Shared-office provider NeueHouse to open branch near Venice boardwalk
NeueHouse, an operator of glamorous shared offices in historic structures, will open an outpost near Los Angeles’ Venice boardwalk in a 1920s building owned by movie mogul Tony Bill.
With memberships starting at $700 a month, NeueHouse will take over space on Market Street last occupied by Snap Inc. The owner of the Snapchat app once controlled a constellation of buildings in Venice but has mostly decamped over the last two years to a Santa Monica business park.
One of NeueHouse’s ambitions is to undo Snap’s legacy as an insular, aloof neighbor on the block close to the center of the bohemian community that, more than a century ago, developer Abbot Kinney envisioned as the Venice of America.
“The street lost a little of its soul when Snap came in,” NeueHouse Chief Executive Josh Wyatt said. “This building deserves to be brought back to life.”
The two-story brick building at Market Street and Pacific Avenue was a production facility and office for Bill, an actor turned producer and director. He edited movies there including “The Sting,” a 1973 crime comedy he produced that won the Academy Award for best picture.
Other creative luminaries including Caleb Deschanel, John Landis, Hal Ashby, Oliver Stone and David Hockney at various times used the building to exhibit art or score and screen films and television shows.
Bill and NeueHouse recently secured city permits for a multimillion-dollar renovation set to begin in April and be completed by the end of the year, Wyatt said.
The opaque frosting that Snap applied to the front windows on the Market Street side will be removed and the building’s original barn-door-like entrance will be restored and left open when the weather is fair, he said. Quarterly open houses and art shows are planned.
There will be a rooftop deck and small cafe with a bar for members, who Wyatt expects will include local creative individuals in search of a place to work and small companies in artistic fields.
Wyatt avoids using the term “co-working” when describing NeueHouse — he said he finds the phrase too “commoditized” — but NeueHouse’s offerings share characteristics with those of WeWork and other competitors that sublet space to people who want a nice place to work on their laptops or firms that need built-out office space they can start occupying quickly.
Other Los Angeles NeueHouse offices are in the former CBS broadcasting facility in Hollywood and the Victorian-era Bradbury Building in downtown’s historic core. The company also has a branch in Manhattan and plans to open one in Miami this year.
