We spent our weekend going down a rabbit hole prompted by an observation that Arcane Estate Coffee in the West Village bears a suspiciously remarkable resemblance to Anaïs Nin’s house in Silver Lake. Something about the dark wood paneling, the violet upholstery, the same insistent purple.
Arcane began in 2015 as a record label founded by Edgar Rojas-Masferrer, imagined as something that could encompass music, art, prints, clothing and collectible objects in a darker, grittier world. In an interview with Vice, he cited Taxi Driver, Weegee and Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law among its references. Real noir type stuff.
But there was always some contradiction. Vice described the “laidback lightness” of LA producer Jamma Dee, whose records Arcane was releasing, against the “back-alley shadows” of the label’s visual identity.
Arcane Estate feels like that world made physical. It’s dark and cinematic, but also warm, plush and slightly fantastical. It feels less like a recreation of rain-soaked, Venetian-blinds detective noir, and more like Arcane’s own dream of it.
That slightly unreal version of noir is what made us think of Nin’s house.
Designed by Eric Lloyd Wright in 1962 as what he later called a “nest,” the Silver Lake home is an unusual counterpoint to the white planes and glass walls of California modernism. Something about the purple-tinged plywood and the color wash in the rooms has always given us a weird, bad-trip energy.
The house, though, feels completely at home in the less-sunny Los Angeles Nin inhabited, where she moved through an avant-garde of experimental filmmakers, artists, mystics and outsiders preoccupied with dreams, sexuality and altered states. Decades later, an exhibition surveying Los Angeles art beginning in 1960 would call this contradiction Sunshine & Noir: Los Angeles as both Pacific paradise and the darker metropolis of film noir.
It seems unlikely that Nin’s house was a direct reference for Arcane (the resemblance is more interesting if it wasn’t), but we can’t help but notice that both spaces seem to invite their guests to escape the brightness outside for something darker, more enclosed, and more theatrical.
Nin’s house feels like midcentury California in a dream state. At Arcane, noir becomes warmer, stranger and more inhabitable.
Bohemian Noir, maybe.