“It’s very difficult to replace the passion of 100,000 people screaming for your team’s victory,” says Tim Green, co-founder of Equity Design Associates in Manhattan Beach and former MVP Trojan football player. “What I’ve been able to do is find something that I’m equally passionate about—and that’s architecture.”
NATIVE SONS
Partners Tim Green and Dustin Gregg were both born and raised in Redondo Beach
POWER PARTNERS
The designers officially partnered in early 2018 to create Equity Design Associates
FIGHT ON
Tim Green was a USC Trojan football player who was named MVP of the 1985 Rose Bowl
“We wanted to build something that was bigger than ourselves,” says Tim Green of the partnership.
If you live in the South Bay or Palos Verdes you’ve no doubt passed by one of their works. A dramatic, three-story Hermosa Beach home on Loma Drive with a cut-out balcony overhang. An elegant shingle-front Mediterranean on 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach, or the mellow, wood- and stone-clad modern residence on Hillcrest Drive in Hermosa Beach—the first collaborative project for the partners.
Between them, they’ve churned out hundreds of projects and now rest on a division of labor that, on one hand, casts Tim Green as the business head and creative, and partner Dustin Gregg as construction whiz and designer. Services range from site analysis and design to project coordination and end-to-end construction management.
A long-time development pro, most recently as VP of Business Development at First Light Development in Manhattan Beach, Tim Green’s turn to architecture started about 20 years ago as an entrepreneur (he owned a trucking company in his post-football years).
“My wife and I bought our first house in Pasadena,” he recounts. Charged with drafting the changes that would result in a tidy profit after the duo renovated and sold the place, Tim Green realized: “We found out very quickly that you can gain a large amount of equity in the right markets.”
Game was on, and he’s completed over 20 personal projects since, with the most recent ground-breaking on a Tommy Bahama-inspired home designed by he and Dustin Gregg on a 12,000-foot-square lot in North Redondo Beach.
An architecture degree was earned along the way, as well as a stint at a firm in downtown Los Angeles. “I joke to people that it was harder to get a degree in architecture than it was to win the Rose Bowl,” says Tim Green.
Of his firm’s ability to churn out a diversity of projects, Tim Green says: “It’s the combination of both Dustin and I being involved in the project from the beginning to the end. I’m better at space planning and he’s better at exterior aesthetics. Through our meetings with our clients and our internal meetings, we have developed a very easy approach to architecture.”
A well-rounded one, as well, with the two using their different paths of experience—Dustin Gregg started his in construction, framing for a local design-build firm before his formal studies and private practice—to create a comprehensive offering all bases in the building process.
“I think it’s a huge advantage to have been in the trenches—and personally dug the trenches, too,” Tim Green says with a chuckle. “I don’t even feel like I’m working because I get to draw spaces and beautiful homes for people and fulfill their dreams.”
TIM GREEN | DUSTIN GREGG
EQUITY DESIGN ASSOCIATES
805 Manhattan Avenue, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
310.621.6107 | equitydesignassociates.com
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF EQUITY DESIGN ASSOCIATES
