Second Home Hollywood, designed by "forest-in-Madrid-based" architects SelgasCano. Photograph by Iwan Baan, courtesy of SelgasCano

If American fast-food chains expanding to the furthest corners of the planet was the most widespread symptom of globalization in the 90s and aughts, for us in the late 2010s, the coworking space might represent a contemporary analogy. Any major city on the planet right now—if it’s a node for international business—will have shared coworking spaces. Like the proliferation of gig-economy labor, the short gains offered by decentralized contract workers means that work is becoming increasingly informal: No central office, no binding contracts.

While this arrangement has freed up employers and employees to reduce their obligations to each other and to bureaucratic blockage alike, it also means that a lot of people are left without a homebase from which to do these jobs.

If you can ignore the typical tech bubble overvaluation fiasco that led to WeWork’s canceling of its IPO, the firing of its CEO, and the ensuing scramble to avoid being wiped from existence, the very real need for purpose-built remote working environments continues to fuel the business of renting space to individuals or small groups of collaborators.

Coworking is still a relatively up-and-coming sector, with competitors trying to differentiate themselves from coffee shops and libraries, spaces that offer similar environments but without the perks, privacy, and pitch of intentional coworking communities. Much like dating apps, they often choose to target a specific demographic rather than a generalized population that has disparate needs. Just within LA, for example, we have The Wing and BizBabes for women, Epiphany Space and Metro Co-Lab for Christians, Vector90 for African Americans, LAX Coworking for frequent flyers, Glitch City for game developers, Kleverdog for dog lovers, The Hub LA for non-profits, Maker City for designer startups, The Hatchery for writers, Thymele Arts for performing artists, Paragon for weed startups, and Phase Two for those who think WeWork is lifeless and expensive. Seeing the diversity in “mom and pop” coworking spaces, WeWork starts to feel a lot more like a generic, franchised Silicon Valley tech office distributed across the world not unlike a Starbucks for startup nomads who don’t want any surprises.

While the common morbid joke about start-ups and “creative” offices is that employees never leave because the office spaces were designed as a second home, a new coworking space just arrived in LA called Second Home which manages to avoid this reputation all-together. More than just acknowledging this dissolved live-work balance in the name itself, Second Home outposts build actual community up through local engagement, public events, and active networking tools that help bridge the gaps between like minds. 

To differentiate themselves from the dozens of other coworking spaces with similar business models, Second Home has focused its abilities on place-making. It sounds simple, but the actual shaping of space, rather than the ubiquitous strategy of renovating existing buildings with trope furniture, makes a world of difference. Seeing how well Second Home works, one only has to wonder why WeWork remains tethered to the tired trends of industrial interiors filled with typical creative office paraphernalia while in the same breath claiming to be creative.

Out of reach from the valuation drama typical of start-ups cynically designed to soak up investment cash, Second Home has developed a target audience much more suited to a sustainable business model: the public. The benefit of working at coworking spaces is in their concentration of like-minded individuals, often entrepreneurs and creatives whose careers often involve knowledge production and dissemination. Central to Second Home’s mission is the development of a public-oriented cultural program: producing events in their auditorium, running a restaurant and bookstore, and providing space for the public to work even without membership. Earlier this year, Second Home shipped SelgasCano’s Serpentine Pavilion to Los Angeles and had it reconstructed at the famous La Brea Tar Pits, which, even if it is a PR move to draw attention to their new Hollywood space, is far beyond the typical marketing campaigns and more akin to the activities of LACMA next door. 

To simplify it, the difference at Second Home is the difference between a freelancer moving from auto-booked meeting room to prescribed coffee shop line to impersonal beer hour, and a self-employed entrepreneur being introduced daily to others like them in a space designed by and managed by humans. To hear more about Second Home’s algorithm-free approach to coworking spaces, I talked with its co-founder Rohan Silva.

I’d like to hear about the beginning of Second Home and how you came to choose SelgasCano to be your collaborator. I believe they've done four of the six locations. 

Yes, and we also funded a project with them to build a school in Nairobi and we built our standalone bookshop with them, too. We've really done six projects with them: Spitalfields, Holland Park, Lisbon, Los Angeles, a bookshop called Libreria, and a school in Nairobi. The other two Second Home projects were done with their sibling practice made up of the three brothers of Lucia Cano. We kept it all in the family. I think it's a pretty unique relationship between client and architect with that depth and continuity of practice and a partnership.

For us, it's very much about having conviction and trusting the architects to run free.

It’s really refreshing to see that consistency for Second Home is more than just a branding choice. 

Right. From my point of view, we'll never run a design competition. We'll work with other architects in the future for sure, but for us, it's very much about having conviction and trusting the architects to run free. I don't really understand why someone would appoint an architect and then sort of try to design the building themselves.

What's been nice about each project we've done with SelgasCano is each one incorporates lessons from the last one. They really care. They made a decision when they started their practice never to grow their team beyond about 20 people, which is also the maximum number of people that can fit into their famous studio in the woods. The reason they didn't want to get too big was that they never wanted to lose touch with the project. We’ve never been interested in the organizational model of gigantic corporate firms where the big name produces a conceptual drawing which is then passed along to be figured out by everyone else. SelgasCano does everything. They design furniture, hand-place everything, and even came to clean the glass and acrylic before we opened. It's a proper labor of love. This level of attention can only work if you take on a very small number of projects, ideally with one client. If you can get straight to the point without having to spend ages trying to communicate, the client-architect dynamic really becomes symbiotic.

Lots of companies are preoccupied with scale; the way they see it, if they aren’t big, they won’t make a splash. Bjarke Ingels has even said that a career’s amount of buildings under his name will still be nothing when you consider the planetary scale of the Anthropocene. But the point of a vanguard is to focus on a mission with a small group of dedicated individuals to achieve something larger than themselves. You have currently six locations—what is the largest you want to be? How does the idea of growth play into your plans?

The meeting rooms at Second Home are each named after thinkers that have genuinely influenced how we think about things. One is named after E.F. Schumacher, the German economist and philosopher who wrote Small is Beautiful. There's a lot in Small is Beautiful that is relevant to Second Home. One is the emphasis on his concept of "enoughness:" the idea that there's a point at which you don't need to be always grasping after more. All that’s to say that we have always been focused on doing one thing well at a time. Genuinely building a community that is diverse, engaged; genuinely building a cultural program that's rich and stimulating takes time. You absolutely cannot do that from scratch.

SelgasCano does everything. They design furniture, hand-place everything, and even came to clean the glass and acrylic before we opened. It's a proper labor of love.

I have met every single team who has based their office in Second Home before they even joined. The reason I do that is to really make sure that we're going to have a diverse community of people that will lean in and take part in something. The hope is that you then make something resilient and that's the beautiful conclusion of Small is Beautiful, that natural ecosystems are very resilient in part because no single entity or organism is ever too big. It's a whole collection of small things. That's a very resilient makeup.

That reminds me of that elephant in the room. Even before WeWork's fiasco, I heard you refer to yourselves as the "Anti-WeWork." Prior to their devaluation, this position made sense as big versus small. However, since this news broke, the problem with ”bigness” for organizations that claim to be creative has almost become common sense. It seems impossible to maintain personable intimacy in your company’s mission while endless growth still has priority. If WeWork exists in the paradigm of Silicon Valley's aesthetic—hedonistic industrial chic—what does Second Home provide in contrast to this? 

Luckily, we had never heard of WeWork when we started Second Home. We opened in 2014, and WeWork came to London a year later. For coworking spaces, there are certainly two dominating aesthetic vocabularies that are very obvious. One is fake hipster, you know: mustaches on the walls, inspirational quotes, glass cubicles with a black frame. The second route is the foosball tables, bean bags thing. Often WeWork combines the two. There's a real sort of irony in those cliches, which is you're trying to create environments for people to be innovative and to express themselves and be unique but only to create a space that is exactly like everywhere else. There's a terrible irony.

I personally think the WeWork failure is a failure of imagination. To just create sterile corporate cubicles is awful. It's like factory farming for human beings. There is this irony that people are quitting their corporate jobs and starting their own businesses, either through need or through desire, which is quite a positive shift. And yet they leave the corporate cubicle behind, and they're at WeWork and then find themselves in yet another corporate cubicle. Absolutely terrible. There's a whole world of learning about how architecture and the built environment can positively impact our behavior, our well-being, our productivity, our creativity—none of that is factored into WeWork. It's just pure efficiency. How many people can we cram in as cheaply as possible? And it's hell. We never even thought to go down that path.

Second Home is definitely not a corporation. Where we choose to open new locations is truly about where we just want to hang out.

However, it is sometimes nice when this thing you believe is wrong turns out to be wrong. Sometimes you think no one will ever notice or, you know, maybe people are too busy to think about these things. We're just going to keep doing what we're doing and learning and evolving. We're always motivated by this idea that, as Winston Churchill said: "First we shape our building, thereafter they shape us." We really do think that harnessing insights from nature, like biophilia and evolutionary psychology, can yield really positive benefits for people's environments.

Riffing off the name of Second Home, freelance culture and flexible work environments get a lot of flack for their invasion of the individual’s free time. In a sense, they do become a Second Home, and not in a good way. You know, stories of Facebook employees never leaving, eating all their meals at the campus, freelance copy editors feeling that a minute spent relaxing is money lost. How does Second Home respond to the increasing casualization of their clients’ lives, and the ever-difficult work-life balance we all seem to face?

The breakdown of the old demarcation of work and life, in lots of ways, can be really grim for people. There are lots of other things that also follow from the explosion of self-employment in the economy. People feel increasingly kind of alone. There's much less of a safety net around them. You feel very lonely. It's very scary. There are loads of bad things in the economy right now. Second Home can't fix that, but what we are trying to do is say, all right, how can we try to create a community with a set of educational and cultural programming as well as create a space that makes that transition to our new economic age something that is more joyful and productive and making you slightly more likely to succeed. That's really what we're trying to figure out.

A big part of it is this diverse community, because we figure that if Second Home was just full of, say, tech startups, then you can't do business with each other because you're all equally broke and doing the same thing. All you can do is maybe poach from each other. At Second Home, we have law firms next to fashion companies next to charities next to filmmakers, next to design firms. And we have people we employ whose only job—and I don't know any other space who does this—is to connect the community. We call them Breakthrough Managers. Their only job is to sit down with people and ask, "what are you working on?" And then, with your permission, put you in touch with other members of the community in order to help you grow. 

Programmatically, we also have a huge set of social activities from running and soccer to drinks on a Thursday and breakfast for founders. They’re all designed to keep smashing people together because they make this new economic paradigm a happier and more productive one. Because it's really tough out there.

I've found that SelgasCano's work fits extremely seamlessly into LA. Seeing the pavilion over at the tar pits and now this, I can see someone assuming that this is an LA-based architecture practice with work in London and Lisbon. But instead, we know they're a forest-in-Madrid-based firm. Perhaps it’s the colorful material choices or the playful attention paid to plant schedules or custom-built furniture and antiques, but for a European firm, it feels exactly at home here. Do you feel at home here as well? 

Myself, my co-founder Sam, the architects, we all feel really lucky to be here. The response from the city and the community has been so lovely. I think LA is a very open place. London, where we're from, is fantastic, but there's a very different mentality there. Whereas when we try new things here, people say, "good on you." It's a really lovely thing. We actually ended up calling the Serpentine Pavilion that we brought to the La Brea Tar Pits a "love letter to LA." We've continued that theme in our programming because we really have come to love the city and just feel incredible gratitude for the welcome response.

We’d love to do more in LA as organic growth would have it. As I said before, our growth model is sustainable, the opposite of WeWork’s. Second Home is definitely not a corporation. Where we choose to open new locations is truly about where we just want to hang out. We figure if we like being somewhere, maybe other people will, too. That's the hope.

I heard you mention that you moved here not too long ago. 

I moved down here with family, my wife and baby, back in April. Initially, I'd planned to stay until the end of the year because it takes time to build a community and get that cultural programing as rich as it can be. But we love it so much that we plan to stay at least through next year as well. And that's partly because the response has been so positive. At this point, if we are lucky enough, we'll try and get another project going in the next couple of years. There is no sense that "we've got to get 200 locations in the next eight months." It's not like that. We found in London that it gets better and better as you open other locations because as your community gets bigger, the number of connections between people in our community actually scales and grows exponentially. It's not linear growth. It's an exponential growth. So we really genuinely think Second Home gets better if you can grow in an organic way.

It's not a growth at all costs model, as parroted by Zuckerberg.

Growth is hard and risky. Coming from London to America was a huge leap. To put it in perspective, our first location opened in 2014 in East London, and then a couple of years later, we opened our second ever location in Lisbon. We expanded for the first time really to see whether our mission would resonate in a totally different city. Was it just a London specific thing? The success of Lisbon gave us a lot of confidence that we could pull off a big move to America one day because our method to help support creativity and entrepreneurship applies globally now. Whether you're in Tokyo or Mexico City, lots of people are facing these same challenges and responding to automation, responding to changes in the economy. Big, formidable companies are employing ever fewer people, and more people are choosing to work for themselves. It's hard stuff, but I think we're optimistic enough to believe that if you do the right things in terms of the built environment and community and programing, actually that future has the potential to be a bright one. It's just going to take a lot of hard work.

That reminds me, I saw you worked for a while as an economic policy advisor to David Cameron and others during the mid to late 2000s, working on a handful of initiatives to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in the country. I wanted to ask about what led you from public work to private entrepreneurship yourself, and what you learned working in the government that has helped to the success of Second Home.

I've got to admit that starting a business was so much harder than being in government making policy about small businesses. That was a real shock. One of the things I started in the British government was an initiative called Tech City which was about building a digital business cluster in East London. At the time, there was a small one emerging, so we were asking how could we really catalyze that growth.

It was completely new for me to think about that interplay between architecture and outcomes.

The thing that really struck me doing that, in truth, was that governments don't really think very much about place. That's why I found Second Home so intellectually fascinating because it was completely new for me to think about that interplay between architecture and outcomes. But the commonality between my public and private sector experience was in thinking about clusters. I find the paradox beautiful that, while technology is making place less relevant—you and I could be having this conversation via Skype or Google Hangout, the clustering of physical proximity matters more and more for successful job creation. This is a fascinating paradox. 

This all begs the question: what are the conditions for healthy clusters to emerge? Do they just fall from the sky, or can you build them? Every Second Home is an attempt to build a cluster within a single building, which is why we think so much about the diversity. My co-founder [Sam] comes from a charity background, so I can’t speak for him. But for me, that idea really comes from my time working in government.

That's great. It does feel like a cluster, maybe like a hostel run by a couple who just wants to share their home with the world. 

Right, that sense of place is something we invest seriously in. That all costs you. Unless you really believe in it, you wouldn't bother doing it. That's one of the grim things about WeWork and Amazon for that matter, that it's about maximizing efficiency, and that may be good for their rational short term interest, but everyone loses at the macro level. I personally think that's the role of the government, to enforce a bit more of that long-term, social thinking. There's not so much of that in Britain right now, or America. So thank you, I'll take hostel.