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What is Arcadia?

Status: Ongoing Project

You can contact us at joinarcadia.org or per email at hello@joinarcadia.org. We’re open to both guests and new residents!

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About Us

Arcadia is a new & growing group house in Berkeley, California, fully launched in September 2022.

We are a small group of entrepreneurs, researchers, and autodidacts passionate about improving the future of humanity.

We think that a lot of serendipity comes from intermingling different life paths and different life stages, so we want Arcadia to be diverse across areas of life. We’re looking for the house to be:

• ⅓ researchers/professors/PhD candidates,
• ⅓ founders/entrepreneurs, and
• ⅓ students/autodidacts.

Why Arcadia?

A quick shortlist:

• Community: Live with exceptional, agentic, and thoughtful people. Researchers, founders, and thinkers.
• Become your most agentic self. You’ll like have a sustainable boost in productivity just by being at Arcadia. Most people gain 2-3 productive hours per day by coming to Arcadia.
• Amazing conversations, and amazing people to collaborate with.
• Social accountability to self-improve across areas of life, from health to epistemics.
• An amazing location on top of the Bay Area, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
• An intentional distance from San Francisco, removed from noise and franticness. Focus on your project, don’t get lost in meaningless flashiness.
• An amazing location within Berkeley, close to lively centers and campus.

What are we looking for?

We’re looking for great individuals who share our core values:

• Agency. There are so many problems to solve, things to be created, and ideas to be had. Take action!
• Thoughtfulness about life, consequences of actions, and humanity’s future.
• Ambition. We want visionaries and dreamers.
• Kindness to each other, and to the world.

Caring & investment: All house members contribute to the house and take care of it — we’re a do-ocracy, you can just do good things and you’re encouraged and empowered to proactively make changes and improve the house as you see fit (within consensual bounds).

House Culture — ArcadiaOS v1.1

Many group houses end up with their residents being less productive than before due to distractions within the house. We think this is a problem. Living with exceptional people should increase your output manifold, not decrease it.

At Arcadia, the most common feedback we’ve gotten from guests and residents is how surprised they were that their productivity increased significantly. A combination of our house culture, the atmosphere, and the dedicated working spaces led to Arcadians and our guests noting — on average — 2.6 productive hours gained per day.

Our days are usually quiet and work-focused, and then we eat and rest with house dinners in the evenings and occasional larger events. All socials are optional: If your current project engrosses all of your time and attention, we embrace you focussing only on that!

Health and self-improvement matter, and we hold each other accountable for that. From common diet experiments to improving air quality, we care about sustainable health. For example, going on a two-day opt-in common house fast, or having 2-5 air purifiers in all social spaces installed.

Activities & Balance

Beyond the usual work-focused days, we love to do communal activities and occasional weekend retreats. Here’s a few things we did or are doing:

Roadtrips …

… to watch a SpaceX rocket launch at Vandenberg, to camp in Sequoia National Park, and to Yellowstone Park.

Fun stuff

Paintball, surfing, playing Jugger, yoga, and more.

House retreats

Going to conferences together, travelling to other cities together, or multi-day retreats at other group houses.

On the program this autumn: A house retreat in Boston to visit laboratories and allied communities in October, then house retreat in NYC in November.

About the House

Finding the property for Arcadia was striking gold. Arcadia has 3.5 stories, up to 10 bedrooms, dedicated coworking space, a dedicated deepwork floor, a balcony, a rooftop, dedicated guestrooms, and lots of cozy hidden corners to retreat to. Here are the looks and features of Arcadia House:

Location

Arcadia is within one of the most lively and lovely parts of Berkeley. We are literally a 20-second walk from the UC Berkeley campus. Most residents aren’t associated with UC Berkeley — the campus is filled with beautiful nature and libraries which are open to everyone.

A 20-second walk in the other direction leads you a lively central street with dozens of restaurants, boba stores, and shops. Berkeley feels like a vibrant, alive city, and multiple guests, even older employees or founders, found it “refreshing” to be in this city around a vibrant student campus.

San Francisco’s tech scene often suffers from a low signal-to-noise ratio; it’s easy to get distracted by flashy start-ups which don’t matter. Arcadia’s location in Berkeley is a bit removed from this, both spatially and culturally. It allows you to sit down in a curated environment with exceptional people, and focus on projects you care about.

We do value access to San Francisco, especially immersing ourselves there intentionally for events that are worth it. SF downtown is just a 23min car ride away (if you avoid the traffic) — closer to downtown than some parts of SF itself. The Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) is also close and takes 30 minutes to SF.

If you want to get a feeling for our location, you can use 2315 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, as a placeholder address.

Common Spaces

For a community to flourish, amazing common spaces matter. We designed and furnished a large common area, directly on the main floor, at a location where it’s easy to serendipitously hop into a conversation if you’re passing by. Most paths through the house lead past the common space too.

There are also many other nooks and spaces around the house.

Collaborative Work Space

Half of our main floor is a dedicated collaborative workspace, with hot-swapping desks and coming with some equipment you can use and borrow for work, ranging from monitors to caffeine pills. It’s amazing for planning and working on projects together, and you can invite collaborators to visit and work from here. Also, there are lots of whiteboards!

Deepwork floor

We value work and getting stuff done.

If the main work floor is distracting you, and you just want to churn out a good work session, we have the entire basement floor dedicated to deepwork, where it’s most quiet and uninterrupted. You can set up camp there, and even buy & set up a personal dedicated desk if you’d like. The deepwork floor features whiteboards, earplugs, coffee chocolate, and phone lockers where you can hand in your phone and lock it for a pre-committed amount of time.

Most personal and innovative progress comes from intensely focused work. We live by this principle.

Wi-Fi

All our floors are covered by our Wi-Fi 6 with an average of ~150mbit/s and generally up to 300mbit/s.

Treadmill desk

We value health and exercise, but we also need to take a lot of video calls. Why not do both at once? As a nice extra for the house, we have treadmill desk where you can combine these if you’d like — taking a call while walking eliminates all Zoom fatigue, we promise. It’s awesome.

Fun-not-so-fun: Upon first setting it up, Isaak worked for 1 week straight from the walking desk, overdid it, and had to take a month-long break to let his legs recover…

Rooftop & Balcony

The upper floor rooms share a long, sunny balcony next to a row of trees. It’s an amazing spot to read during the morning and evening.

And, the house has an awesome rooftop, which stretches for the entire length of the house. We furnished it nicely and love to eat together up there, under the sunset afterglow and with a view over Berkeley.

Room Choices

Rooms at Arcadia are generally clean and nice, but also not luxurious. Room choice ranges from large, beautiful sunny rooms to small & simple basement chambers.

Do you want to live in a simple and cheap basement chamber? You can do that. Our rent goes as low as $1,400 for those. (Compare to Berkeley’s $1,845 average 1-BR rent and $2,295 average 1-BR apartment rent.)

There’s a range of intermediate choices on the main floor. Most rooms are nicely sized and can be furnished with a bed, desk, and other furniture. Choices on this floor range from $1,500 to $2,000 per month.

The upper floor has the sunniest rooms, with all of them having windows facing south (sun!). Their size varies, and rent for the largest, sunniest rooms is up to $2,200.

By default, expect rooms to come unfurnished, but more often than not the house can probably provide a few pieces of furniture, niceties, and decoration!

Beauty & Aesthetics

Living in beautiful spaces matters. We designed Arcadia with this in mind. From numerous plants, over art, to floating moons, we wanted Arcadia to be a gorgeous space. Help us make it better.

Miscellaneous Extras

Whatever small thing you need, there’s a good chance Arcadia has you covered. We have a tech cabinet with miscellaneous equipment you can borrow (including monitors), a hygiene cabinet that has everything from ear plugs to blue-light-blocking glasses, and a cozy-furniture-corner from which you can borrow chairs, floor pillows, and cozy blankets.

Why Arcadia?

A quick shortlist:

• Community: Live with exceptional, agentic, and thoughtful people. Researchers, founders, and thinkers.
• Become your most agentic self. You’ll like have a sustainable boost in productivity just by being at Arcadia. Most people gain 2-3 productive hours per day by coming to Arcadia.
• Amazing conversations, and amazing people to collaborate with.
• Social accountability to self-improve across areas of life, from health to epistemics.
• An amazing location on top of the Bay Area, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.
• An intentional distance from San Francisco, removed from noise and franticness. Focus on your project, don’t get lost in meaningless flashiness.
• An amazing location within Berkeley, close to lively centers and campus.

Issues of Arcadia

Not everything is arcadian quite yet. To be fully transparent, here are a few areas and issues we’re still working on:

• The property didn’t come with a laundry machine, so currently we’re doing laundry nearby. We’re fixing this right now.
• There’s a construction site on the opposite block. The inner rooms are fairly protected from noise, and it’s hopefully done soon, but if you’re in the Western rooms we’d recommend earplugs to maximize the quality of sleep in the mornings.
• We want a huge dining table which we didn’t get yet. Fixed.
• So much to be made prettier! E.g. the small balcony and roof could use some love. Fixed.

So why not Arcadia?

• The issues list above is a dealbreaker.
• You don’t care about contributing to making the future of humanity better.
• Even occasional social interaction is too much.
• The negatives of the US generally: Healthcare, high costs, visa issues, politics, and more.

Open Role: The Gardener of Arcadia

As the house grows, we’re also looking for a resident who’s interested in co-running many of the essential house logistics — the quintessential example being watering our plants. 🍀 Other responsibilities include organizing communal dinners, running events, house improvements, and more.

This house manager (”The Gardener of Arcadia”) lives at half-rent or rent-free, depending on how much responsibility they’d like to take up. This role also gives you experience as a part-time operations lead and running medium-sized projects, which might be helpful for your career.

As of now, this role is partially open! Let us know if you’re interesting in becoming a resident and also taking this role.

Guests

Hosting guests is part of the essence of Arcadia. If you need a place to crash for a few days, or would like to move in for just a few weeks, please get in touch!

You can contact us at joinarcadia.org or per email at hello@joinarcadia.org.

We’re excited to hear from you. Maybe see you soon!

~ Arcadia House

• What is Arcadia?
• About Us
• Why Arcadia?
• What are we looking for?
• House Culture — ArcadiaOS v1.1
• Activities & Balance
• About the House
• Location
• Common Spaces
• Collaborative Work Space
• Deepwork floor
• Wi-Fi
• Treadmill desk
• Rooftop & Balcony
• Room Choices
• Beauty & Aesthetics
• Miscellaneous Extras
• Why Arcadia?
• Issues of Arcadia
• Open Role: The Gardener of Arcadia
• Guests