Air New Zealand's new Los Angeles Koru Lounge is a sleek and stylish space that compares favourably with the best airport lounges worldwide.
The project was designed by San Francisco-based architects Gensler. Ben Marcus, of Gensler, said the lounge had been completed in a southern Californian style.
"The key for us was designing a space that was really large, but felt small and felt homely," said Marcus. "There's a lot of nods to mid-century modernist design, which started in 1950s southern California, around Los Angeles, all the way down to Anaheim."
He said the biggest challenge was designing the project while the Tom Bradley Terminal was still being completed.
"When we were designing the lounge, we were designing to a space that hadn't been fully resolved or fully thought through. It was still in flux, still under construction and so even the process of building the lounge was a challenge: you had the airport crews on site and our crews on site and the builders on site and everyone was trying to hit a deadline that was a moving target."
