Founded in 2011 by Jessica Pell, Manola Studio is a Los Angeles-based design practice working across architecture, interiors, preservation, landscape, furniture, and hospitality. The studio approaches these disciplines as interconnected, shaping places from their larger architectural and cultural ideas through the smallest details of use and experience.

The studio takes its name from Manola Court, Rudolph Schindler’s hillside apartment complex in Silver Lake, where Jessica lived for eight formative years while studying and beginning her practice. The building became both home and teacher, cultivating an enduring sensitivity to site, proportion, materiality, light, and the ability of architecture to shape experience with remarkable economy. Schindler’s influence remains present not as an aesthetic reference, but as a way of thinking: beginning with what a place already possesses and allowing design to emerge from close observation.

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 work moves fluidly between scales, from the restoration of architecturally significant buildings to furniture, objects, and hospitality projects conceived as complete environments.

In 2025, Manola Studio opened Hotel Wren, a twelve-room hotel in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Conceived under Jessica’s creative direction over nearly a decade, the project brought the studio’s disciplines together within a single place, considering architecture, landscape, furniture, art, atmosphere, and experience as parts of one idea.

The studio’s work increasingly extends beyond conventional architectural boundaries, bringing the same attention to the identity, experience, and cultural life of a place as to its physical form. Manola works across scales and disciplines, from the preservation of significant buildings to hospitality and cultural projects shaped from their earliest ideas through the details of how they are ultimately encountered.

Alongside its commissioned work, Manola Fieldwork extends the studio’s interests through preservation, mentorship, research, and creative exchange.