Architect Zoltan Pali on 30 Years of Designing in L.A. and What’s Coming in 2025

With a newly energized investment environment brought by falling interest rates, along with a fast-changing office and housing ecosystems and a new presidential administration on the horizon, the new year is poised to bring significant changes to the U.S. commercial real estate industry five years after the COVID-19 pandemic made landfall.

Yet for all those reasons and more, 2025 is also a banner year for SPF:a, one of Southern California’s preeminent architecture firms. The Los Angeles-based company is marking its 30th anniversary next year, having been founded in 1995 by husband-and-wife team Zoltan Pali and Judit Fekete-Pali. 

The focus of SPF:a — an acronym for Studio Fekete Pali architects — spans the range from commercial to residential to civic. SPF:a has led landmark projects including the renovation and expansion of the famed Getty Villa Museum in Malibu, plus the 2013 reimagining of the historic Crescent Drive Post Office in Beverly Hills into the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center. 

On the heels of the groundbreaking for the Warner Grand Theatre restoration, a historic property in San Pedro for which SPF:a is leading design efforts, Zoltan Pali recently spoke with Commercial Observer about how the past year has treated the firm amid changing market dynamics, his design philosophy, the difference in approach of restoring a historic property versus designing something new, and his plans for the year ahead.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Commercial Observer: How has 2024 treated SPF:a? What has defined this year for the firm, in terms of the amount of new business, particular types of projects, trends?

Zoltan Pali: It’s been an interesting year. We ended up at the end of 2023 quite busy with varied types of projects. But the long and short of it is, there’s been a lot of projects that are just in the entitlement phase. We had several of the builder’s remedy types of projects that came in Beverly Hills and so forth. And also projects that were in the multifamily world that were utilizing some of the other state Senate bills for density bonuses and FAR [floor area ratio] increases. So there was quite a bit of activity in that space.

But what we found is that in working with the different jurisdictions, there’s a lot of back and forth in getting applications complete. It seemed like planning departments had become, for the lack of a better term, picky on how they wanted the applications completed, requiring detail that you normally would not be asked to do in the past. And so obviously I think this is putting more and more burden on developers.

That’s how the year was spent. We’re working on projects that are in construction and we’re building those, and that’s been great. But, that’s kind of how new business was spent. Nothing from our side went beyond that sort of initial schematic design phase yet, and we’re hoping that the outlook for 2025 is that those dominoes start falling and these projects become real, and then there’s a tremendous amount of work to do.

Has there been any kind of shift in the types of projects the firm has taken on lately, given the nature of the pandemic, the presidential election, Southern California’s office market and housing situation? 

The election was an interesting thing and, frankly, I expect a lot more activity because of that. You have a president and a group of folks coming in that are absolutely pro-development. And although that doesn’t necessarily filter down, I think the national psychology is going to be there. 

I think there’s going to be an interesting sort of tension between those folks that want to hold up development, folks that are worried about gentrification, folks worried about development coming into areas that normally don’t see high levels of development, but with the fact that the favor will be on the development side. It’s what I’m seeing, because there’s so much law on the books, even here in California, that has been signed that if cities and jurisdictions are not meeting their housing elements or their housing requirements, the city councils and city planning commissions are having a very, very difficult time stopping projects that have affordable or inclusionary units in them. So it’s going to be an interesting time, I think, in the next few years on how that’s going to develop.

And the other thing which we haven’t seen much of yet, but I’ve been reading about, is that there are folks that are starting to take old office buildings and turn them into residential buildings. Which is a difficult task because office floor plates are way too deep, you don’t get any light into the center, it’s a completely different building type. But I’m seeing and reading about a lot of that kind of activity …  so this is going to be a trend. We’ve studied one or two, nothing’s happened yet for SPF:a, but I think that’s going to happen because entitlement is going to be much easier, because you already have a structure in place. So it’s going to be interesting how that plays out over the next year.

So the long and short of it is that over the next couple of years you expect to be pretty busy.

We expect to be busy, and we expect, hopefully, that some of these projects go into full design, development, and then ultimately into construction. I think next year we’ll be mostly drawing, and then maybe the following year we’ll be building. 

Speaking of which, the renovation of the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro began in December, with SPF:a leading the architectural design and restoration. How do you approach renovating a large historic landmark like the Warner Grand Theatre, which opened in 1931, versus designing something entirely new? Where’s the line between preserving a landmark’s character while also updating it in a responsible but exciting way?

Thankfully I was lucky to have started working on projects like that early in my career. My first preservation restoration project was the Hollywood Pantages Theatre now 20 some odd years ago. What I learned about it was, especially when you have something that’s that iconic, and was so well built back in the day, the thing that you’re faced with is actually just doing the right thing. And yes, when you have to add something new or something different, there’s a method by which you problem-solve and still maintain U.S. Department of Interior standards for the rehabilitation of historic places. 

We have to be mindful of two things: You want it to be compatible, but you also don’t want to fool the public into thinking that something was original. You have to do it in a way where it’s clearly a distinct new thing, compatible with the old thing, and yet still works. So it’s a very interesting balance, and I find it to be, in a lot of ways, a lot more liberating than trying to do something entirely new. It’s like trying to write a story, right? What am I going to write about? What am I going to design here? Whereas working with an existing structure, there’s already something there for you to grab onto, and there’s something to work with … there is such a thing as writer’s block, and there is such a thing as designer’s block too. You can sit there for days, like, where am I going to go with this thing?

You’ve mentioned that rather than having a specific aesthetic, SPF:a tailors its designs to meet a client’s needs, while also pushing sustainable building materials. How do you navigate that while also staying fresh and innovative?

I’m always looking to create a narrative for the project. I’m always looking to create a story behind it. Even the WE3 at Water’s Edge project that we did in Playa Vista, which was an office building, I tried to create a narrative for why we made certain design choices and certain design decisions. It’s not just a crazy thing that the architect wants to do. It’s something that really has its roots in the site. It has its roots in the neighborhood. It has its roots in the history of the site. It has its roots in the history of the developer or the builder or the client. 

I want a sensibility that has a level of design to it that isn’t trendy, because trends always come and go, but from a standpoint of being absolutely clear with the design ideas and being as lucid as possible with them, so that they have a clarity and a simplicity that could hopefully last a little bit longer than just a few trends. But there’s no formula. Each project is different. Each site offers a different thing. And each moment is different. We’ve worked on projects that have been tabled for five, six or seven years, and we have to struggle back and forth and work back and forth and tug of war back to something different. Because we’ve evolved, and so has the world around us.

In terms of sustainability, are there any emerging types of sustainable building technologies or design elements that excite you and that you hope to implement in future projects?

What I’m hoping is to use cross-laminated timber. In my opinion, wood is the most sustainable way to build. In my residential projects we obviously build with wood all the time, but bigger buildings that would want to build out using Type I construction, or maybe Type IV or Type III, maybe cross-laminate timbers is going to be the best. Plus the fact that, not only is it a sustainable way to build, I think it really responds well to the human feel. So why not use it for the main structure of the building, and try and expose that as much as possible? I’m never going to say I don’t love steel and glass and concrete — of course I do — but that is something I’m really hoping in the next few years I’m able to accomplish. 

Looking ahead to 2025, are there any particularly exciting projects in the pipeline?

We’re hoping to see at least one major assisted living facility of several hundred units, 300 to 400, maybe even 500 units, go ahead. We’ve been teetering and tottering on that for a while. It’s a project that’s been with the firm for two years now, so hopefully that will get a green light coming up soon next year, by hopefully February. It’s going to be our first assisted living project, and I really am looking forward to it. That is a project that, like performing arts projects, are really terrific because they have a social value to them that’s more than just what it costs. They bring something very valuable to the communities that they’re in. So those are the kinds of projects that we love and gravitate towards.

2025 is also your firm’s 30th anniversary. When you think about where the firm was when you started it in the mid-1990s compared to where it is now, what immediately comes to mind?

Things go through waves. We’ve been through several cycles of ups and downs. But as you go on, you become more sophisticated and more advanced in how you deliver the work. In the beginning I think we would make a lot of, should I say mistakes, that we wouldn’t make today. We would go after stuff that we wouldn’t go after today, go after client types that we won’t go after today. You know, there’s a little bit of wisdom that comes in 30 years. 

You meet someone and — although you’re not always 100 percent sure — you can pretty quickly tell whether this gang is going to be the right gang for you, or you’re going to be the right gang for them. And then you can kind of say, all right, I don’t think it’s the right thing for us. In the early phases of a firm, one tends to try and go after everything, because you’re trying to survive. But I think as time goes on, maybe survival isn’t quite always at the forefront. It’s always there, but we’ve learned over the years that having clients that don’t mesh with us and/or us with them, makes for a recipe for disaster.

I’m also very proud of the fact that my son came into the practice. That’s the thing that stands out the most. I have a relationship now with him now that most parents don’t get, so I think that’s lovely. I get to go say hello to him every day and argue about something, and then come back and rethink it and rework it, et cetera. It’s a great thing.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.