Blankspaces & Absolute Media Labs: Powering Tech Week and Beyond

 Tech Week is coming up, and we are so excited to be part of Blankspaces’ Tech Week, running the AV for all of their event spaces. Blankspaces has their new (ish) event spaces now in Santa Monica, and you have three spaces. I had the chance today to sit down with Lindsay Lemaire. Lindsay is the Director of Operations here.

Dave Rosen:

This traditionally is a co-working space, but you seem to have taken over some incredible locations—both in Venice, which I’ve worked at for a few years and am very well aware of, but now I’m blown away with what you guys have done with Santa Monica. Talk to me, what are the event spaces like here in Santa Monica?

Lindsay Lemaire: We have a pretty diverse range of event spaces here, anywhere from a large event room that can handle standing room for maybe six hundred people, down to smaller rooms for forty people. We’ve got about four dedicated event spaces here where we can do everything from tech panels to networking events, private parties, and things like that.

It’s really become a big part of our business at this location, as well as Venice and our dedicated event space there. It’s been great as we’ve gotten into the event space over the last few years as a new service in addition to co-working.

Dave Rosen: And the thing that I found so interesting about the way Blankspaces has approached this compared to other places is because it’s based on a co-working space, when you’re prepping your events, you have offices for your team, you have storage for your stuff.

Lindsay Lemaire: Conference rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces. Absolutely, and all of those rooms come equipped with whatever the team might need—TVs, whiteboards. It’s a very productive space, very collaborative, and really allows teams to get together and have the vendors, whether you and your team are planning and prepping the day before, or if you need back-of-house or front-of-house space.

Dave Rosen: Well, the thing that I’ve always enjoyed about working with the Blankspaces team is you accommodate the client’s needs. You’re always looking out for happy clients coming back a second time, which is very similar to our company—Absolute Media Labs and Absolute Rentals—always working on this show to get to the next show. It seems like the team at Blankspaces has that same vibe.

Lindsay Lemaire: Definitely. We really try to prioritize hospitality and working with people rather than treating it like just another rental. It’s about long-term relationships and creating genuine connections. How can we help you, and vice versa? We really see that as a part of our motto: how are we helping businesses grow, how are we helping individuals meet their goals and needs, and what space and service can we provide them?

Dave Rosen: Let’s run through it quickly. At the Santa Monica location, you have a main room with a bow truss ceiling, very open, with glass brick. It’s very different than a hotel and has a very open feel. What do you call that room?

Lindsay Lemaire: We call the main room the event lounge. It used to be an old airplane hangar way back in the forties, so the space has a really open feel with a lot of natural light. We’ve got a roll-up garage door and a lot of whitewashed brick that you can dress up in any way—make it as high-end luxury as you want, or keep it like a creative blank box for a quick tech panel. That’s what makes this room so flexible and adaptable to different events.

Dave Rosen: So you’re saying it’s a blank space at Blankspaces?

Lindsay Lemaire: Blankspaces.

Dave Rosen: Okay, great. And what is the next room?

Lindsay Lemaire: That main room is around four thousand square feet. Our next space is about three thousand to twenty-five hundred square feet. That’s more geared toward a seated group of two hundred. It’s got a formal stage and setting, but a similar feel—whitewashed and easily converted into whatever people want. From there, we have a smaller space that’s maybe a thousand square feet at the most, which is called the event studio.

Dave Rosen: And the thing I like about it is that for larger events, Absolute Media Labs comes in and handles the bigger AV, like we’re doing for Tech Week. But on smaller stuff, you have uplights and speakers on-site.

Lindsay Lemaire: We do basically full service without nickel and diming. It’s all-inclusive: we have chairs, tables, uplights, pipe and drape for some of our rooms, and a lot of other furniture choices that you would otherwise have to rent and bring in. We work with Absolute Media Labs, and Dave over there is really good about bringing in his team, whether it’s one person to run a smaller event up to a huge live stream production. We can make anything happen, whether it’s a lower-budget setup or a higher-production event.

Dave Rosen: Any other rooms we should talk about? Obviously, we have conference rooms and boardrooms.

Lindsay Lemaire: Smaller breakout spaces and conference rooms, but a lot of our spaces work really well for film shoots, corporate off-site events, and private networking events. The spaces are really versatile; some can be separated, and some can be added together to create more of a campus feel where you have all these different breakout spaces throughout the main building.

Dave Rosen: And that’s Santa Monica. Even though we’ve worked together for a number of years, I’m newer to Santa Monica, but then there’s Venice. Let’s talk about Venice.

Lindsay Lemaire: Venice is really unique. It’s a five-building campus around sixty thousand square feet with gated parking on-site—almost a hundred spaces. By day, it’s co-working, but our main lobby breakout rooms and our main event space, which has almost a thirty-foot LED wall, make it a state-of-the-art, high-end, polished event space with the right lighting. It feels like a secure, gated campus with a VIP feel, which is really good for controlling huge events. We also have a full commercial on-site kitchen separate from a gym, so those amenities play a huge factor into event size and what people need.

Dave Rosen: We did the SOCOM event there, putting a big tent right in the middle of the parking lot for lunch. We had indoor-outdoor events with the big sliding doors, LED wall, and breakout rooms, plus lunch for hundreds right outside.

Lindsay Lemaire: The courtyard and outdoor space at Venice make it so events can take over the parking lot because it’s a gated campus. We recently had a carnival there that spanned the entire parking lot with five hundred people walking through the campus experiencing different rides, games, and events. For those huge events, it’s great, but we can also do a hundred-person networking event or a smaller gathering just in our main event space. It’s very versatile based on what people are looking for.

Dave Rosen: I’m thrilled we had the time to sit down. You can book by reaching out to Blankspaces directly or through us to build a custom package. We have all the live streaming equipment, production lighting, and anything else you might need. Together, Blankspaces and Absolute Media Labs / Absolute Rentals have your back. We’d love to have you come down and tour with their team or our team.

Lindsay Lemaire: Absolutely. We’re local small businesses—we’ve been local to Santa Monica for the last twelve to fifteen years, and we’d love to keep events alive in this area and be a provider for both Santa Monica and Venice.

Dave Rosen: So call us today.