Vinyl records, shipping containers, and home cooked Italian food collide in a new concept venue coming to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2025. Monospace is the brainchild of creative director Christopher Knowles and Craig Richards, chef and owner of Atlanta’s acclaimed restaurant, Lyla Lila. It will play host to a restaurant, bar, dance floor, and daytime cafe designed by Mattaforma.
The New York–based firm is also behind Public Records: a multiuse space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, outfitted with a “sound room,” cocktail bar, and record store—all plainly aligned with Knowles and Richards’s vision. At Monospace, the pair has put forth an experience akin to “friends getting together to share a great meal, discuss ideas, play records for each other and dance in the living room.”
Monospace will inhabit three shipping containers situated around a garden outside of Stove Works, a contemporary art center located in Chattanooga’s Southside. Not far from downtown, Stove Works and its surrounding area feels at once pastoral and industrial, a charming quilt of railroad tracks, unkempt meadows, and ivy-covered brick.
Mattaforma’s concept for Monospace is an organic extension of what already exists at Stove Works, both in ethos and design. Renders indicate ample stone, brick, and corrugated material. Reminiscent of the nursery at Public Records, wooden beams cantilever over a patio to add rustic character. The indoor-outdoor concept invites movement throughout the area.
“In the heart of Chattanooga, we’re grafting the Tennessee bucolic—river rock mounds and hemlock canopies—into these modern industrial ruins as a backdrop to the new multisensory experience of Monospace to see what new forms of nature might emerge,” Lindsey Wikstrom, founding partner of Mattaforma, said in a statement.
Visitors can wander from the garden to the restaurant and bar, which draws from Richards’s Lyla Lila both in cuisine and music; think southern Italian food, rich with vegetables, paired with a vinyl collection inclined toward jazz, soul, disco beats, and high-synth new wave. During the daytime, the space will serve as a cafe with coffee and pastries, in addition to myriad goods collected by Richards and Knowles (cookbooks, art and design tomes, and funky records).
Sound will saturate the experience at Monospace—hardly surprising, given Richards and Knowles’ love of music. (Knowles is a longtime DJ and worked at Sony.) The duo has tasked Chattanooga sound designer John White with the space’s sound design and engineering. A partially open shipping container houses a DJ booth and hi-fi sound system with custom speakers, while an open area makes for an ideal dance floor.
Monospace is slated to open in Summer 2025. In the meantime, Richards and Knowles have been hosting pop-ups in Chattanooga that fittingly offer food, wine, and tunes. The restaurant’s Instagram page will advertise future events. Monospace is seeking investors for a second phase, which will renovate a historic stove factory into a boutique music-hall-meets-restaraunt.
