Gensler, the architecture firm where David Loyola is employed as a design director, has a scale impossible to imagine in New Zealand. The company employs 4000 staff in 46 locations. In Loyola’s Newport Beach office alone, there are 75 staff members; he’s worked there for 19 years.

“What’s been great about [working for a big company] is that I’ve had several different careers,” explains Loyola. “I am an architect by training but I’ve done a lot of interior work. I’ve spent about 10 years creating aviation spaces. It’s kind of fulfilling.”

The 53-year-old recently spearheaded LAX’s Oneworld lounge and Air New Zealand’s brand-new Star Alliance lounge. “It was an interesting challenge,” he says of the project that brought him to New Zealand several times for meetings. “It’s a bit like the United Nations: you have all these different cultures and different people wanting different things.”

Loyola grew up in Sacramento, California, studied architecture at California Polytechnic, and lived in Washington D.C. and Dallas, Texas, before settling in Los Angeles. (“The weather brought me back,” he says.) He lives in a 1930s’, Spanish-style house on Third Street, right next to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market.

“Every architect dreams of living in a mid-century modern home. And there is a lot of that architecture that is well known here,” explains Loyola. “My home is not like that at all. It has lovely Spanish details. My neighbourhood is very walkable, which is nice because I’m in the car so much.”

The keen DIY-er (he installed his own kitchen) loves living in LA, despite his daily two-hour commute: “We live in this wonderful climate. LA is really going through a renaissance at the moment. What’s driving it is a younger, urban demographic.”