Look Inside Goop's Airy Santa Monica Office
There’s so much more to Goop than a candle that smells like a vagina. While media coverage of the online lifestyle oracle loves to focus on outré merchandise—like the aforementioned candle or its new companion, This Smells Like My Orgasm—Goop has, in the 12 years since Gwyneth Paltrow founded the company, expanded into a dizzying multiverse of products and platforms focusing on wellness, fashion, beauty, travel, food, social-justice issues, and myriad other subjects. “We were at a natural inflection point,” Paltrow says of the impetus behind Goop’s move to a new home base in Santa Monica. “We’d outgrown our old offices [AD, June 2017], which were spread out in a bunch of rustic little barns. We needed to have more than one toilet for 80 people. It was time to grow up.”
After surveying, and rejecting, a series of offices that felt too traditionally corporate and antithetical to Goop’s determinedly inclusive culture, Paltrow settled on a nearby building that offered floor-to-ceiling windows, broad, airy spatial expanses, and outdoor terraces that catch the ocean breezes and scents wafting off the Pacific. “We still wanted to keep the California feeling and build on the energy and character of the old office,” Paltrow says.
The Goop team found a sympathetic collaborator in the multidisciplinary firm Rapt Studio. “The first thing we asked was not about square feet or the number of desks. It was about the brand,” recalls Rapt president and creative director Sam Farhang. “We talked to Gwyneth about what Oprah means to her, what yoga means to her. She thinks of Goop as her extended family, so the office had to be warm and inviting, with a vaguely residential feel,” he continues.
Rapt’s design solution was built on three pillars—connectivity, transparency, and empowerment. “We thought about the intersection and overlap of those ideas, and how to balance people’s need to gather and retreat,” Farhang explains. Those concepts take shape in the lofty reception area, where the pleasing curves that proliferate throughout the office are introduced in the form of ample rounded furnishings, notably a lithe open shelving unit that gently demarcates the boundary of the space without inhibiting sight lines or natural light.
The lofty social zone connected to the primary outdoor terrace likewise provides plenty of room to breathe. With scooped niches lined with crescent-shaped banquettes and round dining tables, the space is utilized for all-hands company meetings, dining, and individual or group brainstorming sessions. Elsewhere, the Goop ethos rings loud and true in a pair of test kitchens (one for video production and the other for messier, behind-the-scenes work); a wellness lab for research and development; a proper fashion closet; recording studios; and a mini Goop store/showroom where VIP clients get an up-close look at the brand’s latest offerings.
More Inside Goop's Airy Santa Monica Office
“My one diva-ish request was for a shower because I’m always coming to the office fresh from exercising, and I need to do a lot of hair and makeup for asset creation,” Paltrow says of the handy bath attached to her relatively modest private quarters. “Outside my office there’s a big area for the executive team to hash out ideas. It reminds me of the kitchen table we sat around when we started the company. That’s where the inspiration happens.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest