Pod People

Second Home Hollywood is a sight for sore urban eyes, if only you could see it. Five years after the coworking campus opened, the plant life has finally filled in so that from street level, the block looks like a rangy natural reserve in miniature; only a two-story Colonial Revival—designed in 1963 by Paul Revere Williams for the Assistance League charity— manages to peek through. The flip side of this, of course, is total privacy for occupants. Inside this entrepreneurial enclave, there is nothing but immersive flora, blue sky, and the permanent spectacle of movers and shakers who have acclimated to life in tiny glass cells.

Docents are keen to emphasize that Second Home is an escape from the world, an oasis in a desert of lackluster workplaces. When you enter, you aren’t in Southern California anymore; you’re in the aspirational tropical getaway version of LA, the colonial ideal when Europeans first imagined Tongva land as a new Mediterranean coast. But just like Spanish conquest, this ideal requires water, walls, and exclusivity. (We probably shouldn’t make too m…