The History of
Creative Office Space

Creative office space grew out of the 1960s–70s artist-loft conversions of New York's SoHo, was pioneered as a marketed commercial product in 1980s Los Angeles, and hardened into a named real-estate category during the late-1990s dot-com boom — finally entering municipal planning language when Santa Monica adopted its Bergamot Area Plan in 2013. No single person coined the term; it emerged from the trade.

The roots: SoHo and the loft

The story starts in deindustrializing American cities. As manufacturing left Lower Manhattan after World War II, artists who couldn't afford studio rents began occupying the empty cast-iron lofts of SoHo — high ceilings, big windows, raw floors, cheap space. The moves were technically illegal under manufacturing zoning until New York formally permitted certified artists to live and work there in 1971. Sociologist Sharon Zukin documented the phenomenon in her 1982 book Loft Living, which showed how creative workers became the advance scouts for the conversion of industrial districts. The lesson latent in SoHo — that creative firms prefer industrial space — is the whole idea that real estate would later package and sell.

Los Angeles makes it a product

The West Coast turned the instinct into an industry. In Culver City, developers Frederick and Laurie Samitaur Smith began buying derelict 1940s warehouses and, in 1986, partnered with the architect Eric Owen Moss. Their first Hayden Tract conversion was built between 1987 and 1990; the work tore warehouses open, sealed them in glass, left the steel exposed, and rented to media, design and ad firms. In 2020 the American Institute of Architects gave the Hayden Tract its Twenty-Five Year Award, crediting it with setting the precedent for the creative-office model.

A few miles west, the typology was already being lived before it had a name. By 1981, Frank Gehry's architecture firm was headquartered in a converted brick warehouse loft at 1520 Cloverfield in Santa Monica — and in 1987, contemporaneously with Hayden Tract, Gehry formally reclad that warehouse in stainless steel. The warehouse-loft-as-creative-office wasn't a marketing concept there; it was simply how one of the era's most important architects chose to work.

The term becomes a category

The dot-com boom scaled the demand. Tech startups, run by young workers with no attachment to corporate norms, actively sought open-plan warehouse and loft space — exposed ducts, concrete floors, daylight. In Los Angeles, the earliest named instance the trade press points to is the advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, which in 1998 opened a 120,000-square-foot open-plan office in a refurbished Playa Vista warehouse. The Los Angeles Business Journal later called it the first local "creative office space" splash. Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) supplied the theory; WeWork (founded 2010) industrialized the aesthetic; and by 2013, brokerages like CBRE were publishing dedicated "creative office" market reports — proof the phrase had become a defined asset class.

Santa Monica writes it into the code

The term entered formal U.S. planning language in September 2013, when Santa Monica adopted the Bergamot Area Plan — establishing a "Mixed-Use Creative" district and using "creative office" as a land-use category (right down to a parking standard of 3.3 spaces per 1,000 square feet). The neighborhood that codified the term is the same arts corridor that surrounds 1520 Cloverfield.