person peeking through a colorful mural
Motifs from the relief are repeated on the painted-concrete floor.

November 3, 2025

Words: Dan Howarth

Photography: Eric Laignel

A Touch Of Whimsy Reigns In This San Diego Tech Office

San Diego is synonymous with sandy beaches, year-round great weather, and stellar Mexican food. But for the regional studio of the nationwide multidisciplinary firm SmithGroup, its beloved locale offers much more. When developing ideas for the downtown offices of a global tech company, the project team drew on the fabric of the city to create two dual concepts that celebrate its lesser-known assets. The first is based on the surrounding natural landscape; the second, on its grittier urban energy. “It’s really easy to make the cliché references,” says corporate, commercial, and civic studio leader Megan Skaalen, who helmed the project, “but there’s also the secret side of San Diego.”

The client loved both concepts equally and requested they be integrated across the workspace, a single 50,000-square-foot floor plate spanning two buildings and connected by an internal bridge. While the obvious approach might have been to assign one idea to each half of the space, SmithGroup took a bolder route. The more vibrant, zanier scheme—dubbed Feel the Pulse—was applied to the central communal zones that link both buildings. Meanwhile, the softer, more contemplative direction—At Home in Nature—was woven into meeting rooms and workspaces deeper within the plan. This strategy not only enhances wayfinding, Skaalen acknowledges, but also establishes a clear visual distinction between areas for connection and those for focus.

SmithGroup Crafts A Vibrant Office For A Global Tech Company

A colorful wall with various objects and a wooden floor.
In the lobby of a global tech company’s 50,000-square-foot San Diego office by SmithGroup, a custom wall relief celebrates the city’s vibrant colors, culture, and history.

The dynamic energy of the urban-influenced scheme hits immediately upon entry. The main elevator core is wrapped in matte-black steel panels, while matching forced-perspective diagonals slice across the ceiling and floor, making the lobby appear “like it’s ripped,” explains senior interior designer Alex Leadon. An adjacent wall is entirely clad in a relief collage of abstract shapes, vivid colors, and outdoorsy motifs—all nods to San Diego. “The client really puts an emphasis on the local identity of its offices,” Leadon reports, so this arrival moment delivers a bold “SD” signature right from the start.

Throughout the space, arches appear again and again—turning a long corridor into an arcade, for instance, or spanning a deep, banquette-lined wall booth in the coffee-bar area—gestures that reference the Spanish Revival architecture found across the city, particularly the museums, pavilions, and historic structures populating nearby Balboa Park. The color palette in the common zones similarly borrows from the surrounding context of ocean, beach, desert, and mountains. Seafoam green, terra-cotta, and coral are applied strategically “to get the creative juices flowing,” Leadon suggests. Texture is also introduced via materials such as artworks that incorporate sand, natural-wool acoustic panels in the open work areas, and metal mesh layered over glowing light boxes in a pre-function space.

Colorful Palettes Get The Creative Juices Flowing

A couple of people sitting at a table in a room.
Nearby, an Elisa Passino mural backdrops PearsonLloyd’s Kin chairs and Martin Brattrud Studio’s Las Ondas banquette.

Skaalen lists comfort and hominess as the workplace qualities most desired by today’s employees. Those admirable attributes are conjured here through soft furnishings and soothing colors, certainly, but primarily through art. Wherever you look, a wide array of custom artworks created by SPMDesign bursts from surfaces, envelops thresholds, and even drips off canvases onto the walls. They are joined by a curated selection of pieces by local artists, enlivening communal areas and meeting rooms.

With the art and other decorative elements, the hat tips to San Diego continue—sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, and occasionally hidden. Around a conference room themed after the SS Monte Carlo—a Prohibition-era gambling vessel now a wreck visible at low tide on the beach at Coronado—five coins are discreetly tucked away for staff and visitors to discover. And for those who look closely enough, a discreet peephole in the lobby-wall relief offers a glimpse of a vintage postcard. “There’s a sense of play,” Skaalen observes, “but it doesn’t feel elementary.”

Feel The Pulse Of San Diego In This Workplace Design

A room with a staircase and a staircase.
Mario Ruiz’s Clique benches and a pair of credenzas on casters line the walls of a breakout area.

The open office areas and smaller meeting rooms are quieter in tone, so that users can “focus where focus is due,” says Leadon. A variety of breakout spaces, private booths, and even reclining massage chairs are included to accommodate different ways of working and the requirements of neurodiverse individuals. “No matter what personality, learning style, or work employees need to do, there is a place for them to do that,” Leadon explains. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all.” The multitude of settings in which people can meet, converse, ideate, and relax together is critical—particularly today when, as Skaalen points out, many are motivated to come into the office to socialize: “Human connection is needed, even within a global technology company.”

The overall impression created by the interiors is of a much more mature version of the “fun house” tech offices that dominated the 2010’s. Welcoming, adaptable spaces with artful touches of whimsy—rather than glorified amusement arcades or playgrounds—signal a new era for an industry that has outgrown its awkward adolescence. “Tech companies have grown up, and their spaces have as well,” Skaalen concludes. By creating a condensed, abstracted snapshot of San Diego within these walls, SmithGroup has provided an identity tailored for those who, like them, are proud to live and work in the city.

Explore Design Details Like Hand-Painted Murals

A woman is walking through a colorfully painted hallway.
Motifs from the relief are repeated on the painted-concrete floor.
A man walking down a long hallway.
Blackened-steel cladding walls, ceiling, and floor around the elevators.
A red plate with a picture of a beach.
A vintage postcard in a relief peephole.
A white table with a vase and a wallpaper.
The coffee-bar area’s Longboard backsplash tile in post-consumer recycled glass composite.
A woman standing in a room with a painting on the wall.
Hand-painted murals enliven corridors and circulation spaces.
A living room with a large arched window.
Arches in a pre-function area—as throughout—are a nod to the city’s Spanish Revival architecture.
A woman sitting on a couch in a room.
One of them, embedded in the wall and screened with metal mesh, acts as a giant light box, in front of which Hallgeir Homstvedt and Runa Klock’s Lily noise-dampening pendant fixtures overhang Rainlight’s Sunny lounge chairs and Simone Bonanni’s Obon ceramic coffee table.
A woman sitting in a massage chair in a room
Reclining massage chairs in an office area–adjacent corridor.
A woman standing in front of a wall with a cell
Softer hues reflecting the region’s natural palette.
A mural of a tree in a building.
The same theme informing a mural inspired by an iconic fig tree in nearby Balboa Park.
A man sitting at a desk in an office.
An arcaded corridor leads to an open office area, where sit-or-stand desks cater to personal preferences.
A conference room with a large screen and green chairs.
Dubbed Spruce Street, this conference room evokes the pedestrian suspension bridge of the same name, a hidden city landmark tucked in a leafy Bankers Hill canyon.
PROJECT TEAM

SMITHGROUP: ROB MOYLAN; LESLEY SCOTT; GABRIEL CERVANTES; DAVE WANG; PATRICK MACBRIDE; SHAWN NGUYEN; HAL SPIERS; NEHAL DESAI; ANDREA REYNOLDS; MIKE KATAN; JOSE ALICEA; CHRISTINA MOSS. SPMDESIGN: ART CONSULTANT. CREATIVE METAL INDUSTRIES: METALWORK. WB POWELL: MILLWORK. SKYLINE CONSTRUCTION: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

PRODUCT SOURCES

FROM FRONT EHMCKE SHEET METAL: STEEL PANELING (LOBBY). LED LINEAR: STRIP LIGHTING. TERRA NOVA DESIGNS: BENCHES. AXIS: PEN­DANT FIXTURES (LOBBY, CONFERENCE ROOM). LIVDEN: WALL TILE (COFFEE BAR). ASTEK: MURAL. MARTIN BRATTRUD: BANQUETTE. FLOS: SCONCES. ALLERMUIR: SIDE CHAIRS (COFFEE BAR, BREAKOUT AREA). HEARTWORK: CREDENZAS (BREAKOUT AREA). STUDIO TK: BENCHES. UNIKA VAEV: PENDANT FIXTURES (PRE-FUNCTION AREA). MOOOI: COFFEE TABLE. WEST ELM WORK: SOFA. ARCADIA: GLASS DOORS. ENCORE SEATING: LOUNGE CHAIRS (PRE-FUNCTION AREA), CHAIRS (CONFERENCE ROOM). INFINITY: MASSAGE CHAIRS (CORRIDOR). STYLEX: PRIVACY SCREENS. STEELCASE: DESKS, TASK CHAIRS (OFFICE AREA).

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