We tend to associate design excellence with private residences, boutique hotels, or restaurants, but some of the most revealing work happens when designers are asked to operate in unfamiliar terrain – Say, a police gymnasium, for example.
AAHA Studio is known for their work in luxury residential design in the greater Los Angeles area, but today we’re exploring their transformation of a former police gymnasium at San Diego’s historic Headquarters complex into a multi-level wedding venue for Wedgewood Weddings.
Rather than neutralizing the building’s institutional past, the firm treated the project as an exercise in operational and spatial conversion: how do you turn civic infrastructure into an elegant ceremonial space?
“The primary challenge was balancing stringent historical preservation requirements with the need for a poignant, high-impact design that remained commercially viable,” the firm said. “We had to ensure every design move honored the building’s past while creating a functional, revenue-generating space for a modern business.” The result is a case study in applying residential and hospitality design sensibilities to a radically different type of space — where the cadence of wedding choreography, light and modularity become the primary tools of architectural storytelling.
What to change? What to keep?
On the upper level, working within the constraints of the mezzanine and the bow truss grid, the designers chose to amplify the gymnasium’s industrial scale rather than soften it. “Rather than hiding these, we turned them into a focal point, even sandblasting the ceiling to highlight the raw architecture,” AAHA said. Below, where a dense column grid narrowed the field of options, repetition became an organizing principle. Columns were mirrored to establish rhythm and pressed into service as custom drink rails that operate as both structural covers and standing-height tables.
Preservation guidelines for the historic property heavily guided the scope of their design: Gym windows, floors, ceilings and a historic pony wall were designated untouchable, while less programmatically useful spaces were reclassified rather than removed. The tiled shower rooms, for instance, became storage. “Since showers weren’t needed for the venue, we converted that space into storage to keep the tile intact for future historical significance while serving a current need,” the firm said.
Wedding choreography
Weddings follow a strict choreography, and AAHA approached the plan as a sequencing problem rather than a static layout. Through its partnership with Wedgewood Weddings, the firm mapped movement using what it describes as persona role play, ensuring that bridal parties, guests and vendors never intersect at the wrong moment.
The solution to the building’s two-level organization was not separation but timed transformation. A custom curtain system allows staff to reset the upper hall for the reception while guests occupy the lower level for cocktails. In so doing, they created a room designed to disappear and reappear in the course of a single evening.
Fabricated in Tyvek, the curtain operates as partition, acoustic buffer and visual effect. “We wanted a material that could provide a visual barrier but didn’t feel static or heavy,” AAHA said. They were inspired by Ann Hamilton’s 2012 installation at the Park Avenue Armory, where suspended textiles and light produced spectacle inside an industrial shell. In San Diego, the Tyvek curtain absorbs sound and collapses against the wall when not in use, turning ephemerality into a working tool.
Design as theater
Weddings are theater with lots happening behind the scenes. That means most of the important design decisions revolve around a semi-concealed infrastructure strategy. The building arrived as a cold shell, requiring the insertion of a commercial kitchen, new HVAC, electrical and audiovisual systems, along with a structural retrofit complicated by a network of underground tunnels once connecting jail cells. Upstairs, electrical runs were consolidated and aligned, and ductwork was designed to read as architecture rather than industrial background noise. On the lower level, these systems were concealed to intensify the contrast between environments.
Lighting was calibrated for both lived experience and photography: Indirect sources and column uplights shape the lower level without glare, while matte plaster walls prevent flash hotspots. Upstairs, windows double as programmable lightboxes, and chandeliers function as depth cues rather than centerpieces.
All the moving parts
The lesson the firm carries forward from the gym-to-wedding-venue project is conceptual rather than technical. “On a multi-year project with so many moving parts, you have to constantly return to your original North Star idea to ensure the design doesn’t get lost in the process,” they said. Keep their North Star in mind, they successfully transformed a civic interior into a ceremonial one.
