in the current climate. Illuminated by a custom-designed pendant lamp composed of vintage Fresnel camera lenses, the room is overlooked by a light box transformed into a painting – a still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), one of the company's many successful releases, which offers a visual portal into the 18th-century drama about love, seeing and being seen for who you truly are.

Step inside Neon Rated's Santa Monica offices

Designed by the LA-based Studio Muka, led by husband-and-wife team and Wallpaper* US400 honorees Zabie Mustafa and Neda Kakhsaz, Neon's new Santa Monica office is serene but full of seductive curves, and a palette that feels more like a film set than a commercial office space, especially in a town where media companies often opt for bright white, minimalist restraint. But then the company is known in Hollywood as a disruptor, with consecutive Palme d'Or wins for movies that include Anora (2024), Anatomy of a Fall (2023), Triangle of Sadness (2022) and Parasite (2019), as well as accumulating multiple Academy Award nominations, including wins for Anora and Parasite.

Neon founder Tom Quinn first connected with Studio Muka when he and his wife hired them to renovate their LA home. Quinn was so impressed with their aesthetic and demeanour that he engaged them to design Neon's new headquarters. ‘They have the calmness of well-trained astronauts, which is quite infectious,' says Quinn, adding, ‘I consider our office and company to be a kind of atelier dedicated to creativity, and Zabie and Neda are forever curious, which anyone who is truly creative is.'

That creative spirit culminates in a humanistic space where the details matter: bullnose desk edges soften impact on computer users, and a breakout space with upholstered banquettes, tables and flattering lighting is more akin to a Milanese café than an office seating area, serving as a place to share a meal, hold a meeting or work quietly.

Vased at Santa Monica Airport, the 10,000 sq ft space is striking both for what Mustafa and Kakhsaz added and what they left behind. They ground down the concrete floor to its aggregate, which gives the impression of terrazzo, added custom rugs in jewel tones for softness, and opened the space up with an interior central courtyard. By leaving the ceilings exposed with beams and columns, they created a refined rawness that reveals the building's history. ‘This is an adaptive reuse project,' says Mustafa of the building, which was originally built in the 1940s. ‘We wanted to build a space for a community of cinephiles that are producing some of the world's best independent films.'

The custom-designed oak millwork throughout has a luxurious streamlined sensibility that alludes to old Hollywood, as does a purposeful reference to Rolleiflex twin lens cameras via a series of double holes in doors and walls. The oak is also an additional architectural nod. ‘We're in Santa Monica,' says Kakhsaz. ‘There's a little bit of [Frank] Gehry DNA in this part of town, so we didn't want to use rich coloured wood, but instead used oak plywood, something that Gehry would use to change the perception of an inexpensive material by using it in a sophisticated manner.'

Meanwhile, the heart of the office is a state-of-the-art screening room that is just as much about glamour as it is about function. Kakhsaz and Mustafa designed the automated, generously-sized reclining theatre seats, keeping German industrial designer Dieter Rams in mind as inspiration. The room's serene deep blue colour envelops the movie viewer in a calm, immersive space punctuated by Studio Muka-designed sconces, formed from single folded metal sheets and layered with subway grating.

Kakhsaz points out that most of the objects and furniture they used in the design were either historically significant or customised to capture the ethos of filmmaking. Take, for example, the chunky, postmodern Studio Muka-designed lounge chairs – inspired by automotive design, they are covered in a Raf Simons bouclé fabric and directly reference Neon's 2023 Michael Mann-directed film Ferrari. A sense of place also played a role – the romance of an airport, a feeling that you can go anywhere in an instant had a visceral appeal for Quinn, who not only loves aviation, but likened the allure to Rick's Café in the 1942 film Casablanca. The mythical bar acted not only as a physical crossroads, but also as a space for wanderers and refugees, offering the perfect metaphor for a company with a global perspective. It's no surprise that, as the design process unfolded, Kakhsaz and Mustafa kept defaulting to filmmaking and their love of films. ‘That was the root of the story we wanted to tap into,' says Kakhsaz. ‘For us, cinephiles are some of the best storytellers, and we just wanted to honour that art and Neon's origins.'

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today