Day Job's LA Office, DESIGNED BY 22RE
Los Angeles has no shortage of anonymous office spaces, but Day Job’s new studio in Glassell Park is anything but. Housed in a former artist’s compound — once belonging to Ed Ruscha — the building carried years of haphazard additions and wear. 22RE approached the renovation not with a blank slate, but with a scalpel: peeling back, editing, and reshaping until the bones of the place could breathe again. The result is a workplace that feels inseparable from its context — stucco walls nodding to Southern California vernacular, timber pivot doors opening the interior to the hillside air, and material choices that honor both craft and climate. Inside, the project trades generic office tropes for a sequence of rooms that could just as easily belong to a house. A sunken “piazza” workspace replaces rows of desks. Meeting rooms are imagined as living or dining rooms, with custom cherry-wood tables, corduroy seating, and terracotta tile underfoot. Light filters down through skylights and across stainless-steel counters, animating a palette that swings between soft tactility and industrial clarity. The office doesn’t just function; it sets a mood, one tuned for collaboration, pause, and the everyday rituals of work. That blend of domestic intimacy and workplace rigor is what gives Day Job’s office its voice. It’s a project about narrative as much as utility — taking the “office as home” idea and giving it architectural teeth. In a moment when many studios default to trend-driven minimalism or co-working clichés, 22RE offers something else: a layered, site-specific space that celebrates materials, honors past lives, and imagines a future where work feels personal. It’s proof that adaptive reuse can be more than sustainable — it can be soulful.
