Netflix Moves to New Hollywood Office Next Week
Tomorrow will be the last for Netflix in its Beverly Hills office.
After postponing a Jan. 1 move-in date to a gleaming new office building on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, the streaming service’s 800 Los Angeles-based employees are scheduled to enter new offices on Feb. 20.
As of 5 p.m. Thursday, employees are expected to work at home for the rest of the week until they can occupy the 14-story ICON tower at Sunset Bronson Studios.
Netflix has been in Beverly Hills since 2003, when it leased a 4,000 square-foot satellite office and began dipping its toe in content acquisition. The company — which has its main headquarters in Los Gatos — has grown rapidly since then, and now occupies about 80,000 square feet in Beverly Hills.
To accommodate its continuing growth, Netflix leased 200,000 square feet in the ICON building from Hudson Pacific Properties in 2015. In February 2016, Netflix agreed to lease the remaining five floors of the 323,000 square-foot building.
The tower, designed by Gensler Architects, rises nearly 200 feet off the ground, on the former site of the KTLA radio tower. (The radio tower has been moved west along Sunset.) It features a penthouse with a tiered balcony, offering sweeping views of Hollywood. Hudson Pacific also built a new parking garage at Sunset Broson Studios.
At a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce event in November, Ted Sarandos — Netflix’s chief content officer — talked up the new facility, but was somewhat vague about what it means for the company.
“A building like this is a statement — of who you are, what you believe, and what you want to do,” he said. “It’s aspirational for sure, but beautifully functional. That’s why we fell in love with this project as soon as we toured it.”
In recent months, Gensler has gotten building permits to upgrade the facility for the new tenant, building open interior stairs from the second floor up to the 14th, and working on a new terraced deck.
“It’s going to be phenomenal,” Sarandos said at the Chamber event. “It has the best views in town, I couldn’t believe it.”
Netflix has also signed a lease for production space and for a five-story office building, which is across from the new tower. The five-story building is still under construction, and is not expected to be complete before the middle of the year.
Until recently, the ICON tower was surrounded by tall, chain-link fencing. The landscaping had not been installed along Sunset, and men in hardhats were still carrying ladders around inside the vacant building. The bright-red Netflix logo could be seen from the street, though the view was blocked so all that was visible was “N-E-T.”
A rep for Netflix declined comment.
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