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 much of the fact that the campus was designed by the Madrid architectural office SelgasCano, though we can’t entirely ignore it, either.)
Walk twenty minutes north and you discover Griffith Park’s Fern Dell Nature Trail, which runs along an idyllic natural spring that supports an abundance of native and nonnative plants alike. It doesn’t require full-time landscaping staff, and plant roots have all the room they could ever need—much more than the two-foot-deep planters found at Second Home. The place peddles an aesthetic ideal of nature that accedes to LA’s car-centric culture: It’s a verdant carpet concealing a buried parking garage. It may be beautiful, but it’s still a stage set.