How IKEA and New Restaurants Are Changing Helms Bakery District

Drive down Venice Boulevard past the old brick facade with the neon script sign and you'll notice the parking lot is fuller than it's been in a year. Different cars, different hours, a line at lunchtime that wasn't there last spring. If you live in Culver City and haven't walked through the Helms complex since winter, you're due for an update, because almost none of the businesses you remember from a year ago are still doing business there.

That's not decline. It's a pattern, and once you line up who left against who arrived, it tells you something specific about how this stretch of Washington and Venice Boulevards is being reshaped for the people who actually live within walking distance of it.

A Building That Keeps Getting Rebuilt

The Helms complex has never sat still for long. The original Helms Bakery opened in 1931 and ran as a wholesale operation for more than three decades, supplying baked goods across Los Angeles and serving as the official bread supplier for the 1932 LA Olympics. It closed in 1969, and for most of the decades since, the site has functioned as a design and furniture destination rather than a place you'd stop into on a Tuesday.

The most recent attempt to change that came in 2024, when restaurateur Sang Yoon, the chef behind Father's Office, tried reopening a working bakery inside the original Helms Bakery building for the first time since 1969. It lasted about a year. Yoon told the Los Angeles Times that sales weren't strong or consistent enough to sustain it, and that inflation and tariffs pushed operating costs higher than expected. The bakery closed in December 2025.

The Ledger

Here's what actually happened at Helms over the past several months, tenant by tenant.

Three closures. Three arrivals. Nothing about that ratio is unusual for a commercial district. What's unusual is the shape of what moved in.

The New Tenants Are Built for a Different Kind of Visit

HD Buttercup was a full-scale luxury furniture showroom, the kind of place you'd plan a weekend trip around if you were replacing a sofa. IKEA Culver City occupies roughly the same footprint but functions nothing like it. At about 38,000 square feet, it's a fraction of the size of a typical suburban IKEA, which usually runs 300,000 to 400,000 square feet. It's the retailer's first city-center format in Los Angeles, built around order-and-pickup service and around 4,000 items on display, with more than 3,000 available for immediate takeaway rather than a warehouse pickup counter. It's designed for someone who walks or takes the E Line, not someone who's blocking off a Saturday for a big-box furniture run.

Folks Pizzeria tells the same story from the food side. The Costa Mesa original built a following on fermentation-forward 14-inch pizzas and a tight natural wine list, the kind of place you stop into on a random weeknight rather than book for an occasion. Its move into the old Lustig space marks the first time the brand has expanded outside Orange County, and it's a much lower-ceremony format than the Austrian schnitzel restaurant it replaced.

Hayama by WATAMI, which opened May 1 in the former Lukshon space, is the most interesting swap of the three. It's the first U.S. location for WATAMI Group, which operates more than 500 restaurants across Asia, and it's led by chef Frank "Toshi" Sugiura, who previously ran Bar Hayama in Sawtelle before bringing the concept, and his daughter Ichigo, to Culver City. Sugiura has also worked as the primary catering chef for the Los Angeles Dodgers during their recent World Series runs, which is the kind of detail that tells you the kitchen has range even though the restaurant itself is styled as an izakaya, built for a beer and a plate of yakitori after work rather than a reservation-only night out.

Line up the square footage and the format and a pattern shows up. The tenants that closed were all built around occasional, planned visits with higher overhead per transaction. The tenants that replaced them are built around frequency: a pizza counter, a beer-and-skewers spot, a furniture store sized for a quick pickup run. Whoever is leasing these spaces isn't just filling vacancies. They're resizing the district for people who live nearby and stop in on a normal Tuesday, not for people driving in from across town for a special trip.

The City Line Running Through the Parking Lot

Here's the detail that surprises most people who've shopped at Helms for years without knowing it: the boundary between the City of Los Angeles and Culver City runs directly through the complex. The Venice Boulevard-facing side of the property sits in the City of LA. The Washington Boulevard-facing side sits in Culver City. The new IKEA, positioned closer to Venice, is technically inside Los Angeles city limits, which is why it's being marketed as Los Angeles' first IKEA even though everyone in the neighborhood calls the whole complex Culver City without a second thought.

It's a quirk, not something that changes how you'd use the block, but it's the kind of fact that turns "have you been to the new IKEA" into an actual conversation rather than small talk.

What Didn't Change

Not everything at Helms turned over. Father's Office, Yoon's long-running gastropub, is still there, along with Pasta Sisters, the Italian counter that's been a lunch fixture on Helms Avenue for years. Hayama sits diagonal from Pasta Sisters, which means the newest arrival and one of the oldest holdouts are now sharing a sightline across the same stretch of pavement. If you're mapping out an evening at Helms, those two anchors are still the reliable start and end points, with the new lineup filling in around them.

If you want a fuller sense of what else is worth a stop on a Culver City weekend beyond Helms, we've mapped out the broader shopping corridor in an earlier guide to Culver City's retail scene. And if Helms is the kind of block that makes you curious about the neighborhood more broadly, our Culver City neighborhood page has more on what makes this pocket of the Westside distinct.

The Helms complex has reinvented itself before, and it will again. For now, the block looks less like a place to plan a trip around and more like a place you pass through on a normal week, which might be the point.

If you're watching how a neighborhood evolves and thinking about what that means for your own next move on the Westside, Debbie Weiss would love to help. Let's Connect.