Tactile armature.

This tiny clothes shop in Santa Monica is a stunning and delightful synthesis of simple materiality, space and light.

Edgemar is one of Frank Gehry's most urban developments, a combination of new and old construction with a pedestrian court open to the Santa Monica skies and surrounded by retail, gallery and restaurant units. One of these units - a minuscule trapezoid in plan - has been infiltrated by O'Herlihy + Warner on behalf of Harriet Dorn, a women's clothing company. The client's requirements were for display and storage on a spartan budget of $8000. The architects responded with a playful exploration of material and light.

The unit's total area is less than 30 sq m. It has adjacent blank walls, a window and doors on to the court. Then it is extended upwards through the equivalent of six storeys. One steps directly from the public realm into this shaft with its large pre-existing light monitor far above - a shocking, sculptural kind of void. The young architects' strategy was to layer thin functional elements throughout its volume, screening shelves and storage and changing booth behind a comparatively long plywood wall and suspending what could be displayed in the vertical void.

The concrete floor is thus barrier-free. Above it, a metal rod apparatus centrally animates the boutique. There is an 'X' of cross-bracing high up with subsidiary members outlining a fragmentary circle. Dropping towards head height and held between slim taut poles like a trapeze are plywood slivers, dynamic wavers that serve as exhibition trays and from which larger garments are simply hung. As the folded back wall accommodates so much programme and servicing, including indirect lighting, this invented and exposed armature is relatively free of bulky interference. It forms the motif and core of the store.

O'Herlihy + Warner have become manipulators of the frugal. With modest ingredients, they have spun a memorable space. There are echoes of Eileen Gray in the bent metal fittings and geometrically notched screen, in the industrial tactility of the interior. And inevitably, one thinks of their own LA context with independent craftspeople and a mood - more or less based around the school at SCI.Arc - which values the arts of thinking and making. Harriet Dorn is a small but delightful increment in the development of an emerging Angeleno simplicity.