Whalar Group's The Lighthouse opened to members at 58 Kent Street in Greenpoint, taking over the former Kickstarter headquarters — a converted 1872 pencil factory on the East River. Individual memberships start at $5,750 a year. Approval requires a vote from a Creator Council co-chaired by Colin and Samir. The Lighthouse calls itself "the first campus and studio playground for the creator economy." Whether you read that as a real institution or a Hype House with a leasing manager is the actual question.
The thesis
The pitch is straight from CEO Jon Goss: the creator economy is the only major media sector without a physical center of gravity. Hollywood clusters in LA. Television clusters in Manhattan. Tech clusters in the Bay. Creators cluster nowhere — they shoot from bedrooms, edit in coffee shops, and hire freelancers off Twitter. Whalar's bet is that the dispersion is a bug, not a feature, and that the creator class is now mature enough to want what every previous media generation wanted: proximity to the people doing the work next to yours.
The reference points the founders keep naming are Bauhaus, Andy Warhol's Factory, and Silicon Valley garages. Translation: a building where creative collisions cost less than they do in a Slack DM, and where the infrastructure (cameras, test kitchen, edit bays, recording booths) lets you "have an idea, run into a studio, make content, edit, and publish it" in the same afternoon. That sentence is the entire product.
What's in the building
The amenities list reads like a TikTok bingo card and that is the point. Podcast studios. Photography sets. A music studio. Edit bays. A live broadcasting desk. Sound stages. A 2,500-square-foot library and salon. The Lighthouse Theater for screenings. A test kitchen with an overhead camera rig pre-installed for the entire food-creator vertical. Coffee in the morning, cocktails in the afternoon. A 6,000-square-foot rooftop overlooking the East River for the content that has to be shot at golden hour.
The architects, Warkentin Associates (who also did the Venice flagship) and Bench Architecture, were essentially asked to design a building that exports well to vertical video. The cooking kitchen has a fixed overhead camera because the highest-yield format for food creators is overhead. The screening theater is sized for premieres because the creator economy has crossed into the kind of project (Netflix specials, IPO documentaries) that needs one. None of it is staged for the visitor. It is staged for the content the visitor will make.
Pricing and gatekeeping
Individual membership runs $5,750 a year. Twenty-four-hour office access climbs to $7,500. Team memberships, sized for four-to-eight-person creator businesses, are $5,000 per person per year. Application requires Creator Council approval — and the council list is a defensible roster of internet legibility: Eddie Huang, Evan Shapiro, Kareem Rahma, Brett Conti, Salt Hank, Gabriel DeSanti, Eni Popoola, Pooja Tripathi, Kelly Wakasa, Tejas Hullur, Ari Elkins, Dave Bench, Odette Williams, and the Colin and Samir co-chairs at the top.
That gate is the real product. A WeWork desk in Williamsburg is cheaper. A Soho House membership confers more crossover prestige. The Lighthouse is selling neither office nor club; it is selling vetted adjacency to other creators a council has agreed are worth being adjacent to. The Soho House comparison is the right one to start with and the wrong one to finish with — Soho House gates on cultural capital generally. The Lighthouse gates on whether the council thinks you can plausibly make money on the internet.
What this means in the creator-economy stack
The Lighthouse is the physical-real-estate corollary to the platform shift we covered last week — scale is losing leverage; trust, community, and direct audience are gaining it. A creator class that has stopped competing on raw follower count and started competing on owned audience and craft now needs the infrastructure to make better stuff. The home-studio era was about reach. The Lighthouse era is about production value, peer review, and the kind of cross-pollination that comes from running into Salt Hank in a hallway when you're trying to figure out whether your cooking show should pivot to longer formats.
It is also a real estate move. Greenpoint sold the building in 2024, and the neighborhood is in the middle of a creator-class migration that has been visible since the pandemic. Local writers (the Greenpointers piece is bluntest about this) are already pointing at the tension: the same neighborhood where 67 West Street's traditional artists are fighting rent hikes is now hosting a $5,750-a-year campus for the people Instagram pays. Whether you read that as displacement or evolution depends on which side of the algorithm you live on. Both are true at once, and the Lighthouse's success will turn on whether the second story stays the more visible one.
The wider footprint
Venice opened first, in early 2025, on the LA side. Greenpoint is the East Coast outpost. A London location is in development. The plan is a three-city axis: LA for video, New York for editorial and live formats, London for the international content market. If Whalar gets all three open and full, the creator economy will have its first proper studio system — three campuses where the talent, the production infrastructure, and the deal market overlap.
That is the bet. The 2010s creator economy got built by individuals working in isolation. The 2020s version is being built like the studio era of Hollywood — with buildings, councils, and rents. The Lighthouse is the first one to put a Brooklyn address on it.
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