Homes or Shopping Centers?
Drive through Los Angeles today and you’ll see construction everywhere. Empty lots turned into massive “modern” homes, boxy facades with floor-to-ceiling glass, multimillion-dollar listings that look ready for the next glossy magazine cover. But step inside, and you’ll feel it immediately: emptiness. Too many new houses in Los Angeles look less like homes and more like shopping centers.
These houses are built as products, not as homes. They’re designed to impress investors and feed real estate headlines — not to nurture the people who will live inside them. And if we’re being honest, part of the blame lies with magazines and Pinterest. They flood the world with stunning pictures, carefully staged to grab attention, but rarely to educate. They highlight the surface, not the soul. And so developers feel pressured to chase the image, not the experience.
The result? Copy-paste floor plans. Big square footage. Flashy finishes. Rooms staged for Instagram, not for life.
Many developers today are driven by the wrong values. And in some ways, it’s understandable. They have egos, they need steady cash flow, and in a market as risky as real estate, building becomes a kind of gamble. To play it safe, they copy what already sold last month.
But here’s the truth: developers are not villains. On the contrary, most of them are great people — passionate, hardworking, and deeply invested in what they do. I love working with them. They care about results, and they take enormous risks to bring projects to life.
The opportunity lies in shifting that focus. Once developers begin to design with the future family in mind — and disconnect, even briefly, from the obsession with magazine-perfect images — something powerful happens. The focus moves from spectacle to experience. And that shift doesn’t just serve the buyer; it multiplies the value of the project for the developer, both short-term and long-term.
The Forgotten Ingredient: Experience
A home is not just walls and finishes; it’s an experience. It’s the relief of walking through the door after a long day. The comfort of cooking in a kitchen that feels alive with light and energy. The calm of a bedroom that restores balance.
Healthy experiences come from understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a location — its light, climate, orientation, and surroundings — and then making a set of design decisions that respond to them. When architecture respects its place and flow is intentional, the result is always the same: spaces that feel alive.
And that is where the highest value comes from. Not from expensive materials or square footage, but from originality, proportion, and a design that belongs to its context. Without that, even the most expensive property becomes lifeless — a stage set rather than a home.
Why It Matters for Los Angeles
This city has always been a place of reinvention, of creativity, of bold ideas. But our housing is losing that spirit. If every new development looks and feels the same, we’re not just building houses without character — we’re building a city without one.
Los Angeles deserves more than copy-paste mansions. It deserves homes that carry soul, homes that reflect the richness of our neighborhoods, and homes that make people feel alive inside them.
And that’s why Go Nuts Design must fix this. Not by adding more trends, but by restoring what’s missing: soul, originality, and the experience of truly living in a home.
