Eating Our Own Cooking

Eating Our Own Cooking

In our second episode, we step inside Studio One Eleven’s downtown Long Beach workplace, an adaptive reuse project that became a living experiment in community-driven design. Partners Alan Pullman and Michael Bohn, alongside team members and collaborators, share how the move from a disconnected high-rise to a vacant storefront reshaped not only their workplace, but the surrounding neighborhood. What began as an office relocation evolved into a collaborative urban lab that brings together artists, local businesses, and institutions, all helping spark the Downtown Long Beach Design District. Together, they reflect on risk, reinvention, and what it means to “eat your own cooking," aka testing ideas in real time and designing with the community, not just for it.

Retro Row

In our first episode, we head to Long Beach’s 4th Street Retro Row, a lively commercial corridor defined by independent businesses and a strong sense of community. Studio One Eleven Partner Alan Pullman joins Kathleen Schaaf and Kersten Kansteiner, longtime business owners on the strip, to share how a connection sparked by a city-issued call for proposals grew into a collaborative façade improvement and revitalization effort, one that helped shape the street’s identity as it exists today. Together, they reflect on partnership, persistence, and what it takes to breathe new life into a place while preserving the character that makes it meaningful to the people who call it home.