WME’s Sleek New Headquarters Give Agents Every Reason to Come to the Office (Exclusive)

Richard Weitz, co-chairman of the WME group, is standing in the lobby of the agency’s new Beverly Hills headquarters on a recent afternoon. The space suddenly swells with agents, assistants, clients and others shuffling through for lunch. Some people split off to sit for a meal at 1898 — the plush new lobby restaurant operated by Wolfgang Puck that has taken over for Jack & Ben’s — while others grab something light from the café and huddle inside the many wood-and-velvet booths taking up the center of the lobby, creating what is effectively the office’s new town square.

Weitz watches as people come together to eat, chat and even just throw a quick “hey, nice to see you.” He believes work-from-home arrangements aren’t suited to WME’s business. Representation always has been about relationships, he says. Hollywood, in other words, is an in-person job. “Even though the industry is changing, there are two things you can’t replace: community and collaboration,” explains Weitz. So when he and Christian Muirhead became co-chairmen of the storied agency in 2022, they made it a priority to renovate the headquarters to foster more face-to-face interaction. They asked global design firm Gensler to reimagine WME’s aging offices along Camden Drive, which hadn’t had a refresh in more than two decades.

“WME had been in this building for such a long time, and every time some other tenant moved out, they took over the space,” explains Brian Berry, Gensler’s design director, who led the renovation. As a result, the agency’s 10 floors were a Frankensteined amalgamation of styles flattened out by white paint and a vague Y2K futurism aesthetic: “It was all kind of cohesive, but not really.” [...]