New $500M Hollywood Office, Studio Complex Planned For Sunset Boulevard

Hollywood’s creative landscape has been dominated by Netflix over the last few years, but a new project could create an office complex and recording facility just south of the Walk of Fame. 

Called CMNTY Culture Campus, the 2-acre property will hold a new 500K SF building designed by SoFi Stadium architects HKS with landscape design by Hood Design Studio. 

Most of that will be creative office space — 430K SF of it, roughly. The remaining space will be about 50K SF of studio and production space, performance venues and educational space. There will also be a 500-seat outdoor performance venue. 

The development at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue is the idea of Philip Lawrence, who owns the Hollywood recording studio Record Plant, and Thomas St. John, who runs an accounting and entertainment business management company. The two industry veterans started CMNTY Culture in 2020 as an entertainment business. 

The duo “contracted with established real estate partners” to realize the $500M project, the Los Angeles Times reported, including developer David Malmuth, who helped develop the Hollywood & Highland retail center when he was a top executive at TrizecHahn Development Corp.

The development could be one of the largest Black-owned enterprises in the Hollywood area, according to a release about the project. 

“We want to create a destination where artists can experience, evolve and have access to all aspects of entertainment,” Lawrence told the LA Times. “So we’re building state-of-the-art recording facilities for music, film, composing and all of the musical needs around production.”

There’s a lot of office space planned for Hollywood. A year-end report by the business group Hollywood Partnership found that at the end of 2021, 60K SF of office space was under construction in Hollywood with another 818K SF entitled.