My Favorite Room: Will.i.am looks for inspired ideas from a ‘plain’ space
Will.i.am loves design and has cultivated a distinct red-carpet style, but his favorite room at his state-of-the-art Hollywood facility is surprisingly plain.
“To be honest, it’s the ugliest room in the building,” said the seven-time Grammy Award winner and Black Eyed Peas frontman.
Now a tech entrepreneur as well, will.i.am created the 50,000-square-foot complex, dubbed “The Future,” with interior designer Liana Reid in 2013. The site houses several recording and photography studios, a soundstage, video editing bays, a cutting and sewing area, and a lab for electronics design.
As such, it’s become a home away from home for the 41-year-old, who owns a residence in the Los Feliz area.
It’s also where his fashion and tech company, i.am+, is developing a voice-activated virtual platform called AneedA — it’s a bit like Apple’s Siri, only device-agnostic and more conversational. The interface debuted this year in the i.am+Dial smartwatch.
What’s so special about this space?
It’s a cross-disciplinary creative environment — musicians collaborating with coders, coders collaborating with seamstresses. We’re all working together on different products. Anything you want to make, you can make here.
You mentioned the artificial intelligence room is your favorite and that it’s unlike the rest of the complex.
All the other rooms I designed to look really geometrical and faceted, with white, swooping curves coming out of the walls to form couches and sweeping, bleeding lights. I designed those rooms like I designed products.
But not the A.I. room?
The A.I. room is just an empty space with some simple, basic tables. It’s not beautiful at all. It’s just white walls you can write on with dry erase markers, like any start-up has. But it’s all about the people in that room — the developers and engineers — and the things we talk about there.
It just goes to show that something can be very beautiful, but just because it’s attractive doesn’t mean that’s where you spend most of your time.
What’s written on those walls right now?
“Firmware,” “scribble scrabble,” “launch,” a bunch of different math problems and different codes and passwords for servers.
Maybe some good inside jokes too?
A lot of the people that work there are of different cultures, so not so much with the inside jokes.
I guess there might be some translation issues.
That’s why we have AneedA.
What does AneedA do, exactly?
A newscaster can tell you the news but can’t answer all the people who have questions. It’s a one-way conversation. We want to have a two-way conversation with sound that gives you all the information in the world, a deeper dive.
In 2016, we all have touchpads on our phones. In 2026, you’re just talking to things. You’ll go up to a mirror or an intelligent wall and speak to it and it computes.
You’ve had some pretty impressive muses: Fergie, Britney Spears. Are the A.I. room and AneedA like that?
AneedA is amusing; she’s a museum because she has all the world’s information on request, she’s music, she’s a muse. I’m amused all the time when I interact with her. That’s a play on words. Whoa.
