Marvimon Lobby

Marvimon Lobby

Originally built by an Italian race car driver in 1924 as one of Los Angeles’s first automobile showrooms, Marvimon has reinvented itself as a stand alone super-loft for events, weddings, exhibitions, productions and fine living. Marvimon has a Woolly Pocket living wall indoors, in the entry area as well as a large outdoor installation in the 3-story walled garden.

Design Challenge

 The challenge was to create a verdant living wall indoors that could be watered by drip irrigation, without doing any in-wall plumbing. Drip-line was run like co-axial cable through the loft and painted white so that is was almost invisible.

Date of Install

May 2009

Owner

Marvimon Productions 

 Designer

Form LA is an award winning landscape design, construction and maintenance firm that has unique and varied experience working with landscape and regional vegetation in the Los Angeles area.

Access

Marvimon is available for private events.

Climate

Installation is indoors with moderate indirect sunlight through skylights. Shortly after the installation some of the plants struggled and it was determined that the cause of the problem was that the climate controls for the building were programmed to shut off at night when the building was not being used. By adjusting the climate control system to run at a minimal level at night the plants recovered.

Pockets

The installation uses (8) Chocolate Wally Ones and (8) Wally Threes with reservoir.  This was one of the first indoor living walls created with Pockets using our patented reservoir system. The installation is 8’ – 9” tall and 7’-6” wide.

Plant List

Planted with a mix of 8” and 1 gallon plants for an instant lush effect:

Ficus – Rubber Tree

Philodendron – Zanadu

Philodendron – Hederaceum

Philodendron – Split Leaf

Pothos – Golden

Pothos – Jade

Irrigation

The living wall is watered with a drip irrigation system. The drip line is 1/4” self regulating ½ gph emitters spaced every 6”. The water source is run off an split connection to a washing machine in an adjacent room and run through ¼” supply line through a loft space kind of like coaxial cable. A timer automatically triggers the system to run 2x a week for 3 minutes. It is very important to have a backflow preventer on the supply line, especially when running the water source down from the ceiling.