Cafetales Restaurant is an eye-catching facility on La Brea Avenue. It has been Farmer’s Restaurant, and GG’s, before closing in 2008. Cafetales’ paint has dimmed, but its sign, design, and interior details, remain to honor the Googie moment.

Googie is a space-age retro futuristic architectural style. The term arose with Googie’s Coffee Shop on Sunset Strip. The Googie style include tapered columns, spires, roofs shaped like flying saucers and spaceships in tropical landscape. Buildings were tiled in classic southern California colors of turquoise, avocado, and orange. Inglewood once held ten Googie buildings; today only Cafetales and Jet Car Wash remain.

Martin Stern, Jr. was born in New York in 1917. His family moved to Beverly Hills and he attended the University of Southern California in architecture. Establishing his Los Angeles practice, Stern pioneered Googie architecture with his iconic 1954 coffee shop in Culver City. Stern’s exuberant aesthetic proved perfect for Las Vegas. His aesthetic was appealing to Vegas hoteliers. Stern designed the Sahara in 1959; Sands Hotel in 1964; the Flamingo in 1967; and the Mint in 1968.

Creating a new urban resort motif, Sterns transformed hotels with space-age design and theme restaurants. He died in Los Angeles in 2001.

Collection: Architecture

Location
115 South La Brea Avenue
Inglewood, California 90301