Life at Home

Inside the 'Soho House for Dogs,' Where a Dog Park Costs $1,400 a Year

DOG PPL turned a Santa Monica parking lot into a members-only club with a bar, DJs, and a vetting process. Here's what the membership actually buys, and what it says about city dogs.

By Sasha Ford, Feline Behavior Specialist

April 8, 2026 · 6 min read

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Picture the dog park you deserve. Less mud. Somewhere to actually sit while your dog runs. Water that will not send your pup home with giardia. And, crucially, some assurance that the other dogs are vaccinated, fixed, and not looking for a fight. That place exists. It is called DOG PPL, it started in a Santa Monica parking lot, and a membership runs about $1,400 a year, which tells you most of what you need to know about who it is for and how far the “premium pet” economy has come.

Two dog dads and a bad dog park

The origin story is almost quaint. Photographer and filmmaker Liam Underwood and artist Alex Esguerra kept crossing paths around 2021 at their local dog run, a cramped, overcrowded spot that left little room for real sanitation or safe play. Like a lot of city dog owners, they were tired of the tradeoff: the only free option was small, dirty, and, worst of all, unregulated, which meant no way to know whether the dog charging toward yours had its shots or was about to start something.

So they built the opposite. DOG PPL opened as a members-only dog park unlike anything that came before it, and the members-only piece is the entire point. Before a dog sets paw inside, its owner has to clear a vetting process, uploading veterinary records to prove the dog is up to date on required vaccines and spayed or neutered, followed by a club tour and a behavior assessment to confirm it is a good fit. Staff keep monitoring after that, because a dog’s behavior can shift as it settles in. The founders partnered with REEF Technology to build out the space itself in Santa Monica, technically Dogtown, the stretch straddling Venice and Santa Monica where 1970s skate culture was born.

What the membership actually buys

DOG PPL is a park, a café, a bar, and a lounge stacked into one address. Members get access during open hours, plus a rotating calendar of events, table amenities, and a stack of freebies through the club’s partnerships. The café-bar, run out of a shipping container, serves coffee, beer, wine, and cocktails, and the food angle got a celebrity assist: the founders credit Jada Pinkett Smith for the idea of selling pupusas made to be safe for both dogs and their people, delivered, in true Los Angeles fashion, by a little robot from a kitchen kiosk across the street.

The events are where the “Soho House for dogs” label really lands. There are recurring nights and one-offs alike: a DJ series called Sounds & Hounds, an annual Desert Dogs country-music festival, fitness classes, singles events, and a yearly snow party for which the club trucks in some 100 tons of snow so LA dogs can experience what the rest of the country complains about all winter. A collaboration with the veterinary company Modern Animal, including its VP of Medicine, folded in trivia nights and education on preventive care and dog-park safety, and the club has flirted with partnerships as random as a beloved hoagie shop. The whole thing has proven magnetic to a certain crowd; John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Liza Koshy, Simu Liu, and Travis Barker have all been spotted on the grounds.

The rescue angle is real, too

Under the velvet rope there is a genuine mission. DOG PPL has leaned into adoption events, setting aside days for rescue dogs in “Adopt Me” vests to socialize with people and other dogs in a safe, supervised setting, which makes them more adoptable. The club worked with trainer Robert Cabral, a longtime advocate of structured playgroups who teaches shelters to give dogs off-leash play so they can be confidently marketed as good with other dogs, a small thing that can meaningfully change a shelter dog’s odds.

“Set aside the DJ sets and the cocktails, and the core idea here is actually sound,” says Dr. Amara Solis. “The single biggest risk at a normal dog park is an unvaccinated or poorly socialized dog you know nothing about. Requiring proof of vaccination and a temperament check before entry removes most of that. You don’t need the pupusas, but you do want to know the dog next to yours is healthy.”

What newer developments add

DOG PPL has kept growing. Underwood and Esguerra have said membership climbed toward 2,000 at the flagship, and the model, shipping-container café, parking-lot or rooftop footprint, “rinse and repeat,” was always designed to travel. The most concrete expansion is in New York. The company signed a 10-year lease for an 18,000-square-foot private rooftop dog park at 12 Berry Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, perched atop a pickleball club and a short walk from McCarren Park, with a summer 2025 opening targeted for its first East Coast outpost.

The New York rollout also sharpened the rules, and they read like a manifesto for the concept. Expected dues run around $1,400 a year, or roughly $120 a month, with a limit of three dogs per person and an extra $75 for each additional pup. Dogs still must be vaccinated, fixed, and cleared by a behavior assessment, and outside toys and treats are barred to cut down on possessiveness and squabbles. The humans have homework too: no laptops after 6 p.m., a deliberate nudge to make people actually talk to each other, and no children under 16.

What it says about city dogs

It is easy to roll your eyes at a members-only dog park with a bar and a no-laptops rule. But the thing driving it is not vanity, it is scarcity. City dogs largely do not have backyards, safe off-leash space is genuinely hard to find, and the free options are often exactly the overcrowded, unregulated runs the founders were trying to escape. Whether the answer should cost $1,400 a year is a fair debate. What is not really in question is the underlying demand: a lot of urban dogs are under-exercised and under-socialized, and a clean, vetted, supervised place to run is a real fix for a real problem. DOG PPL just wrapped that fix in a social club and priced it accordingly.