Office Space: BuzzFeed Is Not Moving to Downtown LA’s Arts District After All
A rendering of the Ford factory in the Arts District that BuzzFeed will not be moving into.
Super-wealthy media company BuzzFeed had big plans to move into Downtown LA’s Arts District, taking up a two-thirds of the space at a renovated (and beautiful), hundred-year-old Ford factory. But, “after months of discussion,” BuzzFeed and developers Shorenstein Properties couldn’t seal the deal, and now the company is back to the hunt for a new home, says the LA Business Journal . With a planned expansion on the horizon, they’re still going to need a lot of space.
At the least, BuzzFeed is looking for enough room to accommodate an “expansion” of their company; at most, they’re looking to consolidate all four LA offices (editorial, branded content, sales, video), which right now are spread across Hollywood, Fairfax, and Venice. Possible sites big enough to handle all that include the future Pen Factory at the old Papermate site in Santa Monica or the Red Building at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.
While the search for a sufficient space continues, BuzzFeed’s video production department (BuzzFeed Motion Pictures) will move out of its current home in Hollywood, on De Longpre just south of the Arclight Cinemas, to the 52,000-square-foot Siren Studios space nearby on Sunset at Gower. Sometime in the first quarter of 2016, work will begin on the Kilroy-Realty-owned campus they leave behind to transform it into the Academy (formerly Academy Square), an enormous mixed-use project with retail space, creative offices, and a 20-plus-story tower with housing and perhaps a hotel inside.
· BuzzFeed Puts Brakes on Deal at Ford Factory [LABJ]
· Inside the 1913 Ford Factory That Could Become BuzzFeed’s Massive New Home in Downtown LA [Curbed LA]
· Hollywood’s Huge Academy Square Will Have a Supermarket [Curbed LA]
October 1, 2015 at 11:27PM
via http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/buzzfeed_is_not_moving_to_downtown_las_arts_district_after_all.php