Creative Apartment Space is Born with Deconstructed Open Wood Ceiling

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1 Creative Apartment Space is Born with Deconstructed Open Wood Ceiling Posted on July 4, 2014 We just gave birth to a full creative apartment unit renovation at our new project at 1306 Temple Street in Echo Park. At 580 square feet, the one bedroom unit has full deconstructed open wood ceilings. We stripped off the drywall ceiling of a 1920 apartment unit and left the wood lumber exposed. To accomplish this, we installed new finished doug fir plywood just above the existing wood ceiling frame. The result was to create a loft look in only 580 square feet. Due to City laws, most one bedroom loft like apartment units (with wood ceilings) in Los Angeles are much larger. Creating this unit may seem easy, but it was very difficult because it had never been done before. A number of dubious team members worried the city fire codes would not allow an open ceiling, or it could not be framed. Eighteen years ago, we faced a similar challenge. We proposed to strip the acoustic tile from an existing 1000 square foot office suite and create an open wood ceiling with rigid ducting and skylights. In other words, we wanted to create a creative office in a conventional 3 story office building. First Wood Open Ceiling in a Conventional 1982 Office Building, 720 Wilshire, Santa Monica

2 No one had done this before in Los Angeles. The first prospect loved the space but asked when he the ceiling was was going in. in. Shortly, we we had had multiple offers for for the the space. Again, the the first first one one was was hard hard, but the rest is history. Below is how the 1920 apartment unit, with drywall ceilings, looked before our renovation.. Unit Before Renovation Here is a close up of the ceiling before deconstruction: Original Drywall Ceiling Prior to Deconstruction and Renovation

3 Below is the unit after renovation: a loft looking creative apartment unit with the new deconstructed open wood ceilings. After Renovation with New Deconstructed Open Wood Ceiling Congrats to our project designer/manager, Adaptive Realty, our consulting engineer/architect Gwynne Pugh Urban Studios, and our PMI team.

4 Innovations and Milestones in Creative Office Facilities 720 Wilshire in Santa Monica, 1996 PMI transforms the Westside traditional office space with acoustical tile ceilings into creative office space with exposed ceilings (at the time only warehouses were being converted to creative office).

5 4223 Glencoe, 1996 PMI converts a warehouse into the first multi-tenant creative office conversion in Marina Del Rey to offer a lower cost alternative to creative warehouse conversions in Santa Monica.

6 1632 Stewart, 1997 PMI converts the first two story warehouse in Santa Monica into multi-tenant creative space by cutting large openings into the first floor ceilings to create the feeling of volume; names it Penn Station.

7 8675 Hayden Place, 1998 PMI converts warehouse in the Hayden Tract to creative office in order to join Samitaur in the Culver City creative office revolution. Post dot com revolution, 2001 PMI creates lifestyle offices: predesigned spec suites for conventional offices with design features creating the look of a loft or art gallery.

8 410 Townsend and 539 Bryant, PMI leases only to digital tech tenants to create cluster effect in the SOMA area of San Francisco. PMI Properties purchased the 75,000 square foot 410 Townsend Street and 55,000 square foot 539 Bryant Street in the mid 2000s during the recovery of web based software companies. PMI Properties made the bold move of catering the buildings to web start-ups by implementing an innovate strategy: introduce the first collaborative office designs, lease exclusively to internet start-ups, and simultaneously employ a flexible leasing policy. This tactic, featured in The Wall Street Journal, created a cluster effect and successfully branded the building as the center of tech start-up activity. This innovation of clustering digital tech tenants resulted in Twitter, a start-up at the time, moving into a 4,000 square foot office at 539 Bryant after their first round of venture capital. Other successful start-up tenants at these buildings have included Yammer (sold to Microsoft for $1 billion dollars), Playdom (sold to Disney for $763 million) Tech Crunch (sold to AOL for $25 million), Guardian Edge (sold to Symantec), Xobni (sold to Yahoo!), Eventbrite, OpenDNS, Scribd, Zendesk, Jaspersoft, Ustream, and Yousendit (now known as Hightail). Recently, Adobe leased most of 410 Townsend for a ten year term and HKS Architects leased the ground floor of 539 Bryant (also for ten years). 539 Bryant Street 410 Townsend Street