Culver City, a once-quiet corner of L.A. County people would pass through on their way somewhere else, has emerged as a destination of choice for some of the world’s best-known companies.
Apple, Amazon, TikTok, and Sony are just a few of the big names with a strong presence in the city of fewer than 40,000 residents, conveniently located between downtown L.A. and the beaches. Recently, they’ve been joined by Ikea, Pinterest and the company behind the Labubu dolls.
“We’re this little oasis in the midst of a megalopolis,” Mayor Freddy Puza said.
Pop Mart, the Chinese maker of the viral dolls, picked a location in Culver City for its headquarters in the U.S.
Michael Hackman, an independent studio owner who controls the building that Pop Mart is moving into, says he is inundated with calls from people excited that the company is coming to Culver City.
“We’re getting all these calls from people saying ‘I have a daughter who is a huge fan,’ and ‘how can we get a Labubu doll?’” he said.
Swedish furniture giant Ikea said last month that it would open a store in the Helms Bakery complex that once produced bread. Although Ikea’s address will be in Los Angeles — most of the sprawling area now known as the Helms Design District is in L.A. — Ikea pointedly announced it was coming to Culver City.
Culver City residents “spend a significant amount of time commuting and are increasingly impacted by affordability challenges,” making it a good fit for a new Ikea store, company spokesperson Briana Lehman said in a statement.
The Helms Design District was a good fit for Ikea because it is a “historic Los Angeles destination” known for its restaurants and home furnishings businesses, the company said. The complex is also home to a Scandinavian Designs store, The Rug Warehouse, Room and Board, among other retail businesses.
The 11-acre Helms complex is the former home of the Helms bakery, famous for the butter yellow trucks that once zoomed across Southern California delivering fresh bread and for being an official supplier for the 1932 Olympics — a distinction still proudly displayed on a rooftop sign.
The bakery shut down in 1969 because the founder did not want his company to unionize, The Times once reported. The Marks family real estate firm bought the property in 1972 and turned it into a center for home furnishings and antiques.
The charm of Culver City is understandable because the former whistle-stop between downtown L.A. and the ocean has emerged as one of the region’s top choices for creative businesses, including HBO, Amazon and Apple, which is building a splashy new office complexon the border of Culver City and Los Angeles.
Another newcomer is tech company Pinterest, which opened a new office in Culver City in January.
For years, city leaders have worked to cultivate a business-friendly image while managing some growing pains. It eliminated parking requirements for new development, making it less expensive to build housing, new shops and restaurants. The city also has a small-business assistance program to reduce permit costs and provide advice to startups.
Improving housing affordability is another priority, the mayor said. The average home costs more than $1.2 million, and longtime residents have expressed worries that the influx of well-paid tech employees will push up rents and exacerbate the area’s housing shortage.
More units are on the way, Puza said, citing efforts to meet the Southern California Assn. of Governments’ target of adding 3,341 units to Culver City by 2029.
“We have 4,400 units in the pipeline,” he said, and “600 of those are affordable.”
A maker city
“Culver City has always been a ‘maker city’ for people who make things,” said Hackman, whose company Hackman Capital Partners owns Culver Studios, where classics “Gone With the Wind” and “Citizen Kane” were filmed. Amazon MGM Studios now makes movies and shows for its Prime channel there.
“Creatives have really latched on to the Culver City area,” Hackman said.
The low-key linear city evolved along railroad lines and roads connecting downtown Los Angeles with Abbot Kinney’s resort city Venice, making it a self-contained outpost in the early 20th century. Its personality, however, lost luster after World War II, as it was engulfed by the sprawl of Los Angeles.
The presence of famed movie studios, including the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer headquarters, always provided some glamour, but when car dealerships started replacing former roadhouses and speakeasies in the 1950s, Culver City took on a decidedly suburban vibe.
Over the years, Culver City Stadium was replaced by a shopping center, and a Costco now stands on the site of the Culver Dog Track, where greyhounds and, later, cars raced. The Culver City Airport, where city founder Harry Culver kept his own plane, closed to make way for a supermarket and an Earl Scheib auto-painting outlet.
With the cessation of train service in the 1950s and the 1965 opening of the Santa Monica Freeway, Culver City became a bit of an island, with its own police force and conservative sensibility.
“It was a drive-through city,” said Walter N. “Wally” Marks III, whose family bought the recently defunct Helms Bakery in 1971. “You didn’t stop here.”
Now, he said, “Culver City has been found.”
A tech boom
One of the reasons it has gained appeal is the economic boom the tech industry brought to the Westside two decades ago, grabbing up offices in what became known as Silicon Beach. In search of space, companies looked away from the ocean. More recently, the region also has become a growing hub for aerospace startups.
“It was obviously glitzier to be at the beach,” Marks said, but Culver City had the room and its location east of the 405 Freeway turned out to be a plus as traffic to the west grew unbearable at some hours of the day.
Architect and Santa Monica escapee Lise Bornstein says a broader shift is lifting Culver City.
“I feel like the energy center in L.A. is being pulled east more and more, like the city itself is pulling,” she said.
Her firm, KFA, bailed out of Santa Monica in 2019.
“We were starting to lose out on employees because driving to Santa Monica was a deep, deep, dark thing,” Bornstein said, “and we were busting at our seams.”
KFA landed in a manufacturing building from the 1940s, last used by a china importer that was converted to an airy office by the architects.
It’s one of several former industrial buildings in Culver City’s Hayden Tract area that was developed by Sam Hayden after World War II. It’s now a cluster of buildings with creative uses, some of which were designed by architect Eric Owen Moss in a plan to turn the district into a “laboratory” for experimental, avant-garde design.
Near KFA’s office is Moss’ undulating, steel-clad Waffle building, which is occupied by the two-Michelin-star restaurant Vespertine. . It’s part of the mix in the Hayden Tract, which includes pottery studios and a whiskey distillery.
In November 2024, a new version of Helm’s Bakery from restaurateur Sang Yoon opened in a 14,000-square-foot lot in the district, but it closed in December due to lagging sales. Two restaurants — a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant — plan to open in the district this spring, according to the district’s Instagram account.
The new Pop Mart headquarters will occupy a Moss-designed building on Hayden Avenue known as Slash for its tilted windows and jagged design.
The company said it was drawn to Culver City because of its proximity to L.A.’s creative industries, which shape global pop culture.
“Pop Mart sits at the intersection of art, design, and entertainment, making Culver City, with its concentration of film studios and innovative technology companies, an ideal base,” Larry Lu, president of Pop Mart for the Americas, said in a statement to The Times.
The historic downtown near the 1920s landmark Culver Hotel, where movie stars used to stay while working at studios nearby, has the charm of a small city. Officials renovated its public spaces, such as sidewalks and medians, years ago in an effort to attract new businesses. In 2021, they launched one of the most ambitious street redesigns in the region that reconfigured pedestrian, traffic, bus, and bicycle lanes to reduce congestion and emissions.
Reviews on the program to improve walking, bicycling and use of public transit remain mixed, at least among drivers.
“Navigation there is a little hard,” said Bornstein, who won’t drive on a stretch of Washington Boulevard. “It’s insane. There are too many things to look out for.”
If Culver City can find the right path to interweaving pedestrians, bicycles, public transit and cars, the results could be an example for other cities in the region, she said. “I’m interested to see how it plays out and what changes they might make.”
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