A portal to Tokyo in downtown San Francisco: how Muse & Co. built the Crunchyroll HQ
You step through the door of an unremarkable building in downtown San Francisco and come out — inside Tokyo. That, in short, is how the headquarters of Crunchyroll works — one of the world’s largest anime streaming platforms — which the studio Muse & Co. transformed into nearly 80,000 square feet (about 7,400 sq m) of fully immersive set design. The project, begun in 2019 and completed in 2022, became the studio’s most talked-about work and one of the most-awarded offices of that year.
Scale: four floors, one world
Crunchyroll approached Muse in 2019 with the task of reinventing its headquarters. The space — about 80,000 square feet across four floors, per the studio’s description — was to be a coherent, authentic Japanese and anime experience, not a collection of gadgets. The ground floor was designed as full immersion in Tokyo; independent write-ups describe the lobby as an “oversized” imagining of the Japanese capital’s centre, with a street-market-style café, an arcade games room and a lounge inspired by the film “The Garden of Words.” The upper floors — meeting rooms, kitchenettes and special zones — reference specific areas of Japanese culture, geography and history and titles from the Crunchyroll catalogue.
Method: travel first, then design
The most interesting element of this project is not technology but research. Muse decided that an authentic Japanese experience could not be created without immersion in the culture — so the team took a company trip to Japan to prepare for the project. It is a decision that says a lot about the studio’s philosophy: a spatial experience is built from details, and details cannot be googled. The result is a lobby with a set of torii gates inspired by the iconic Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine, and a statue of Hime, the Crunchyroll mascot — an introductory element meant to “lift the curtain” on the full experience waiting behind the doors.
Collaborations: furniture and AV as part of the illusion
A project of this scale is teamwork. Muse was responsible for design, engineering and fabrication, but partnered with KBM Hogue on the furniture and with SenovvA on the building-wide audio-visual installations. This division of roles matters: the immersion collapses if a random office chair stands in a Tokyo alley or the sound “escapes” the mood. Integrating furniture and AV with the space’s narrative is part of what separates set design from decoration.
The industry’s verdict
The industry’s reaction was exceptional. Office Snapshots placed the Crunchyroll HQ at the top of its “Top 25 Most Popular Offices of 2022” list. The project made the Dezeen Awards 2022 longlist in the Large Workspace Interior category — one of only 26 highlighted from over 5,400 entries across 90 countries. It also won a platinum MUSE Design Awards 2022 (an award unrelated to the Muse & Co. studio itself) and featured among Archello’s “Best Projects of 2022”. The project was covered by, among others, Architect Magazine (the American Institute of Architects’ publication) and China’s ID+C Magazine.
A sequel in Texas
San Francisco’s success had a sequel. In 2023 Muse completed the Crunchyroll office in Dallas — also around 80,000 square feet. The starting point was, as the studio describes it, a “clean but colourless” corporate open space on the city’s outskirts that failed to convey the character of an animation company. The method stayed the same: hours of research into the history and aesthetics of anime, then translating them into a space that “reveals itself as you move through it — like successive chapters of an anime.”
What this says about experience design
The Crunchyroll case is a textbook example of the thesis that an office can be a brand medium. Muse did not “furnish an interior” — it built a story that employee and guest walk through physically, step by step. Three things proved decisive: researching the source (the trip to Japan), narrative consistency across all four floors, and the integration of furniture and AV with the space’s plot. It is an expensive path — but, as the harvest of awards shows, hard to imitate.
This editorial material by Method Press is based on public sources (the studio’s website and projects, trade press and industry catalogues). It was produced independently, with no commercial relationship with the company described. Floor areas (~80,000 sq ft / about 7,400 sq m) and part of the descriptions are figures declared by the studio or client.