Cypress Club

San Francisco, CA

What is American design?

It’s the fathappy lovechild of the tavern next-door and a forty-eight Hudson-

Keroac at the wheel, going ninety
Stopping for jazz, hitchhikers and apple pie,
Named for a Bogart-movie nightclub
(Screenplay by Faulkner, adapting a dime store detective novel by Chandler)

Built fat when materials were flat Built by hand
Small batch – every component from scratch
And pudgy like a pig and juke boxes and cars
From a time of optimistic can-do

What is American design? The Cypress Club in San Francisco pioneered the new Northern California American dining culture featuring fresh local ingredients in traditional recipes inflected with the myriad cultures of the city, served with California wines and jazz. The design was rooted in the optimism of the late 1940’s in America, a hybrid of vernacular next-door taverns, imagery from “On the Road” and a blend of elements from post war popular culture…

When Chef Charlie Trotter heard that JMA was working with Kimpton Hotels and George Lucas in San Francisco, he introduced John Cunin. John ran Masa’s, recognized for fourteen consecutive years by San Francisco Magazine as the best restaurant in the Bay Area. He wanted to open a new American restaurant featuring the cutting edge food and wine emerging from the Bay Area.

The name “Cypress Club” comes from “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler (transformed by William Faulkner into a screenplay with starring roles for Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart). The design transforms the San Francisco bar-in-a-dining room with high wainscots, brass and leaded glass with the pudgy forties futurist designs of automobiles, airplanes and juke boxes softened with the bigger-than life WPA era imagery of Thomas Hart Benton.

The Cypress Club was the first instance in which JMA
entirely designed and prefabricated the design
components themselves in the Midwest and
shipped them to California.