As executive vice president of Lowe — the Brentwood-based private real estate company run by chief executive officers Mike and Rob Lowe — Tom Wulf has overseen the creation of 2130 Violet, nine stories of ground-up construction at 2130 Violet St. in the Arts District that opened last summer.
The project introduces 113,000 square feet of office space and 3,300 square feet of retail space to the Arts District in a building that comes with a rooftop deck, mountain views, indoor/outdoor workspaces with private terraces and four floors of parking.
The property, which Lowe acquired five years ago, was formerly a scrap metal recycling yard.
Wulf called it the company’s first office development in the Arts District.
Why was Lowe interested in doing a project like 2130 Violet in the Arts District?
The Arts District is a location that Lowe has been involved in for over 30 years. My own history with the company — I’m going on 29 years now — when I first started, I actually started with Lowe in the Arts District at the old produce market. Now called the Row, (it) was a property that Lowe had acquired from the old Southern Pacific railway. At the time, 30 years ago, we were redeveloping industrial properties in the Arts District.
How has the neighborhood evolved since then?
It’s evolved tremendously. Thirty years ago, there were very few residents. Artists were moving in at super-discounted rates because they could get a lot of space for nothing. It was mainly 100% industrial. Now it still has a lot of industrial, trucking and logistics, but it’s changed dramatically. Now you have top-tier restaurants that are Michelin-star, James Beard award-winners that are destinations for everyone in L.A. to come to. There are probably over 2,000 residential units now that did not exist.
Now you have traditional office. You have Warner Music, Spotify, Honey Science. It’s grown tremendously in terms of a location and it’s continued to put itself on the map as the suburbs of downtown. You still feel like you’re in this great
experiential area of downtown but you’re not in the hustle and bustle of the high rises.
It’s a highly desirable place with a lot of experiential character that drives a lot of folks there.
When did you start construction on 2130 Violet?
We started construction in the middle of the pandemic in July 2020. We constructed the building all the way through the pandemic and completed it in the middle of last year.
We’ve been marketing it throughout that time but the office market has been hit pretty hard and it has a lot of tenants reevaluating what their needs are and focusing in on what their employees need. We’ve been marketing it, but we’ve not yet signed a lease.
What does 2130 Violet offer tenants?
Our goal is to provide a high-quality new construction that’s meeting the needs of today’s office tenants. A lot of those office users that are in high-rise buildings today are looking for something that has more identity, but also has health and wellness, so the ability to have indoor/outdoor space, balconies, roof decks, access to the outdoors. The ideal for us would be a single tenant for the whole building. We could easily do full-floor tenants of 28,000 square feet. We could even go down to dividing floors if we had to. It depends on that creative-type tenant. You think about the folks there now, these music folks. But we’ve also had interest from law firms to design firms.
What do like most about being a developer?
The highlight for me is seeing the joy and excitement that tenants, residents and the greater community get to experience with the things that we’ve developed. It’s the user experience of being able to see people in the space, in the place, in the building and it becomes a place where they live, work and play. We’re community builders at heart. What do we do to help create and build our cities and how do we make them better places for people to live?
