22RE Converts Ed Ruscha's Former LA Studio into a Sunken Piazza Office for Day Job

Most creative agencies in Los Angeles end up in some version of the same white box: polished concrete, open plan, a ping-pong table doing the heavy lifting for "culture." 22RE went a different direction entirely with Day Job's new headquarters in Glassell Park. Working inside a building once used as a studio by artist Ed Ruscha, the firm peeled back decades of extensions and add-ons to reach something more honest, then rebuilt the interior around a sunken central piazza that borrows its logic from Italian town squares and its geometry from Soviet modernism. The result is a 1,800-square-foot office that feels closer to a well-loved apartment than a place anyone clocks in.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is its refusal to separate design ambition from domestic comfort. The piazza sits lower than the surrounding rooms, a move born from structural constraints that 22RE turned into the building's defining spatial gesture. From there, the program radiates outward: lounge, editing suite, conference room, kitchen. Every zone reads as a room in a home rather than a department in a floor plan. Cherry wood, green concrete, Heath Ceramics tiles, and locally sourced Douglas fir do the talking, and they say something specific about LA's material identity.

The Sunken Piazza and the Art of Constraint

The sunken piazza is the project's gravitational center. Circular skylights punch daylight down into the lowered floor, casting shifting pools of light across green concrete that reads almost like a civic ground plane dropped into a private interior. The level change was not a whim; immovable columns and existing structural limitations dictated it. 22RE simply decided to make that constraint legible, turning a problem into the most memorable room in the building.

Timber seating platforms step down toward the work zone, creating a topography that encourages people to settle at different elevations. The terracotta tile risers between levels act as thresholds, marking transitions without walls. It is a strategy that keeps sight lines open while still giving each zone its own territory. You always know where you are, even in 1,800 square feet.

Cherry Wood, Green Leather, and a Californian Material Palette

22RE built nearly everything in the interior by hand or by commission: desks, dining tables, lounge pieces, a conference table, even the cabinet pulls and door handles. Cherry wood dominates the millwork and paneling, its warm amber tone grounding every room. Against it, olive-green carpet and green leather desk chairs introduce a tonal richness that avoids the sterile neutrality most offices default to.

The banquette seating along one platform pairs corduroy upholstery with low cherry-wood tables, a combination that belongs in a 1970s Italian living room more than a modern coworking space. A sculptural black wall relief above the banquette adds a gallery quality without trying too hard. Built-in timber shelving runs along corridors, doubling as room dividers and display surfaces. Vertical timber slat windows filter greenery from outside, keeping the connection to the landscape constant even in circulation spaces.

The Kitchen as a Domestic Anchor

If the piazza is the public square, the kitchen is the hearth. 22RE treated it as a proper room: oxblood-red Heath Ceramics tiles on the backsplash, stainless steel countertops, and a central island that pulls people in for coffee and conversation. Curved-back dining chairs sit at a custom table, and the whole ensemble reads more like a dinner party setup than a break room.

The framing here is deliberate. From the adjacent workspace, you catch a view through terracotta tile floors and green carpet to the kitchen beyond, a telescoping sequence that makes the small footprint feel layered and deep. The ceiling fan overhead is a quiet nod to the domestic register 22RE maintains throughout: this is a place where people cook, eat, and work in close proximity, and the architecture does not pretend otherwise.

Indoor-Outdoor Fluidity and the Gravel Courtyard

A wall of pivoting timber-framed glass doors collapses the boundary between the main living area and a gravel courtyard planted with lush beds and simple outdoor furniture. In afternoon light, the courtyard becomes an extension of the office, a decompression zone that does not require leaving the building. Douglas fir frames the openings, tying the exterior cladding material back into the interior language.

The courtyard is modest in scale but generous in atmosphere. It borrows from the California tradition of treating outdoor rooms as seriously as indoor ones, a lineage that runs from Schindler through Neutra and into the present. For a creative agency, a space like this is not a luxury; it is where thinking actually happens, between the desk and the garden wall.

Circle Motifs and the Geometry of Detail

A recurring circle motif threads through the project at every scale. Six brass portholes punctuate a walnut door panel beside the round conference table, echoing the circular skylights overhead. In the compact bathroom, the same motif appears as circular cutouts in the walnut paneling, framing a wall-mounted brass basin. The repetition is disciplined without becoming rigid; each instance responds to its specific context while reinforcing a coherent geometric language.

These details reveal 22RE's ambition to control the experience down to the tactile level. Custom door handles and cabinet pulls carry the same intentionality as the furniture and the spatial plan. The circle, as a motif, also connects to the project's mid-century references: Gae Aulenti's playful geometries, Shiro Kuramata's precision, the soft curves of Pierre Chapo's woodwork. The citations are present but never heavy-handed.

Split Levels and Layered Thresholds

Throughout the interior, 22RE exploits level changes and built-in furniture to carve distinct zones out of a continuous volume. A potted tree stands beside a built-in timber shelving unit that simultaneously serves as a bookcase, a spatial divider, and a frame for views into the split-level seating zones beyond. The conference area, visible through the shelving, sits on its own green carpet island, a room defined by material rather than walls.

The entry sequence deserves mention: low and intimate, it unfolds gradually into the layered interior rather than revealing everything at once. It is a residential trick, the kind of thing you experience in a well-planned house where the hallway compresses before the living room releases. Applied to a commercial interior at this scale, it transforms a potentially claustrophobic footprint into something that feels expansive through choreography alone.

Why This Project Matters

Day Job Office argues that the creative workplace does not need to announce itself through spectacle. At 1,800 square feet, there is no room for empty gestures, and 22RE did not waste a single one. Every material choice, every level change, every circular cutout serves both a practical and an atmospheric purpose. The domestic register is not a gimmick; it is a position on how creative work actually happens, in rooms that feel inhabited rather than occupied, where the boundary between thinking and living stays deliberately blurred.

The project also stakes a claim on what Los Angeles design can be when it looks inward rather than outward. The references to Italian and French modernism, to Kuramata and Schindler, are filtered through a Californian sensibility that privileges warmth, light, and material honesty. In a city where commercial interiors often default to either tech-bro minimalism or nostalgic pastiche, 22RE has built something that belongs to neither camp. It simply feels like a place worth spending time in, which may be the hardest thing to design and the only thing that matters.

Day Job Office by 22RE, Glassell Park, Los Angeles, California. 1,800 square feet (167 square meters). Photographs by Yoshihiro Makino.

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