Residents of Ten Thousand need not worry about parking their cars—or re-filling their gas tanks. There’s a 24-hour valet for that.
Driving east on Santa Monica Boulevard, through Century City into Beverly Hills, the Ten Thousand building is the last high-rise before you officially enter 90210. The 40-story, 283-unit tower of shimmering glass stands on 2.4 acres of land between an Equinox and a Maison Margiela boutique.
In the lobby, doormen—two or three at any given time, in suits and face masks printed with the building’s logo—offer Ten Thousand–branded water bottles. They also operate buttonless elevators from behind their desk, making sure visitors go only where they are supposed to.
The price is in the name: the cheapest rental in the Ten Thousand building is an unfurnished one-bedroom for $10,000 a month (the building doesn’t do studios), and prices go up to $65,000.
Since it opened, in 2017, monthly rent has included a daily breakfast buffet of bagels and lox, access to both a 75-foot indoor lap pool and an outdoor lounging pool, a tennis court, a dog park, a game room, an “experiential lifestyle concierge” (there to book residents’ Il Pastaio reservations), and a butler, who delivers residents’ groceries on a bellhop cart and then organizes them in their fridge.
It’s like a developer crossed a five-star hotel with a summer camp to attract L.A.’s youngest, richest, most famous crowd. So far, it’s worked like a charm.
A daily breakfast buffet, a dog park, an “experiential lifestyle concierge,” and a butler who organizes your groceries in your fridge.
If you’re on social media, chances are you’ve seen the inside of this building and not realized it. One resident tells me she can discern which influencers live in the high-rise from their bathroom selfies. “All the units look exactly the same,” she says, “so it’s very obvious that they live in this building.”
Addison Rae, who has 84.6 million TikTok followers, often posts poolside TikToks and Instagrams of herself tanning or dancing by the gray slated cabanas. The reality TV star Harry Jowsey and his boys post shirtless TikToks from there, too.
The quartz kitchen countertops and Bosch appliances in Olivia Jade’s YouTube vlogs (she reportedly moved in shortly after she withdrew from U.S.C. in the wake of the Varsity Blues scandal, in which her mother, Lori Loughlin, was implicated) look identical to those in Dixie D’Amelio’s TikToks (34.6 million followers)—and Tate McRae’s (the TikToker who co-wrote the song “Tear Myself Apart” with Billie Eilish).
Noah Beck, D’Amelio’s boyfriend (30.5 million followers), seems to post gym selfies from Ten Thousand that show off his bis and tris as well as the cantilevered, 10-foot-tall windows with sweeping views of Beverly Hills. The Bunny Barbie (1.6 million followers), whose real name is unknown, posts TikToks from that same gym—walking on the treadmill in six-inch pink heels.
If you’re on social media, chances are you’ve seen the inside of this building and not realized it.
By now, “collab houses”—mini-mansions where a dozen or so aspiring social-media stars live to devote their days to content creation—have gone mainstream.
YouTubers started these content cribs forever ago. By posting several videos a day with six or seven other influencers and tagging their handles, they could all swap a couple hundred, or thousand, followers.
In 2019, about a year after TikTok reportedly surpassed Facebook in popularity, TikTok collab houses started popping up around L.A. Teens going viral could choose between Sway House, the Drip Crib, the Clubhouse for the Boys, and Girls in the Valley, among many others.
But one of the first TikTok collab houses—and the one with the most clout—was the Hype House. The Spanish-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills, which got its own New York Times profile last year, became an incubator for some of the app’s biggest stars: Rae, D’Amelio (and her sister, Charli), Beck, and others.
Today, Rae has turned her TikTok fame into a multi-movie Netflix deal, and D’Amelio has turned hers into a reality-TV show on Hulu (not to mention a record deal with HitCo Entertainment).
Where is a TikToker with too much hype for the Hype House to go?
Michael Avenatti Yesterday, Dixie D’Amelio Today
It took a few years before TikTokers could monetize their platform enough to pay for a lease in the same building as Demi Lovato, Steve Bing (who, in June 2020, died by suicide by jumping out of a window from his apartment on the 27th floor), and Stormy Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti.
A longtime Ten Thousand resident tells me that, a few years ago, the building seemed mostly filled with rich international businessmen, wealthy kids whose parents probably bankroll them, and “divorced dads.” Actors, directors, producers, and singers have apparently come and gone, too.
But since the pandemic, he’s noticed more crypto-currency businessmen, cannabis entrepreneurs, and TikTokers.
Jowsey, a 24-year-old Australian with a six-pack and 4.4 million TikTok followers, moved to L.A. in the spring of 2020, around the time Too Hot to Handle, a dating-game reality show he appeared on, premiered. During his first few months in L.A., he says he visited the Hype House every day.
The day he hit one million Instagram followers, Jowsey’s friends bought balloons and sprayed him with champagne. He says he went to bed and woke up with one million more followers.
Brands paid him to post sponsored content—basically, to hold or use their product in his TikToks—even before he hit one million followers. But “a million is where you can make pretty good money that you can live off really well,” Jowsey tells me. “That’s when I got big contracts,” he says, for companies such as Pepsi and ASOS.
After a few months in L.A., he considered moving into a house with a few of his boys. But Jowsey, who has since started a dating app and a podcast, wanted to build his own brand “instead of having a one-off brand hit me up with a fat chunk of change.”
He thought, How am I going to meet more businesspeople … build up those relationships with people at a way, way higher level? He heard that successful people lived in the Ten Thousand building, so he moved in. “You never know who you’re going to bump into in the lobby,” he says.
The Bunny Barbie, who started using TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic and within a year amassed one million followers, moved into the building last spring. (Although she, her husband, and their toddler jet between Ten Thousand, their Florida house, and their Wyoming property via a private plane they fly themselves—while, of course, recording it for TikTok.)
In the spring of 2020, “brands didn’t want to look at you if you were a TikToker,” Barbie says. But in the past few months, “brands are taking it much more seriously.”
Although Ten Thousand is known to many in L.A. as “the TikTok building,” non-influencers still sign leases there, too, according to Barbie.
The ordinary people of the Ten Thousand building make good neighbors—and not only because they are potential business connections. Living among the types of people who can afford the Ten Thousand lifestyle offers TikTokers some assurance that their neighbors won’t secretly take photos and sell them to TMZ for quick cash.
A few years ago, the building seemed filled with “divorced dads.” Now it’s crypto-currency businessmen, cannabis entrepreneurs, and TikTokers.
“I don’t think anyone here would do that,” one tenant says. Another resident tells me that “everyone in the building thinks they are super-important so they are not bending over backwards for these influencers.”
In case the excitement over seeing a TikToker in a bikini overwhelms a resident’s sense of propriety, the lease legally assures privacy. According to a copy of the lease obtained by AIR MAIL, clause 52 states: “Landlord has a strict policy prohibiting any photography or videos being taken in any common areas of the property, including but not limited to the lobby, elevators, garage, hallways, health and wellness center, roof decks, the pool and second or third floor amenity spaces.”
Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, this seems more like an entreaty than a rule.
Meanwhile, a tall hedge blocks the building’s driveway and façade from the prying eyes of paparazzi and fans. On the other side of that foliage, there’s the always-clogged Santa Monica Boulevard, which makes stopping to snap pictures nearly impossible. And if a man with a camera were to somehow make it to the building’s glass entrance, he’d be greeted by the building’s 24-hour security and escorted out.
Even the denizens of Ten Thousand can access only a few floors with their swipe card: the one they live on, and the ones with common spaces, such as the third floor, which has a fully stocked bar and a Reformer Pilates room.
But before all that—the saunas, the boardrooms with views of the Bel-Air Country Club, the one-acre resident-only park—there is the valet, which all those who wish to enter or exit the Ten Thousand building must pass.
Waiting for my car there, I saw three Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons. I saw a buff female masseuse lugging her massage table to her Toyota; five boys who looked too young to drive, all dressed like Justin Bieber, filing out of a Tesla; moms with lip fillers coaxing babies with iPads out of Mercedes sedans. Everyone looked so happy.
Jensen Davis is an Associate Editor for AIR MAIL
