Coworking is a growth business. Estimates from Small Business Labs place coworking memberships at just over 1 million by 2022, with providers offering nearly 6,200 locations. Some of these new locations will be in Washington, D.C., a leader among coworking hot spots.
MakeOfficesis doing all it can to drive the expansion of coworking in the nation’s capital and enlisted Gensler’s Washington, D.C. office in that effort. The firm has designed five locations so far. MakeOffices operates in Chicago and Philadelphia in addition to its nine sites in D.C.
When gauged by population, the D.C. metro area is fourth in the nation in the number of coworking spaces at 42.80 per 100,000 residents. Although it follows San Francisco, Miami and Atlanta in rankings by SimpleTesting.com, the D.C. metro bests four of the nation’s six top real estate markets in total coworking locations.
By September 2018, leases for coworking spaces in the D.C. area exceeded 400,000 square feet. Additional reporting from Bisnow’s Jon Banister revealed that coworking space accounts for just over 1% of the D.C.’s total office inventory. His story included a prediction from Cushman & Wakefield that “coworking’s share of the market in gateway cities like D.C. could triple in the next decade.”
As MakeOffices envisioned their future, leadership at the Arlington, Virginia-based company saw competing providers upping the ante. Prospective members needed reasons why their businesses could do better by having memberships with MakeOffices instead of the competition. It’s easy to compare the costs of membership using the standalone pricing structures all the providers use, unlike access to, say, Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal in Frankfurt that’s bundled into the fare.
Having assessed the coworking landscape, MakeOffices concluded that their difference maker would be interior architecture emphasizing a professional look, feel and function. To animate this direction, it selected Gensler Washington, D.C.
The Gensler team included John McKinney, LEED-AP, NCIDQ, Design Principal. “MakeOffices understood architecture could help create their brand, so they were attracted to Gensler,” said Mr. McKinney. “They found through working with us how design could establish a recognizable brand in the D.C. market.”
Carol Schneider, IIDA, LEED ID+C, NCIDQ, Senior Designer, explained what Gensler did on the first project, the Clarendon location, that cinched the relationship.
“MakeOffices appreciated that we developed a story for each of the spaces and built the design concept around it,” she said. Local MakeOffices staff embraced this approach, retelling the stories in pitches to prospective members. “I think this is one of the reasons MakeOffices keeps coming back to us.”
Four more commissions followed Clarendon, including one on K Street. Once a hub of lobbying activity – the ranks of lobbyists there have thinned in recent years – there’s an international feel to coworking on K Street.
Mindspace, a real estate developer based in Tel Aviv, operates coworking locations in their hometown and across Europe. Mindspace opened their K Street location last year in July following the design cues established in their existing sites. A San Francisco location opened shortly thereafter.
At Eaton DC on K Street, one of the few hotel and coworking combinations anywhere, overnight guests can check-in, but coworking members must be vetted. Curbed D.C. reports that “members will be vetted and chosen by a special selection committee on a rolling basis.” Press materials say the committee seeks “socially conscious leaders.” The project’s leader is Katherine Lo, founder and president of Eaton, a portfolio business of Hong-Kong-based Great Eagle Holdings Ltd.
Coworking locations for women only are what Inc. Magazine termed a trend-within-a-trend. Local sites include The Wing in Georgetown and Hera Hub in Friendship Heights. Inc. Magazine’s Amanda Pressner Kreuser wrote that this model offers “a more safe and supportive work environment for women and people who identify as non-binary.” But it’s also good business because founders of women-only providers see women-owned businesses as significant contributors to U.S. prosperity going forward.
Knowing that coworking was taking off in the D.C. area and they were undertaking their very first coworking interior, the Gensler team decided they’d get some intel on the coworking scene.
“John and I went to the location of a MakeOffices competitor,” said Ms. Schneider. “We worked there as research to understand how the space functioned and how it differed from corporate spaces we’ve designed.”
One big difference was branding within the environment. “In a corporate project, there’s one brand and one culture happening. The opposite is happening at MakeOffices,” said Mr. McKinney. “There are a hundred or more companies who want to make their mark within the coworking environment.”
Entrepreneurs and workgroups want to tag their MakeOffices spaces with their branding, and the Gensler team integrated these intentions as a design feature.
“As far as each individual space, members are able to change things around,” said Mr. McKinney. The design responds to branding and also to further a professional image.
That image gets a boost from solid walls between individual spaces. “They provide privacy and more ability for members to create individual environments,” said Mr. McKinney. This sets MakeOffices apart from their competitors, with some using glass partitions throughout their spaces. “The glass partitions made the spaces we visited feel very open, less private and MakeOffices considers this less professional.”
Exuding a professional feel led MakeOffices to suggest an all but extinct feature of the pre-Facebook workplace: perimeter offices. The Gensler team plans few spaces with perimeter offices these days, so planning them here was a throwback moment.
However, there is a basic economic factor at work. In the coworking world, the most high-value and desirable spaces are the individual offices along the windows.
“Those are the moneymaker spaces,” said Mr. McKinney. “Because the most marketable spaces are at the windows, planning for MakeOffices is completely opposite from corporate.”
In the planning, individual spaces were pushed out to the perimeter and the community spaces were pulled in to the core. A great many activities central to compatible emotional frequencies among MakeOffices members happen in the community spaces. The furniture is often on casters making it easy to clear the area. The open area accommodates outside vendors who might hold events for members, including skill-building workshops, lunch and learn sessions or fitness programs.
Over time, the Gensler team has sculpted the floor plans to bring shared views and natural light into these hard-working community spaces.
“We recommended ways to increase the quality of community spaces by puncturing through the ring of perimeter offices,” said Mr. McKinney. “Clarendon is a good example because their community space is along the windows overlooking the courtyard.”
Amplifying neighborhood features individualizes each of MakeOffices coworking locations.
“One of the important things to them was for us to take cues from the surrounding neighborhoods as we designed each space,” said Mr. McKinney.
The courtyard held prominence at the Clarendon location, and Farragut Square with its noontime assortment of food trucks-influenced graphics in the K Street location.
The National Time Clock sits next to the Glover Park location on Wisconsin Avenue. It inspired the creation of MakeMoments, a celebration of artistic elements that help ground locations in their respective neighborhoods. “We have created MakeMoments in other cities for MakeOffices, like their Philadelphia site,” said Mr. McKinney. Conceptualizing down to these seemingly peripheral details is essential in humanizing these spaces.
“We talked a lot about how we could create a human experience within the coworking world,” continued Mr. McKinney. He said these inputs helped in “locating the community hubs, implementing graphics and colors and breaking the space down into areas for a coffee bar or a large collaborative meeting space.”
“These started as secondary spaces and what MakeOffices is finding is that members love to work in the community zones,” said Mr. McKinney. “They are getting up, bringing their laptops and sitting at the large tables all day.”
This is a use of the space that members found on their own, supported by the design team’s thoughtful evolution of the community zone concept that, in turn, created an unexpected revenue stream for MakeOffices.
Consequently, the coworking provider established a membership tier for “open desk” users. As Mr. McKinney explains it, “You don’t necessarily have to rent a room – you can work in a central area, have the free coffee, the free beer and still have a place to work.”
Providing a place to work is, of course, the raison d’etre. Making the spaces comfortable, welcoming and embracing of all who enter differentiates Gensler’s designs for MakeOffices, an important outcome for several reasons.
If one could be magically transported around the globe from one coworking space to another, it’s possible the interiors would leave little to no impression of country, city or locality. The spaces can appear similar to airline club rooms without the airplanes. Some coworking regulars comment that locations can feel less like a workplace and more like a well-to-do frat house. To show how the MakeOffices approach breaks away from the pack, prospective members receive tours of the space that Gensler’s work helped to shape.
explains: “We based our entire space planning program on a tour route showcasing the space for prospective clients,” said Carol Schneider. The tour highlights where members can focus without distractions and where members “can mix with other companies like a networking center” to grow their businesses. That happens by finding mentors, finding partners and coming upon new business opportunities.
In a 2017 survey of coworking members conducted by Small Business Labs, 64% of respondents said networking at their coworking spaces was an important source of work and business referrals. The tour for prospective members shows off how the space itself contributes to each member’s success.
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“Gensler selected a luxury vinyl plank product, Oak in Rain, from Parterre’s Vertu collection. The design industry is coming around to LVT in a significant way, recognizing it as a material with a host of favorable qualities, its environmental profile among them.”
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The gateway is the entry space, which typically gets dressed up by a drywall ceiling. Open plenum ceilings sprayed with acoustical insulation prevail in the remainder of the space, leaving the task to establish zones for individual work, group work, community and amenities to the flooring.
The design team drew upon their experience and their specification know-how to optimize a family of products from Parterre Flooring Systems.
“On a large floorplate, like the one at Clarendon of 50,000 square feet on a single floor, we used different tones of the same flooring material for definition,” said Mr. McKinney. “We’ll choose a grey flooring in one zone and a different wood tone flooring in another zone.”
A light shade of gray over a natural wood-look design featured in both projects, with the addition at K Street of a contemporary dark shade over a classic oak look called custom Midnight Oak, and at Clarendon another dark plank called custom Black.
Ms. Schneider noted that the design team’s role included “understanding how the product worked and coming up with an innovative way of using it.” Her team created custom patterns and paths of travel throughout the space using Parterre’s standard product line in deftly choreographed installation schemes.
“We used the flooring to activate the floorplan,” said Mr. McKinney. “We turned all of the flooring on a 45-degree angle.”
The team selected a luxury vinyl plank product, Oak in Rain, from Parterre’s Vertucollection. The design industry is coming around to LVT in a significant way, recognizing it as a material with a host of favorable qualities, its environmental profile among them.
Parterre’s Vertu collection featured in these MakeOffices locations arrives as a sustainable material and meets guidelines for flame spread, smoke tests, low emitting and indoor air quality.
Roche FitzGerald, Parterre’s Product Designer, positions Vertu as a product at the forefront of design. He said that 2019 projections for wood flooring suggest “cathedrals going softer, not as strong; greys and softer tones are growing in applications.” He added, “We just introduced 12 new colors in Vertu including soft greys and whites, plus a charcoal black.”
The design team believed LVT was the right choice for MakeOffices both visually and functionally. LVT created “unique patterns and an energy throughout” throughout the spaces, while bringing the “warmth of real-looking wood.” LVT also helped level the floors.
That speaks to the material itself. “LVT cuts much cleaner than wood or ceramic tile, making LVT more responsive to intricate floor designs,” said Parterre’s Roche FitzGerald. “It’s a great product for customizing with color and embossing, with visuals that are so good it’s almost indistinguishable from wood.”
Something clearly distinguishable are the success stories among members of MakeOffices. These stories build from the first impressions of professional spaces for growing businesses. And it’s an ongoing story of collaboration between MakeOffices, a firm bringing the world a new way to work, and Gensler, a firm reshaping the places where the world goes to work.
Stephen Witte writes about the design industry, publishes design research and supports design education. Contact him at stephenmwitte@gmail.com.