Designing for the Big Screen: Working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
by Gaurav Nanda, founder of Bend Goods
There are clients that challenge you technically, and then there are clients that challenge you to think about what furniture is actually for. Working with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been the latter.
The Academy came to us with a problem I find genuinely exciting: four completely different Los Angeles spaces ... the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, and the Margaret Herrick Library ... each hosting over 20 events a month, each with its own architectural personality, and all of them needing to feel like they belong to the same world.
Inside the Pickford: What a site visit actually teaches you
Before you can recommend a single piece of furniture, you have to stand in the room.
When we walked the Pickford Center, the first thing that struck me was how much the space does on its own. The warm wood ceiling panels, the round columns, those PH Artichoke pendant lights hanging in the foyer, this building has been carefully considered. Our job isn't to impose a furniture statement on top of that. It's to find pieces that belong there.
The Pickford hosts everything from intimate industry screenings to standing cocktail receptions, and the same rooms have to flex between all of it. That's the core design problem: the space is not large, and it has to do a lot. Every piece of furniture we bring in has to earn its place three or four times over.
What we heard from the team
Listening is the most important part of a site visit. The Academy team told us something I've heard from every serious event client: they need furniture that moves. Not just pieces that look good in one configuration but pieces that a two-person crew can rearrange between a panel setup and a cocktail reception in under an hour.
Heavy upholstered sofas, solid wood pieces, anything that requires two people and a dolly. What the Pickford needs are pieces that are compact, classically proportioned, and light enough to actually move.
Our wire furniture was designed for exactly this. The powder-coated steel frame and aluminum tube pieces are surprisingly light for how substantial it looks. You can lift a Bend Goods chair with one hand. That matters enormously when you're resetting a room at 10pm between events.
Making suggestions in the room
We photographed the spaces as we walked — the open foyer with the artichoke pendants, the built-in bench alcove, the large open event floor — and started sketching configurations on the spot. The Academy team was already thinking in options: six individual chairs versus a sectional sofa configuration, both drawn into the actual space. That kind of thinking-out-loud is exactly the design conversation we want to be in.
Back at the studio: from photographs to 3D
The real work starts when you get back to the computer.
We took the site photos back to the studio and began building 3D models of the Pickford spaces. This is a step I consider non-negotiable for any serious institutional client. A mood board tells you what a piece looks like. A rendered model tells you whether it actually fits — physically, proportionally, and aesthetically — in the specific room you're designing for.
We rendered several configurations: the Cube Sofa Sectional pulled into the main event floor as an interview setup, individual lounge chairs arranged around our Pedestal Coffee Tables for a reception cluster, and bar table groupings defining the perimeter of the foyer. Seeing those renders is the moment a site visit becomes a proposal. The client stops imagining and starts reacting — and that reaction is where the real design decisions get made.
For the Pickford specifically, the renders confirmed something I suspected when we walked the space: the room wants fewer, more considered pieces rather than a full furniture program. The architecture is doing too much work to compete with. A tight cluster of well-chosen Bend Goods pieces in the right zones will feel deliberate and elevated. A room full of furniture will feel busy.
The brief that emerged
Walking out of that process — site visit, photographs, 3D renders, client conversation — the brief became very clear:
Pieces need to be compact. The Pickford's rooms are elegant but not enormous, and oversized furniture kills the flow of a reception.
Pieces need to be classic. The building has a timeless mid-century warmth. Trendy furniture will look dated in two years and wrong against that architecture in five. Our wire designs sit outside of trend cycles in a way that most furniture doesn't — they reference a design vocabulary that was already established before the Pickford was built.
Pieces need to be durable. The Academy runs hundreds of events a year. Every surface gets touched, every leg gets bumped, every cushion gets sat on by people in formal wear for hours. Our powder-coated finish handles that — and can be refreshed when needed without replacing the piece.
And pieces need to move. The best event furniture is furniture that disappears when it needs to and defines a room when it doesn't.
Three more buildings to go
The Pickford was the first visit. We still have the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, and the Margaret Herrick Library ahead of us — each a completely different architectural conversation. The Museum is contemporary and glass-forward. The Goldwyn is a proper cinema with all the gravitas that implies. The Herrick feels like a place where film history is being actively kept alive.
Each one will require its own site visit, its own photographs, its own 3D renders, and its own design dialogue with the Academy team. That's the process. There's no shortcut that produces furniture solutions that actually work.
I'll be sharing what we find at each one. This is exactly the kind of project that made me want to start Bend Goods in the first place.
