Jonathan Watts is a partner at Culver City-based architecture firm KFA Architecture, which he has led since 2016, alongside Lise Bornstein and John Arnold. KFA is designing more than 8.1 million square feet of current projects in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on multifamily housing, adaptive reuse, hotels, and mixed-use buildings and campuses. The firm has seven active projects in Culver City, and, according to Watts, its hyper-local approach gives KFA knowledge and expertise in understanding communities.

Watts sat down with the Business Journal to discuss current and past projects, the lure of Culver City, which neighborhoods are the most developer-friendly and what it’s like to design in the firm’s own backyard.

KFA is designing multiple projects in Culver City. Why is it a desirable neighborhood?

Culver City feels like a town and is well run like a town. The downtown is wonderful and the areas to the east focused on single-family homes. The one neighborhood that still has potential is Fox Hills. Fox Hills has an infrastructure of wide streets which curve and provide an interesting starting point. The Westfield mall is close by and there is easy access down to Marina del Rey and LAX. It’s walkable and will get more walkable with new development. We’re trying to create real community in this neighborhood by having publicly accessible open space on private land, which is always hard to do, but it’s a big part of what KFA is advocating for.

The firm now calls Culver City home. Tell me about KFA’s relocation.

We moved our office to Culver City in 2019 in an attempt to be more central. We were in Santa Monica, and it was wonderful, but it’s very difficult for our employees to come in and out of Santa Monica these days. We moved to a beautiful warehouse in Culver City. We have a lovely space, and it’s been a really important move because we were able to attract talent that we could not in Santa Monica. It’s a very culturally strong firm. We have a lot of fun internally.

What’s it like to design in your home turf?

It’s really gratifying. We do work all over – affordable housing is 40% of our work and that tends to be all over the place, not in the wealthy neighborhoods usually because the land is too expensive – and so to be able to start to build buildings in the city that we’re working in is very gratifying. And to get a reputation for caring about the city, as well as about our developers, is also a fun part of it. I believe that we’re doing really good things for Culver City, and that’s important to me.

How has the city evolved over time?

I think Culver City is really maturing beautifully from the old 1930s, ’40s, ’50s. The tagline (for Culver City) is ‘The Heart of Screenland,’ and it really was an industry town for the movies. Then it went away from that to manufacturing, transportation and housing stock that was relatively affordable. And now it’s coming back. The big creatives – Google, Amazon and the Culver Studios – are all thriving again. Those are each half million-square-foot institutions, and they’re bringing jobs and salaries. And for the housing now to catch up with the commercial success of Culver City, while maintaining the scale and feeling of a small town, it’s really cool. It’s wonderful.

Tell me about a project you’re currently working on that you’re particularly excited about.

I think 5757 Uplander Way is extremely exciting because it’s 8.5 acres. There are going to be six separate buildings with a beautiful paseo, an internal sort of walkway system. It really is like a campus, and I think it’ll end up being the sort of heart of the Fox Hills area. The other, 5700 Hannum Ave., that is almost at the end of getting approved and entitled, is 309 units for Lincoln Property Company. It’s a very cool project on a very important corner. We’ve designed a stunning rooftop swimming pool deck that’s going to have amazing views and be a wonderful place for residents to hang out. What we’re trying to do is balance the needs of the community, the city and the residents who are paying to live in these spaces. And I think that’s where KFA and the developers and teams are very strong, being able to design something which the city feels good about approving because it’s enhancing community, but the developer feels good about financing because they can make a couple of bucks on it.

Previously, KFA designed the Ivy Station, a 500,000-square-foot mixed-use transit-oriented development that provides a mix of retail, office, hotel and residential uses. What can you tell me about its design process?

It’s definitely the building I’m most proud of in my career so far, and I’ve been doing this for 37 or 38 years. (The city) did a very quick competition (for who gets to develop the site). We teamed up with Lowe and we won the competition. And the reason, I think, that we won the competition is that we took all the traffic off the 5.5 acres of the site. The other developer architects all had a public street running through the middle of it. And we said, ‘no, this needs to be a pedestrian haven; it’s right at the train station, we need to engage the train station, not turn our back on it.’ That’s what we did with the big public lawn. And the master plan that we came up with, when we won the competition, is exactly what got built in essence. It was around this idea of community with the great lawn being open 24/7. It’s been very safe and very well used. And I think that building is remarkable because of the attention to the space in between the buildings. I can’t think of a project I’ve done that had that much complexity to it.

What’s it like to work on an array of asset types?

It’s challenging because they all have to be part of a collective, but they also have to stand alone, especially in their operation. We spent a lot of time dissecting each piece, particularly the retail, because it’s not always easy to integrate it into these buildings. Designing Ivy Station was one hell of a challenge. And it took a long time. That project was 11 years from inception to opening the doors, and most projects are four or five (years). It just took a long time to get clear on all the different elements, (but) we did it. It was challenging, but it was a lot of fun as well. That’s what we (as architects) look for, that kind of project.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

I think there’s a lot. I mean the main thing I’ve always been in architecture for is to design buildings. In partnerships, often younger people (help), but I tend to work very hard on the designs. So, Ivy Station, I designed. It’s my design. And 5700 Hannum (I designed) with one of the young guys. I’m the only guy in the office who draws by hand and does watercolors; everyone else uses computers. When I can take my three kids to Ivy Station and show them this is a result of sitting at the kitchen table one evening, sketching on ideas, it’s very gratifying. I enjoy that process, but I (also) really enjoy running the business and seeing how we can create something we enjoy but that is also attractive to our clients.