Founded in 2011, Manola Studio is a Los Angeles-based design and hospitality practice led by Jessica Pell. Working across interiors, architectural preservation, landscape, furniture, and experience, the studio approaches each project in relation to its larger context, considering the people, history, use, and surrounding environment as part of a whole. At the center of the practice is a belief in creating greater harmony between self and space.

The studio takes its name from Manola Court, Rudolph Schindler’s 1926–40 residential complex in the hills of Silver Lake, where Jessica lived for eight formative years while studying and beginning her practice. The building became both home and teacher, an everyday study in site, light, proportion, and materiality, and in the ways considered design can shape daily life and our relationship to space. Manola Court remains an enduring muse, its influence woven into the studio’s ethos and way of seeing.

A native Angeleno, Jessica studied Environmental Design at ArtCenter College of Design, with a focus on spatial and furniture design, and sustainability at Tama Art University in Tokyo. Her early career included work with Eight Inc. in San Francisco and Rottet Studio in Los Angeles, as well as furniture design for Bernhardt Design.

In 2025, Manola Studio opened Hotel Wren, a twelve-room hotel in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Conceived, designed, and co-owned by Jessica, Wren developed over many years as an opportunity to bring the studio’s ideas into a single lived experience. Beyond the physical design of the hotel, it treats hospitality itself as a creative medium, weaving atmosphere, ritual, objects, landscape, and small gestures of care into the experience of being there. Wren is the clearest expression to date of Manola’s belief that thoughtful design can shape not only a place, but the quality of our experience within it.

Today, Manola’s practice continues to evolve beyond the physical making of a place, extending into the ways it is inhabited, experienced, and understood. Working with clients and collaborators, the studio engages projects from their earliest ideas through the details that shape how they are ultimately lived. Across the work is a commitment to integrity, restraint, and things made to endure, honoring history without being bound by it and creating places of lasting beauty, feeling, and relevance.