Following a 20-year career in commercial property as a Director at JLL, Zoe worked across the hotel, retail, industrial, and logistics sectors before launching Spaces to Places in 2019 to support flex operators and landlords with research, placemaking, and marketing services. At its core, Spaces to Places is about defining what a place actually is and making flexible working work better for everybody.

Building on that mission, Zoe launched a new venture earlier this year: Office Tier List — after identifying a lack of clarity and end-user focus in the coworking market. Office Tier List brings greater transparency to the flexible workspace sector, helping end users understand and compare different workspaces.

In this conversation, Zoe shares what people are actually looking for in their workspaces and how truly understanding end-user needs, rather than just second-guessing them, is the greatest flex of all for coworking operators.

1. What first pulled you into the flexible workspace industry?

Zoe: What first pulled me in was a few different projects I was working on. I left JLL after a 20-year career in commercial property, working across all sectors: hotels, retail, industrial, and logistics. Lots of different things were happening, and having my son suddenly changed my perspective. I wanted to have some work-life balance and work closer to home.

The flex office sector was really changing the market; it was becoming more consumer-oriented and appealing. Having worked in hotels and retail, the office industry matched my skill set, and I started picking up contracts with large corporations. It was grassroots; that’s how Spaces to Places started.

Originally, Spaces to Places was going to focus on all property sectors, before I narrowed it down to the Build To Rent (BTR) and coworking industries. Everybody says the flex sector just draws you in; it’s fascinating. You start looking at the sector and understand the dynamics more and more.

My experience has always been place-making. That’s why my company is called Spaces to Places; I see spaces as empty and soulless in some ways. But a place has people, purpose, and meaning. It’s the difference between a house and a home. That’s where the big difference lies.

2. What problem were you seeing in the flex industry that made launching the Office Tier List feel necessary?

Zoe: In the commercial property industry, there’s a lot of ‘hope marketing’ (where time and money are invested in random marketing tactics in the hope that they bring in customers, with no underlying understanding of the location and demand drivers, and not enough focus on end-users).

I was constantly telling people you can’t just do ‘hope marketing,’ you need to understand your target market: who they are and their location. That’s coming from a much more end-user-centric perspective, and it’s exactly what we’re doing with the Office Tier List. We’re flipping it on its head.

Sometimes, I feel like the industry has been set up more for the property industry, not for end users. We’ve done quite a lot of research reports, including four last year, the last one being the ‘Voice of the Customer,’ which opened my mind up to the fact that we’re doing end users such a disservice.

There are so many wonderful workspaces, some are more industrial, others are more corporate — but there’s a flavour for everyone. Office Tier List is a matchmaking service connecting people with the right workspace for them.

We’re still using the same intelligence and know-how with Spaces to Places that we use with our clients’ workspace brands. But with Office Tier List, we’re targeting a different audience: end users.

Tier lists came from the gaming industry. You can decide who’s the fastest character or the strongest character. You can then put them in different tiers and decide which players you want when you’re gaming. Loads of people use tier lists, for example, children, to ascertain which is their favourite chocolate bar.

The whole purpose of Office Tier List is to celebrate the diversity of the market and help end users find great workspaces. We want everyone to be able to find the right workspace and understand the industry better.

3. What are some of the key metrics or signals you look at when assessing a workspace?

Zoe: It comes back to what the end user wants from their workspace. They need to know their needs, whether they’re looking for other businesses and energy, community and support, or access to training programmes.

Some businesses want greater productivity; they’re looking for head-down space and time efficiency, but in other cases, they’re looking at CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) factors.

We do a lot of work with brands. If you want productivity and control, and to access workplaces between regions, then maybe Regus is the place for you. Or maybe it’s WeWork — if you’re looking for a busy place. For fun and enjoyment, try Runway East. Meanwhile, Spacemade has a fashion and health business cluster, and Techspace is a tech-focused space, where you’ll meet other ambitious businesses in that sector.

To understand workspaces better, the easiest way to think about them is with a four-stage model:

You look at physical properties first: the building and location. That’s the key one, because you’re always going to want to work out the location. But what type of location – is it city centre or out of town? They all have different nuances.

Then you look at the intangibles of the service element, such as the people, processes and placemaking. That’s always our second level.

The third level is much more about your perception – is the price high or low, compared to what value it’s offering you? Pricing is always subjective because it comes down to customer value.

The final one is analysing workplace performance – is it constantly evolving? Are they looking after their assets? Who are their property partners? Who are they working with? Sometimes we see brand-new, shiny office buildings come up, but after five years, some still look brand-new, while others look tired.

Our ‘Voice of the Customer’ report uncovered that people and businesses are searching for Wi-Fi and meeting rooms. While we might assume they’re looking for gyms and other amenities, it turns out most people are thinking about the basics.

The other thing people are searching for is whether a workspace is furnished. That’s where the end customer doesn’t realise some of that is a given in coworking, although there are spaces where you take an empty shell.

Partly, that’s because they don’t understand this industry. We’re all constantly trying to educate, but it’s not always landing. That’s when we find people asking what’s included in the cost of coworking. We tend to overthink things in this industry, so we’ve got to go back to the basics.

Once people get into this sector and understand it, they’re blown away by these places. We want to get people to spend more than a day or a week, to really ingrain themselves in a community, and see what it means.

Overall, we make too many assumptions about what people want. That’s what the ‘Voice of the Customer’ research really showed us. Most people have worked in an office and have expectations, but as operators, we don’t do the research to find out what those expectations are; we think we know already.

Recently, I went to a student accommodation conference. That sector spends a lot of time understanding their end customers, like what students want in their accommodation, and their expectations. They’ve got phenomenal data and didn’t assume anything.

4. How do you factor in the human side of a workspace: community, belonging, or day-to-day experience?

Zoe: It depends on the end user. Neighbourhood workspaces are for people looking for a sense of belonging, especially the sole entrepreneur, who we’ve seen a rise in recently.

But the only thing about community is it’s two-sided, and you have to work at it. I see some amazing places, but you need the right culture to keep on inviting people, even if they say no.

Our research revealed that people want to feel like they’re a member – they want to be invited and know they could go to events even if they don’t attend. It’s nice to be invited and feel included. It’s the same with gym memberships. People like being part of a gym and knowing it’s there, even though they might not use it that much.

Sometimes, I find community is a trade-off. People are really drawn in by a community, but don’t necessarily get involved. For example, larger businesses tend to have their own culture, meeting rooms, and office space, but they try to get the best of both worlds by joining a coworking community. Having their own company culture makes it harder, though.

Meanwhile, other companies choose more managed space to meet their size requirements. They’re not looking for community beyond that. And some people’s prime need is head-down space. If it’s noisy at home, or they’re constantly out and about selling, they need a quiet space for work. That’s a different need.

Other people with a competitive nature like to see others working around them. Or businesses in growth mode have a work culture where everyone comes in and works late or on different hours. They need micro moments more than community – rather than having long conversations, it’s more about seeing other people working, and feeling part of something bigger, so you don’t feel lonely.

When people look at workspaces, a good question to ask is: What are the other businesses in the building? Generally, the people coming to the community are the ones who can go up and ask others what they think, who are open and transparent.

5. Which coworking trends are you excited about, and which ones make you a bit sceptical?

Zoe: I’m excited about the industry maturing. Today, brands are focusing on their customer and doing persona work — knowing who they’re for and who’s not right for their community.

That’s where we really see the big players in the market grow their locations. Those brands are tuning into the right buildings, locations, and attracting the right people. Some offer coworking, serviced offices, enterprise suites, or virtual memberships exclusively; others provide the full spectrum — supporting businesses from one desk to 100. That’s where I’m seeing much more diversity coming into the industry.

We’ve also got more niche coworking spaces: maker spaces, health tech centres, a vibrant mix of creatives, or people in the music industry. That’s where we’re seeing these specialists coming together and evolving their models.

The brands with more locations know what works for them and who they connect with. They’ve built tribes. What excites me is seeing the evolution of elevated standards in flex.

The industry has been constantly progressing since COVID, but it’s always disheartening to see the other side when spaces close down. They’ve built up a community and want to get that mix going, but haven’t been financially viable. Creating a great end-user customer experience is one thing, but it must be commercially viable.

The misconception is that you can set up a workspace and make huge amounts of money, but there’s more to it than that. The service element is particularly hard work.

This industry has been around for a long time now — 50 years for the serviced office sector. But it’s only starting to really mature, that’s the joy of it. As the industry progresses, I’m seeing more people benefit, which brings more investment to the industry and helps it evolve even further.

In the UK, over 70% of workspaces have one to three locations. While it’s always been quite fragmented and location-oriented, we’re now seeing some bigger brands with greater size and scale. We also still have the small independents. That’s where I’m celebrating diversity across the board.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking space founders and community builders who share their journeys of bringing people together.

Edition #27 of People Make Coworking interviews Zoe Ellis-Moore, CEO and founder at Spaces to Places and Office Tier List.

Read more coworking stories.

From his own experience of navigating a new city in Tallinn, Estonia, Alistair recognised a common challenge among expats around building meaningful connections in a quieter society. In response, Alistair started hosting informal networking sessions at a trendy cafe every Friday.

For two years, these sessions brought together business, academic, and government people – the “triple helix,” as Alistair refers to it – before it became clear that the community needed a more permanent home.

That new home became Fraqmented, a coworking space in Tallinn that Alistair set up with two entrepreneurs, Cagatay and Markus, whom he met through his networking sessions. Celebrating diversity, Fraqmented welcomes people from all walks of life, working in different industries and from all parts of the globe.

Alistair’s journey reflects a consistent thread: connecting people across boundaries. Fraqmented is a space where meaningful relationships and impactful ideas can flourish. This conversation shares how the coworking space came to be.

1. What sparked the inspiration behind Fraqmented?

Alistair: People move to Estonia for many different reasons. I’m British, Cagatay is Turkish, and Markus is Danish — we all moved here for a better quality of life. But when we arrived, we also shared similar challenges around integrating and getting to know people in a quiet, slightly insular society.

I set up my own networking group to meet people in the city. Every Friday, we had a day of connecting on a Viking long table at the front of a famous art gallery and cafe, owned by a Swedish design company, called Fotografiska.

People could just walk in; there were no rules. It was a triple helix – for government, academic, and business people.

It went on for two years. We started growing and growing, booking the table weekly, but every now and again, the cafe wouldn’t honour our booking, because they’d have a big event and needed the space. We were bringing over 20 people to their cafe every Friday, eating cakes and drinking coffee. After a while, we realised we were getting nothing out of the deal.

We built up a community, and then a lady took it upon herself to become our community manager. I met my cofounders through the Friday networking event, who were sitting at one of the Viking long tables, but I didn’t know them well enough until they approached me to set things up properly. They’re serial entrepreneurs with great ideas, and they felt that I was good at building this network. Within two months of approaching me, we’d set up Fraqmented together.

At the same time, some of our community members expressed that it was hard to get work done in the cafe because everyone was chatting. If they wanted to take a call, they’d sit in a far-flung corner and hope no one would sit next to them. Or they’d sit together at the Viking tables, talking about a business idea, but other people visiting the cafe sat alongside them. They needed something a bit more professional, without it being too straight-laced and corporate.

We knew that Fraqmented would always be larger than the first community, and that some of them would come with us. But others wouldn’t, because although we were moving to a community-first model, we wanted it to be commercial and make a profit.

2. How did you go about finding a physical space for your community?

Alistair: Tallinn is a huge city — it’s where half the Estonian population live. There are a bunch of coworking spaces here, a lot of them being very corporate, but there are also some lovely, beautiful spaces. There are also grungy ones, where you have to be into tech, otherwise you’re not going to fit in. But they’re all awesome.

Finding a space was tricky. We couldn’t afford much, as is usual in coworking, but we just looked around in all the different zones of the city, whether it was the old town in the centre, on the periphery, the tech area, or the central business district.

Coming from hosting events in an ultra-cool, trendy cafe with massive ceilings and art everywhere, we wanted to build a workspace into our own feel. We knew it had to be good for our community and the future.

Some of the places we looked at were just shells, others were very corporate. But when we walked into this space, in the middle of the old town, it had wood, stone, a higgledy-piggledy wall, and it was ready and accessible — we immediately said, “Yes.”

At our Friday meet-ups, our community members would talk about business ideas together at one end of the long Viking tables. So we set up Viking tables here. We’ve got several coworking spaces, pods, and a self-serve cafe. Except for our fixed desk room, a lockable office with 10 desks, a couple of meeting rooms, and conference rooms, everywhere is coworking at Fraqmented.

3. Has a specific success story or collaboration come out of the Fraqmented community?

Alistair: It’s not just one, there are loads.

We’ve been open about 13 months, and our members have set up between 12 and 13 businesses between them. That’s roughly one new business a month – it’s big for us.

Four of our members set up a dating business together. Another one is a tech UX company, based at the university. They set up here, bid for some funding, and are now on an incubator course. My cofounders and I have just set up another international relations company. There are so many different examples of people setting up here.

In Estonia, it’s very easy to set up a company, so we all help each other with the questions, like: How do you do that? What’s the best way? How do I save money? Everyone here is working with the same accountants, using our office address, and so on.

Our community just helps each other and combines their skill sets, but they’re small companies. They set up here, but who goes on to survive and become bigger? That’s another question. We’ll see how it goes.

4. How does Fraqmented contribute to the broader startup and tech ecosystem in Tallinn?

Alistair: ​​We’d love to contribute as much as we can. Right now, we do that in two or three ways. One is soft diplomacy: the name, Fraqmented, came about because we bring together fragments of society from different walks of life. Here, we have small, medium, and large businesses, and people from business, academic, and government backgrounds. The fragments are all isolated without the space.

In Estonian culture, everyone keeps to themselves a bit, maybe because of the former Soviet times. But many people coming to Estonia like to experience more of a day-to-day social scene and networking capability. That’s also why we built Fraqmented.

This lends itself to reinvigorating the city centre. Like many other places, there’s been a slight decline in shops and high streets here, but opening in the Old Town, we’re bringing a different kind of clientele who go out for lunch, shop, and head into town every day.

We’re also partnered with the Estonian government’s formal e-residency programme, with two of our co-founders (including me) being official envoys. We’re showing people how that works, and helping them set up their companies in Estonia.

Bringing together these three disparate parts – academia, business, and government – hasn’t really been done on a systemic scale anywhere else in Estonia. You have events around it at universities, but none of the coworking spaces is doing triple or quadruple helix with civil society. They’re either for tech bros or appear very corporate. Meanwhile, we’re all about events, and we’re mixing it up.

When we coined the phrase Fraqmented, the ‘Q’ in fragmented was like the ‘Q’ in LGBTQ+ – it’s all about the diversity within the business sector, and the diversity of people.

We believe we can contribute to the economy by applying disruptive thinking, mixing people together and bringing them to the town centre rather than in peripheral areas. From the centre, you always meet people very easily. We wanted Fraqmented to be in the heart of Tallinn, bringing disparate people together who wouldn’t usually mix.

5. What’s your vision for Fraqmented over the next few years?

Alistair: We’d like to be more visible across the Nordics and globally, not just in one place, so we’re forming alliances to give our members access to Fraqmented when they’re moving around the world. For example, we’ve joined AT World — a German organisation, where we’re part of a global coworking space booking app.

Although we like forming alliances with the city and the government, we need to provide more for the locals, too. There are lots of transitory people here, nomadic people who’ve heard about the tech scene or are part of the e-residency programme. They’ve started an Estonian company, but they then go away a month later.

We want people to stay and be part of a community, and we want to welcome Estonians. Right now, we’re running a campaign targeting Estonians.

We’d like to absolutely nail the triple helix, ensuring people understand its power. It’s not just about being a business person selling to a government person; it’s also about the different ways of seeing the world and thinking.

We’d also like to break even within the next two months and then make a profit. For 13 months now, we’ve been running like a non-profit out of the goodness of our hearts and building this community because we believe in it. We’ve been profitable for three months out of 13, but it’s just up and down.

Now we’ve taken a strategic decision to lose one of our six rooms, which makes us profitable overnight because we’ll switch out a rented pod and buy one instead. We need to turn profitable now, and we’re not ashamed to talk about that.

We always talk about community first, but that’s part of our vision as well. Fraqmented is a business, and we’re helping other people with their businesses – that’s what our consultancy is about. We should be able to run a business ourselves, without losing money.

While those are our visions, we’re not losing sight of why we set up Fraqmented in the first place. We like hosting events, and for external people to take away a little bit of Fraqmentedness with them, and understand more of what we’re all about. We’re a community helping each other, first and foremost, and we’re about diversity.

We only advertise spaces that are within our confines, so we only have space for 70, but if someone wants to run a large event, say for 150 people, we can help you get a good deal through one of our partner spaces.

We’re just trying to become slightly bigger than what we are – that’s what Estonia represents in the world. It’s bigger than what it really is, and we want to lead beyond our authority. Right now, we’re just a little business in the town centre, but we want to be more than that. We want to say something about certain things, work with big charities here, and the founders of unicorns. And we want to do good things.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking space founders and community builders who share their journeys of bringing people together.

Edition #26 of People Make Coworking interviews Alistair Starling, co-founder of Fraqmented coworking space in Tallinn, Estonia.

Read more coworking stories.

That experiment became the foundation for Cohere Coworking – one of the early independent coworking spaces to open in the United States.

Launched in the shadow of the economic recession, Cohere began as a 1,000-square-foot loft in Fort Collins, Colorado, filled with freelancers and consultants. Sixteen years later, Cohere remains intentionally small, fiercely independent, and deeply community-led.

In this conversation, Angel reflects on her journey to launch Cohere, why she’s chosen to build a lifestyle business instead of a scalable brand, and what coworking really stands for.

1. Take me back to the beginning – how did you start Cohere Coworking?

Angel: I took a traditional career path, went to college, got a psychology degree, and then worked in retail. Part of that job involved interviewing people, but I wanted to be on the other side of helping people get jobs, so I became a career counsellor.

What I really aspired to be was an internal career counsellor at a company, and I reached that — becoming an internal career development specialist at a new local startup. My favourite part of the job was sitting in each department with the different creatives, professionals and technicians. I learned the basics of SEO sitting next to a lady named Mary, and we’re still friends.

I got a lot out of that job and met lots of different technical professionals, from web developers to PR teams. But on day 89, I got fired. It was clear they needed traditional HR rather than internal career development, and with 75 employees, the organisation didn’t have the legal foundations. It was really shocking, though. I thought I’d landed my dream job and would work there forever.

I didn’t know what to do with my life next; I truly was adrift. So, I started volunteering at an entrepreneurship incubator and assisting the receptionist, which was very humbling.

While I was there, a guy named Kevin introduced me to this ‘new concept in California’ called coworking – where freelancers work together instead of alone. I decided that’s what I was going to do.

I asked the incubator director whether I could experiment by hosting a weekly coworking session in the reception area nobody used. Five weeks later, we ran out of chairs, broke their internet, and they asked us to move along.

2. What was Cohere like in the early days?

Angel: The origins of Cohere were part luck, part serendipity, and part finally feeling like I’d been clued in to an idea that was new enough that I could get traction with it. That’s how we got started.

We began the weekly meetup sessions in late 2009 at the height of the recession. People coming to my sessions had been laid off from their corporate jobs and became freelancers and consultants to make ends meet. Nobody knew what they were doing.

The pace was blistering. Five weeks after launching, I found a commercial lease a few blocks away in our downtown, which was suffering from the effects of the recession – a 1000 square-foot, downtown loft, with a curmudgeonly landlord.

I hired someone off Craigslist to build us some custom curved desks with integrated power. My friend and I drove eight hours to the nearest IKEA in Utah, filling a U-Haul with the basic startup kit for a coworking space – chairs, the couch, and some dishes. We drove it back, built everything, and opened up several weeks later. March 15th 2010, is our anniversary (we’ve just celebrated 16 years).

We felt so fancy. We had 12 workstations, a couch, a six-by-six meeting room, and a conference room that we shared with the landlord and another tenant. That was it.

Over a year later, we outgrew that space before moving several blocks away to a larger building. We rented it for 13 years, adding spaces in that building as they became available. At the end of 2024, I bought a unit in a building and downsized us to 1,800 square feet.

3. What does surviving this long say about your model?

Angel: Chasing hot, new amenities is exhausting. We’ve always been people-focused and less amenity-focused. As someone who used my checking account to start a business, I don’t know how people have enough money to pull that off.

There were never any investors or VC money, so we always leaned really hard into the scrappy philosophy that we’re in this together and helping each other. When somebody needs something, you announce it to the room, and we all dive in and help.

That happened because our space was so small. In the beginning, only 400 square feet of the space contained those 12 desks, so you could reach out and touch your neighbour. That’s how close together we were. The physical density of that worked in our favour, making it impossible to ignore what they were going through.

We all felt like doing everything as a unit. We worked all day and went to lunch together. Before having kids, we’d stay late, go to an art walk or see music in the square. It cemented our bonds, which compounded over time. In a couple of weeks, I’m participating in one of our original members’ conferences, and members who moved away still text me to share their news.

To still be here 16 years on, 50% of it is just how the space was fostered, and the other 50% is that I’m super stubborn and wasn’t willing to let it die. Even during COVID, and our challenging economic and political landscape, I believed so strongly in the power of community – it can get us through almost anything.

4. Many coworking brands aim to scale fast. Why have you chosen to stay independent?

Angel: I’m invested in Cohere being a lifestyle business for me. I don’t work full-time or subscribe to the grind. I’m into lifestyle architecture, and growing the business will just use up more of my time.

We’re simple folk, so the desire to scale, grow, have more, and do more and be recognised never resonated with me. Women in tech are always asked whether money is the motivator, but I always feel like it’s the wrong question. I hardly ever meet women who want more money. I want balance and flexibility; to be able to go to my kids’ programmes, stay home when they’re sick, or when I’m sick, and have more flexibility in life.

One of the coworking OGs, Alex Hillman (co-founder of Indy Hall), describes coworking like a restaurant. You can walk into a McDonald’s, and you can walk into a farm-to-table local restaurant, and while you’ll get a meal at both, what’s the quality of that meal like? Where did they source the ingredients from? What’s your experience like? Will you remember that experience after you leave?

That’s what coworking has become. Everyone walks in to get a meal, and we all get served something. But unless you experience the other type of restaurant (or coworking in this case), you don’t know what you’re missing. Coworking has become a ubiquitous term for shared office space, but the value you get from place to place differs wildly.

People must explore different options and ask better questions on their tour. I don’t feel like they ask the right questions. We had a period when people asked if we had a printer — that’s not the point.

We’re always communicating to people that our physical container holds us, and it’s deeply useful to get work done, but you can do that anywhere: at home, in a coffee shop, or at your friend’s house. It doesn’t matter what I have in the space, but what if you meet your new best friend here?

5. The core offer at Cohere Coworking is community friendship rather than desks and amenities. What does that look like in practice?

Angel: Lately, I’ve been working really hard on my marketing at Cohere to attract more of the type of people that we want in our space.

In town, we’ve got some amenity-heavy, shiny, beautiful new coworking spaces with the ‘wow factor’ when you walk through their front door. Those spaces sell an aspirational lifestyle for someone who’s hustling, grinding, and performing work for a crowd of people on camera.

Cohere is the antithesis of that. We’d like you to come as you are. We’ll make you a cup of coffee, sit with you, and listen to why you’re struggling today or what you’re trying to get out of this space.

We’ve had people who just got laid off and brought their whole messy selves to us. What we’ll do is match you with somebody who’s into the same things as you, and now you can do it together instead of alone.

Cohere has grown up with me, and I tend to attract people of a similar age and phase of life. More members are married, have kids, and are mid-career remote workers. Although we have a handful of freelancers, almost everyone at Cohere is a well-paid remote worker managing people. The coworking space is seen as an easier line item in their budget. We’re all into the same stuff – there are lots of outdoor people, bicyclists, and skiers.

6. What would you like to see more of in the coworking industry?

Angel: I’m desperate for the kinds of gatherings that the OG operators used to have. We’ve lost the scrappy, bootstrapped ways we used to connect, and part of it is just life circumstances.

Now, many people have moved on from running their spaces or are doing other things. It’s really rare to have been in coworking this long and still be boots on the ground in a space, refilling the toilet paper and holding people during life’s moments.

I don’t want to go to a shiny conference with sponsors; I want to hang out with the war-torn, experienced grassroots, coworking operators who aren’t in a franchise or a chain, who don’t have VC funding, and who just show up, and believe so passionately in coworking as a force for good.

I don’t really identify with the conferences anymore. They don’t speak to me in any kind of meaningful way. But I still believe in gathering in three dimensions. As an old-school operator, I want to rent a house by the beach and hang out, and cook dinner together.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking space founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #25 of People Make Coworking interviews Angel Kwiatkowski, founder of Cohere Coworking in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Looking around, Michael saw countless other inventors and innovators struggling with the same barriers: brilliant ideas constrained not by creativity, but by infrastructure. That became the foundation for Blue Garage.

Housed in a rare industrial building on Lewisham’s high street, Michael has built an affordable makerspace in the heart of the capital. Blue Garage has evolved into a home for hardware startups, creative manufacturers and makers who want to prototype, produce and scale – all within Zone 2.

In this interview, Michael shares how Blue Garage flips the traditional coworking model on its head, supports companies that struggle to access affordable manufacturing facilities, and the exciting opportunities the makerspace brings to Lewisham.

1. What sparked the concept of Blue Garage, and why build it in London specifically, rather than a smaller town or industrial area?

Michael: The concept was to create the environment and support that I wish I had when starting my company. Looking back on the success of my business, the hardest thing to overcome wasn’t making the product, but manufacturing it in the UK, especially while living in London.

I empathised with these brilliant inventors and creative startup businesses around me, and their challenge of spending money on overpriced, unnecessarily large spaces and signing up for long-term leases. I thought I was the right person to fix that problem.

Lots of creative people start their businesses in London, often after university. There’s a huge demand for space for early-stage startups, but there’s hardly any supply. Everything is so expensive here, and buildings are often converted into flats or offices.

There are fewer makerspaces, creative spaces, and opportunities for people to scale their business on their terms, rather than under the banner of another accelerator with its own agenda.

I wanted to create something independent and to help startups by providing equipment and space at the lowest possible cost. We needed something large, but also accessible, and on the high street.

Most industrial spaces are on a soulless industrial estate. Everybody’s driving there; it’s impossible to get the train, and you’re not part of the community. The buildings themselves are normally big, empty sheds, with companies stacking them high with racks and shipping boxes. At Blue Garage, we wanted something accessible with character, on a high street in an up-and-coming area.

We looked at many buildings, but there was nothing like the one we found in Lewisham. It was the perfect fit for us – an industrial building with three huge concrete floors, a lift that goes between them all, and a big delivery bay.

It’s ideal for lots of small companies, but not for one big company, and it can’t be converted to flats or offices. This building can’t be used for much else.

2. What makes Blue Garage unique as a makerspace?

Michael: We have a factory in a box. At Blue Garage, our main uniqueness is having millions of pounds of production equipment and prototyping equipment. It’s the kind of thing you’d have in a factory up in Leicester (I used to drive up to a factory there to use a large printer), or for someone with a well-kitted garage out in the suburbs.

We’ve got lots of sophisticated tools – a sewing lab, textile equipment, screen print facility, a massive woodworking room, metalworking room (with welding for aluminium and steel), and a large general assembly area. All the things anybody could dream of prototyping, we’ve got in this building.

Our people are founders who’ve created a new product that will change the world and who could scale up to become a large manufacturing company.

Inventors and innovators struggle to scale their business, partly because it’s difficult to develop and produce a physical product. As soon as you have to physically make hardware or products, it introduces new challenges. But if you can break through and develop a new physical product, the opportunities are amazing.

Some of the best global companies are based on physical products. Often, the ones doing something technically difficult or that involves manufacturing can have a big impact, so it might be a med tech product, a new climate tech material, or a fashion brand – all sorts of things.

Blue Garage combines technical, manufacturing and commercial ambition. The people we’ve really designed our space for could change the world through physical products – freelancers, designers, engineers, and creative entrepreneurs. Think of the people who built the companies of today: James Dyson, Steve Jobs, and Yvon Chouinard.

The name Blue Garage takes after all the tech companies in Silicon Valley that started in a garage. We’re the London ‘garage’ for hardware companies, and we’ve got big blue garage doors. We support creative entrepreneurship and the ‘garage’ ambition of scaling a new company. The best ideas come out of the blue.

Many things prevent people from building ambitious, successful companies. A big part of our mindset at Blue Garage is to reduce the physical limitations of a scale-up manufacturing company.

Being surrounded by ambitious people rubs off on you, and it’s really exciting to be part of the wider ecosystem of independent coworking spaces in London. We offer a virtual membership so people can use the makerspace and have their own office. They’re probably not building a hardware startup, but perhaps they need somewhere to fix their bike, do some DIY, or work on a part-time side hustle.

We’ve got about 10 different clients manufacturing products who previously lived in London and made things much further away, often abroad. Blue Garage enables people to receive and ship a volume of product, and still be in Zone 2. Getting things made locally is much easier and faster.

3. Is there a crossover between traditional coworking and what you do here?

Michael: I didn’t start by building a coworking space, but by building a shared factory for manufacturers. The coworking element came from having all the infrastructure and thinking of ways to get as many people into the building to use it.

Normally, a coworking space that calls itself a makerspace will have coworking amenities, and then 3D printers in the corner, a woodwork room, and a messy room. We’ve equipped ours the other way round.

What haven’t just got all this incredible equipment, but a wonderful community that built itself in an independent, coworking environment. People stay at Blue Garage because they didn’t realise they would find connections, friends, support, contacts, and expertise from other people in the building.

We’ve got hot desks, so more people are joining Blue Garage just for that, or to rent an office, but they’re not using the makerspace, which is an extra bolt-on. Someone recently told me, “This community has more soul than any of the other coworking spaces I visited.”

If everyone’s working on their computers all day, every day, then you meet up at the coffee machine or the water cooler. But you’ll bump into each other more if people are welding, printing and sewing.

As you need to carry things and get things delivered here, you’ll help each other out more. It ends up being a much more interactive community because people’s work forces them to help each other, and that builds relationships.

4. What has been one of the biggest challenges in running and sustaining a makerspace like this?

Michael: It’s very expensive to establish and run a makerspace. We’re not just computers, desks, and utilities; we provide top-of-the-range equipment and health and safety technicians. Half the space is dedicated to these shared facilities.

Initially, getting enough people in to cover the costs was challenging. But, we’ve now reached one year of self-funding. We’re covering the rent, and we’re profitable, growing, expanding, building more offices, and looking for more locations.

What Blue Garage has created in Lewisham covers most of South London, with people travelling from central and Zone 1 down to the southeast. There’s potential and demand in other parts of London, so we might have another two Blue Garages in London, with others outside the capital.

Our model lends itself to a whole network of innovation commercialisation hubs, supporting all types of creative entrepreneurship and makers.

5. What kind of community do you see forming here, and how does it reflect the neighbourhood?

Michael: I’ve lived in London my whole life, but as I’m not from Lewisham, I welcomed everybody here, and that’s brought lots of new companies to the area.

Through opening Blue Garage, we’ve discovered all of Lewisham’s different communities. Loads of people said they’ve lived in Lewisham their whole life, but never imagined that something like this would be here. It’s exactly what they’ve always wanted.

Being one stop from London Bridge, Lewisham is easy to get to, but it’s one of London’s lowest job density boroughs, so many Lewisham residents commute for work. Now, the perception of Lewisham is changing, and we need to create more jobs for its residents.

There are some really deprived neighbourhoods in Lewisham, and within them, many talented, ambitious people who don’t have the opportunities to pursue their ambitions. This is the community we’re tapping into now.

For example, we’re bringing a music recording studio to the space, in the hope that it attracts young people through music. People participating in that programme will hopefully get involved in other parts of the building.

Blue Garage is an inclusive melting pot of talented, ambitious people. The only entry requirement is your attitude to being in a shared space and a shared community. The more differences, the better it is for everybody.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking space founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #24 of People Make Coworking interviews Michael Korn, founder of Blue Garage in Lewisham, UK.

In the absence of offices and social routines, local cafés became part of Sara’s everyday life and, unexpectedly, places where connection took shape. But as gentrification reshaped the town, Sara’s favourite local coffee shop was slated for demolition, leading her to question where the community could meet. That moment gave Sara a clear opportunity to create a space where local business owners in Elora could connect and flourish.

While renovating a late-nineteenth-century house and working full-time, Sara opened CW Co-Work last February – a cosy, cabin-inspired coworking space designed to bring people together, support local businesses and embrace flexibility.

This month, CW Co-Work celebrates its first anniversary. With a year of operations and community-building behind her, Sara reflects on the realities of the first year, her plans for 2026, and why CW Co-Work has become an important resource for local businesses and professionals.

1. What inspired you to start CW Co-Work?

Sara: CW Co-Work was born out of place, timing, and a deep need for connection.

We’re based in Centre Wellington, Ontario, a rural Canadian farming community experiencing rapid change. The area is growing quickly, with tourism booming and people moving out of cities in search of a different pace of life. With that growth comes opportunity, but also a gap in shared spaces where people can work, create, and build community.

I moved to Elora in 2019 after six years in northern British Columbia, and almost immediately, it felt like home. The historic downtown, limestone cliffs, and access to nature made it feel different from anywhere I’d lived before.

Less than a year later, the pandemic hit. I went from having a highly social, collaborative career in rural economic development and grant consulting to working alone from my bedroom window for the next few years. Aside from my rescue dog, Gizmo, it was isolating. I made it work, but I missed people and the everyday interactions that make work feel human.

In 2022, while renovating a century-old home downtown and living without a kitchen for six months, I found refuge at a small local café just down the street. It became my daily rhythm. Coffee, emails, familiar faces. Over time, it turned into a natural meeting place where I built much of my local network. The Elora Café’s closure in 2024 to make way for luxury condos marked the loss of a beloved community gathering place.

Not long after, a new friend and fellow patron asked me, “Where are we going to meet now? How are we going to stay connected?” It crystallised what I had been feeling for years: Centre Wellington needed a collaborative workspace. Not just desks, but a place for connection.

I’ve always been drawn to entrepreneurship and filling notebooks with business ideas, but I’d never taken the leap. This time felt different. I wrote a business plan, asked for feedback, and followed the momentum.

In October 2024, I signed a lease on an old auto parts shop and began turning the barn-like space into CW Co-Work, often after long workdays, covered in paint and completely exhausted.

At its core CW Co-Work is a response to isolation and a love letter to this community. It exists to bring people back together and to give them a welcoming place to step away from the chaos of life, reconnect with peers, and do their best work, side by side.

2. You’re gearing up to celebrate CW Co-Work’s first anniversary. How has your first year of operations been?

Sara: It didn’t take long to attract people who were craving something like this, often pulling them out of their basements and spare bedrooms. Hearing their stories about improved focus, productivity, and connection has been incredibly validating.

I initially expected faster uptake, but we’re a small space (about 1,500 square feet), with one flex office and two studios rented full-time by a local music school. Early hesitation seemed to stem from a mix of return-to-office policies, unfamiliarity with the coworking model, and simply not knowing we existed.

As awareness has grown, that curiosity has started converting into real traction. We signed three new coworkers in January, and we’re seeing strong word-of-mouth referrals and consistently positive feedback.

Overall, I’m really happy with how the first year has gone. Between renovating the space, launching, and building a consulting practice at the same time, it was a heavy mental load.

Once we opened, the space started to take shape quickly, and for a while, I was making weekly tweaks and upgrades. Eventually, I realised it was more important to listen than to keep guessing. Taking a step back and responding to what the community was actually asking for has made a big difference.

I’m currently deep into delivering two programmes in my day-to-day work, so I’ve brought on part-time support to help with light operations, capture content, and build a more consistent brand and marketing presence.

Getting the word out is key, especially since coworking is still a relatively new concept locally. We focus less on prescribing how people should use the space and more on helping them imagine what’s possible, given our flexibility and welcoming approach.

Our goal is to create a space that adapts to different types of work and evolving needs. Sometimes people aren’t sure if it’s the right fit at first, which is why I always encourage them to come in, grab a coffee, sit by the fire, and have a conversation.

CW Co-Work operates as a social enterprise. We’re building something the community can feel good about supporting and using in a variety of ways. Our mission to Connect Work and Create Impact is starting to resonate.

Coworking isn’t for everyone, and every space is different. But for those who’ve joined, they’ve found value here and made the space their own. That’s exactly what we hoped for.

3. Building a community is such an achievement - how have you approached growing it?

Sara: Because our space is intentionally small, we build community with thoughtful partnerships rather than large-scale events. Our official Grand Opening in April was a great example. We partnered with Adrian Jones Music School (one of our studio tenants) and featured performances by four of their up-and-coming musicians, which immediately brought energy and life into the space.

We also collaborated with local artist Vera Kisseleva. A few years ago, I took one of her painting classes at the Elora Centre for the Arts as a complete beginner and was instantly drawn to her work.

When we opened CW Co-Work and were faced with big, empty white walls, I reached out and asked if she’d like to display her art here. Her large canvas pieces completely transformed the space, and having them on display gave her another place to share and sell her work. She even joined us to live-paint during the Grand Opening, which felt like a really special moment.

We rounded out the weekend with baked goods from Elora Bread Trading Company and coffee from Elora Coffee Roasters, one of our beloved business partners and former owners of Elora Café.

On the Saturday alone, about 50 to 60 people came through the space in just a few hours. Sunday was quieter but still included live performances and a photo booth from Timeless Photobooths, another local business.

From the start, I felt it was important to work closely with the Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce. They already offer office space, boardrooms, and strong member services, so my focus has been on complementing rather than duplicating what they do.

They’ve been a valuable referral partner and sounding board, often connecting us with people who are looking for space like ours, sometimes before they even realise coworking is what they need.

I’ve also stayed connected through the Community Foundation and my time serving on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Centre Wellington. We regularly lend the space for workshops and planning sessions, including youth programming like ukulele sessions delivered by our in-house music school. We also offer a Canopy Membership, a sliding-scale option that gives community groups, charities, and non-profits affordable access to workspace and meeting rooms.

Looking ahead, one of our goals is to promote from within our own community. We’re surrounded by talented professionals, from bookkeepers and photographers to marketers and administrators, and we’re actively building a referral model to support one another.

Creating a self-sustaining network where opportunities circulate locally is core to what we’re building.

Day-to-day, we use our social channels to amplify local businesses and organisations, share community events, and show that we’re here to support what’s happening around us. We also host workshops led by subject matter experts, many of which are open to the broader community, and we’re not afraid to try new things, like hosting puppy yoga with a local breeder this month. The desks get pushed aside, and suddenly the space feels completely different.

At the end of the day, the strongest driver of our growth has been our core group of coworkers. They’ve become natural ambassadors, sharing our story, inviting others in, and genuinely believing in what we’re building together.

4. How have your events involved local businesses, and what impact has that had on the community?

Sara: Because Elora is a tourist town, we do see drop-ins from people visiting from Toronto or further afield who need a place to work. That’s a nice bonus, but it doesn’t keep the lights on. We’re evolving that interest into something more intentional.

We’re actively building Team Off-Site and Field Trip packages in partnership with local accommodation and activity providers, creating “Work, Stay, and Play” experiences that encourage teams to spend more time in the community and engage more deeply with what Centre Wellington has to offer.

One of CW Co-Work’s strongest value-adds is offering flexible, cost-effective workplace solutions for local small businesses. Commercial space in Elora is limited and expensive, and many businesses don’t need or can’t justify a full-time office. Our coworkers get the benefits of a fully equipped workspace without the high overhead or long-term commitments. The idea is that by staying lean and flexible, local businesses can be more resilient as markets shift.

We recently launched a new membership tier called The Cabin Club, an unlimited lounge drop-in option designed for freelancers, creatives, and independent consultants. It includes light marketing support and a monthly Co-Work Social to encourage networking and promotion.

The uptake in the first month has been encouraging, and we’re planning to continue growing this offering through 2026.

We’re also exploring a model specifically for local trade and field service businesses. Many of these teams work out of trucks or on job sites and don’t have a central place to meet, train staff, welcome clients, or sit down with their bookkeeper. We see an opportunity to offer fractional, scalable office access that supports their operations without adding unnecessary overhead.

Beyond memberships, the space is designed to be flexible for local business activation. One example is Enchanta Experiences, who host immersive fantasy and fairy-tale events across Ontario, using the space to bring together local vendors, artists, contributors, and partners for community-focused gatherings.

Through CW Co-Work, Enchanta connected with Elora Writing Workshops, leading to a spoken word performance collaboration at one of Enchanta’s events last year. One of the most rewarding parts of this work is seeing those connections form organically and grow into real partnerships.

That’s the impact we’re aiming for. CW Co-Work isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place where local businesses meet, collaborate, and create opportunities together.

5. As CW Co-Work enters its second year, what are you most excited about, and what’s your main focus over the next 12 months?

Sara: As we head into year two, my main focus is growing our memberships and continuing to test what flexibility can really look like in practice.

One of the three new coworkers we’ve welcomed in the past couple of weeks is from a visual merchandising business, LA Gift Solutions & Designs. They create stunning custom gift baskets for local brokerages and businesses, and we’ll be hosting their pop-up shops on select weekends, welcoming the community to purchase their products. It gives them a new level of visibility in town and helps us demonstrate how the space can support different types of businesses.

We’re intentionally thinking outside the box. Ideally, we’ll welcome a few more pop-up retail vendors and create a small, rotating weekend marketplace where people can discover local businesses in one place.

Having on-site parking makes that possible, and it’s something we don’t take for granted.

Membership packages are an area I’m constantly revisiting. I’m always asking myself whether I’m overcomplicating things or simply responding to the need for flexibility. That’s an area likely to get a refresh this year. Our ideal audience is small business owners, freelancers, independent operators, marketers, and content creators who want community and support, not just a desk.

I’m also excited about leaning more into community-building in 2026. We’re going to host a monthly member social and build partnerships with local accommodations and restaurants to support team off-sites and executive retreats, which we plan to roll out in the spring.

Another focus is increasing visibility for our business partners. We have six large front-facing windows on a busy road, and I’d love to see more of them filled with vinyl logos, representing businesses within the CW Co-Work ecosystem.

In the longer term, I’m hopeful we’ll expand into an additional 1,500 square feet, allowing us to respond to what the community is asking for, including food service and private offices, while still staying true to our collaborative ethos. Coworking will always be central to what we do, but I also recognise that different businesses need different types of space at different stages.

Overall, I’m excited. The focus now is on helping businesses clearly see the value of being part of this community and making sure we’re building something sustainable that can continue to grow alongside them.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #23 of People Make Coworking interviews Sara Hipson, founder of CW Co-Work in Elora, Canada.

As Spark Coworking scaled from one location to five sites across four states, Maggie helped build the systems and train community managers nationwide, enabling teams to spend more time with people and less time behind a screen.

After eight years at Spark, Maggie relocated to Augusta last summer to build a creative consultancy that helps coworking operators, collaborative spaces, and third-place developers design the systems, programmes, and brands that turn spaces into thriving communities. Building her own community from scratch in a new city has deepened Maggie’s perspective on the importance of showing up locally.

Maggie continues to support Spark Coworking through fractional work. She also remains deeply involved in local and national ecosystem initiatives, including the co-founding of Baltimore Coworking Week in 2024 – an annual August celebration (in line with International Coworking Day) uniting the city’s coworking ecosystem.

In this interview, Maggie reflects on scaling coworking with intention, the often-overlooked traits that make great community managers (including why so many seem to be eldest daughters), and how a serendipitous coworking tour in Augusta led her to play a key role in planning a global ecosystem-building summit.

1. What’s your journey into coworking been like?

Maggie: I entered the industry as a community manager for Spark Coworking in Baltimore, where the job description felt like an explanation of my dream work, ticking all the boxes and putting a name to work that fit me so well that I didn’t even know existed.

From the beginning, it was clear to me that Spark Coworking was the perfect place to start that journey. I knew very little about the industry when I began; it was a happy accident. I found myself scouring podcasts, learning and following people in the industry.

I rode the wave with the community through COVID. Here in the US, all that did was enforce my love for the coworking industry.

Beyond community engagement, I learned how to launch a space from zero by paying attention to the hyperlocal and putting systems in. Later, I transitioned to a senior manager, overseeing community managers across the business, and focussing our attention on hospitality and entrepreneurship.

I helped scale Spark Coworking from one location in Baltimore to five locations across four states.

Since leaving my full-time role at Spark Coworking in the summer, I’ve moved from Baltimore to Augusta. I’ve built a creative consultancy helping coworking operators and third-place developers design the systems, programmes, and brands that turn spaces into thriving communities, focusing on community strategy, CM training, and brand development for third places.

As it was a huge transition, and we weren’t quite ready to part ways, I’m still doing fractional work with Spark Coworking.

2. What were some of the learning curves you faced when scaling Spark Coworking from one to five sites?

Maggie: We started scaling in 2020 (an interesting situation, timing-wise). When we opened Kansas City after Baltimore, it was more of a virtual launch.

The opening of Spark Arlington in Texas moulded my understanding of scalability. Leading up to its launch, I was on the ground with our national director, Shervonne Cherry, who has been with Spark since the beginning.

Shervonne is an incredible mentor and leader in the coworking world. We became hands-on in creating connections with the local community and implementing onboarding processes. We ensured that the physical space felt like Spark and was ready on day one, which involved a few shopping trips to Home Goods to make it perfect!

Scaling a business isn’t a perfect science, but we were conscious of hospitality and entrepreneurship. Those values were reflected in the first impressions of the community: a prospect will walk in and, within the first 30 seconds to a minute, decide whether the space is for them.

Not only do they make a first impression of the space, but of the team. Part of my work involved training and onboarding our teams. We hired a local team in the area, with knowledge about the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Arlington (that I didn’t have, coming from Baltimore).

Meanwhile, my understanding of Spark tapped into that knowledge bank and married it with their understanding of the local ecosystem. We were building systems, so our team spent less time in front of their laptop and more time with their community.

A successful community manager and operations team should spend more time working within the community than away from it. To do that, you need great systems and workflows in place on the back end, to fill the team with the confidence and time to do the real work – the human-first work.

3. What qualities do you think coworking operators should look for when hiring community managers?

Maggie: Recently, I attended the GWA immersive Summit, and I had this exact conversation with a couple of folks there. My joke is that the majority of community managers I’ve talked to in Baltimore (and beyond) have been eldest daughters. It’s telling because of the many traits that eldest daughters have.

I answer this question by saying: find someone where community is ingrained into their personal ethos.

You can teach anyone how to run an onboarding session and a booking platform, but you can’t teach them how to read a room or understand emotional intelligence, like knowing when a member is having a hard time, feeling off, or craving connection, and then understanding who is the best person to connect them to.

Those soft skills have always been important in the coworking industry. As we move towards more AI and tech-focused systems, I’ve seen them become more relevant in the general hiring process, too. All of a sudden, the rest of the business world is paying attention to community, instead of calling it an audience, client or follower.

As an industry, we have a unique opportunity to raise our hands and say that we understand how to build community authentically, and we don’t want to commodify community. We’ve been doing this work for the past two plus decades.

We’re well-positioned to lead and teach people doing this work, whether it’s in a coworking space or in a different industry. It’s an interesting trajectory I’m seeing right now.

4. What did moving to Augusta teach you about community building?

Maggie: This recent move to Augusta has taught me to walk the walk. Community building and being a villager are so important in today’s digital age, and I’m viewing that from a different perspective. Now, I’m not only teaching it and talking about its importance, but I’m experiencing it firsthand.

I grew up in Baltimore — it’s a community I’m extremely comfortable being part of. I knew all of the players, and I really understood the ecosystem infrastructure: the upcoming projects, the direction the city was heading in, and how it could support startups and entrepreneurs.

Moving to Augusta, I knew how to build community, but I didn’t know anything about the community itself. The move forced me to practice what I preach. I began by connecting with local entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders (folks working in local government and tourism), and understanding the direction Augusta is heading in, from an entrepreneurial and developmental perspective.

Since moving here, I’ve found myself exploring some of Augusta’s third places, like local coffee shops and small businesses.

Putting yourself out there is scary, but if you have the confidence and clarity of who you are, you can go into a new community and authentically present yourself as an asset and an advocate for it.

5. Have you joined any coworking spaces in Augusta?

Maggie: Naturally, researching all of Augusta’s coworking spaces was one of the first things I did when prepping for the move. There are only two – one being the Clubhou.se – a nonprofit coworking space right in the heart of downtown.

I reached out to their team for a tour and met with their ecosystem builder, Lexi. She showed me around the space, and we spent an hour sitting in a conference room talking shop. There’s just a certain language and understanding of people in this industry that we might not get to chat in person very often, especially in a city with only two coworking spaces.

Lexi mentioned they’d just finished a planning meeting for the Startup Champions Network (SCN) – a national organisation for ecosystem builders, that hosts two summits a year. The upcoming summit just happened to be in Augusta.

I asked how I could help, and was invited to join the planning committee. So, only a couple of weeks after I’d moved, I was suddenly in a room with the Augusta Chamber of Commerce, the coworking space founders, and team members planning the event.

I helped execute the event in November, where we brought 85 ecosystem builders from around the world together for four days of programming, community-building events, panel discussions, and TED-style talks.

It was an incredible thing to be part of, and a serendipitous experience that led to many connections since then.

6. How is Baltimore Coworking Week shaping the local coworking ecosystem?

Maggie: This is a newer initiative that we started in the summer of 2024. There are about 30 coworking spaces across Baltimore, including makerspaces and niche spaces. Although we all celebrate International Coworking Day (one of my favourite days of the year), there was no formal alliance between the independently owned coworking spaces.

We decided to create this incredible piece of programming around International Coworking Day. Throughout the week, every space offered either free or discounted day passes, encouraging folks to check out all the different coworking spaces part of Baltimore Coworking Week.

We organised daily programming across all the spaces, with four spaces participating in the inaugural year. One evening, for example, we hosted a member panel with members from all the different coworking spaces, about how coworking and being a part of their home coworking space supported their businesses.

We also had a TED-style talk around placemaking in coworking and its impact on the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Throughout the week, we supported each other across the different events. Baltimore Coworking Week propelled a local understanding of the ecosystem – many people who’d never coworked before visited all four coworking spaces in one week.

They gathered information about what type of space would be best for them and made new connections, which helped them make a good decision about the type of coworking space that they wanted to join.

For the coworking teams participating, Baltimore Coworking Week was a great reinforcement of one of our industry values: collaboration over competition. Despite some people working in the industry in the same city for years, they hadn’t even met each other. The event was a fantastic opportunity for those teams to talk about their shared experiences in coworking.

We’re all building community, and it can be easy for people who support communities or ecosystems to forget that they need support as well. Having conversations with someone who knows the situations that we deal with on a day-to-day basis helps.

Not only did Baltimore Coworking Week give our teams a chance to collaborate, but the greater community experienced coworking and understood the coworking spaces they could access across Baltimore.

We had our second year in 2025, and we’re continuing to build the initiative.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces

Edition #22 interviews Maggie Terhune, who has set up her own creative consultancy. Follow Maggie on Instagram (@mag.terhune) or shoot her an email.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

After moving abroad for work and launching Angola’s first coworking space in 2015, Michael found himself back in Jeffrey’s Bay during the lockdown. It was then that, quite serendipitously, he stumbled across a huge building facing the ocean that can only be described as a surfer’s utopia.

Michael founded Green Room JBay — a coworking space for digital nomads, tech entrepreneurs, ocean conservationists, and creatives who all share a passion for surfing, sustainability, and the ocean. This influences everything the space does, from being surfer-friendly with all the amenities you could ask for, to supporting initiatives that protect the ocean and coastal ecosystems.

In this interview, Michael shares his remarkable story of starting Green Room JBay, what an “ocean-minded” culture looks like in practice, and how the workspace gives back to the local community, injecting new revenue into the local economy.

1. What inspired the founding of Green Room JBay, and how did you get started?

Michael: I grew up surfing in a city near Jeffreys Bay (JBay). I recall on weekends, it was always such a treat to head to JBay to go surfing. In JBay, the waves are long, tapered and beautiful. It’s the best surfing set-up in South Africa for sure, perhaps one of the best on the African continent.

After school, I left home to study, work and travel. I started my first coworking space in Luanda, the capital of Angola, in 2015. When COVID hit in 2020, I decided to return home near JBay to spend some time with my elderly parents. Of course, I went surfing in JBay.

Whilst I was there, I connected with someone who owned a large, recently vacated building in town, who had heard about my coworking space in Angola. I had no intention of staying in JBay, but decided to visit the building out of curiosity.

Turns out the building in question was the South African Head Office for the global surf brand, ‘Billabong’. They had done what any well-capitalised global surf brand might do: build a big, beautiful, warehouse-style office at the beach overlooking a surf spot. They then filled it with incredible surf nostalgia, surfboards and imagery, much like a surfing museum. It was pretty much the ultimate office for a surfer.

I used to love reading an American magazine called Surfer Magazine, which had a section right at the back called ‘People Who Surf’ – about incredible working professionals who also happened to surf. That was my favourite section in the magazine because I’m not a very good surfer, but I could relate to that.

I’m also influenced by Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard’s book: “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.” It’s mostly about finding more balance and sustainable ways of running a business, where profit doesn’t cost the surrounding environment and communities.

Standing there, looking at this big, empty office, it was easy to imagine a sustainable coworking space full of super-interesting professionals who also happen to love surfing.

It could be, in a way, the physical manifestation of ‘People who Surf’ and ‘Let my people go surfing’. It had the potential to be the ultimate coworking space for the working surfer. That’s what really inspired me to do this!

Billabong had been JBay’s biggest employer, but its head office and manufacturing operations had recently been moved out of the area. The rest of the town mostly revolved around the tourism industry.

In 2020 (mid-COVID), things were looking pretty grim. There were no other businesses in JBay big enough to take the whole space. Even if there had been, at that stage, it wasn’t entirely impossible that no one would ever want to return to the office. The landlord was understandably nervous.

I made a very opportunistic offer to take over the lease because I had nothing to lose. The landlord and Billabong agreed, on the basis that we’d start recruiting from the people who’d been laid off from Billabong, which we did.

It was very much an opportunity to bring a positive impact to the area I’d grown up enjoying. Who doesn’t want to do that?

2. What sort of things make your coworking space uniquely “ocean-minded”?

Michael: The magical thing about Jeffrey’s Bay is the ocean. The town is built on a hill overlooking the bay. You can see the sea from almost anywhere, and you’re never more than a few minutes from the beach. There’s no industry or port nearby, making the water beautifully clean and full of sea life; it’s quite extraordinary.

Almost like clockwork, in the morning and evening, the water is usually teeming with pods of dolphins. Then there’s the long, tapered waves.

People come to JBay because of the ocean, and we really wanted to embrace that. We decided that everything we do, even though we’re in the office, has to somehow relate to the ocean. I think the more people use, see and think about the ocean, the better they understand it, and ideally, the more they feel inspired to conserve it.

An “ocean-minded” space was made easier in practice because we inherited the office from Billabong. It’s right next to the beach with these floor-to-ceiling doors and windows overlooking the ocean; it’s impossible to ignore! It’s not unusual to be distracted during an online meeting by a breaching whale or a perfect wave.

We’re exceptionally surfer-friendly – we have ‘surfboard-parking’, showers, wetsuit drying racks and warm showers. We make it totally acceptable to arrive at the office in a dripping wetsuit; actually, it’s encouraged! It’s quite common for members to quickly go for a surf at some point during their workday.

When you’re surfing, you appreciate the quality of the ocean first-hand. We really want to support ocean and wilderness conservation. So, if you’re doing anything related to conserving the ocean or our coastal areas, you’re welcome to work here and pay what you can (or nothing at all).

We have several local conservation organisations based at the Green Room, and various initiatives come from the space. For raising awareness, it’s really helpful that there is a ready audience and a wide range of skills in-house, often willing to lend their assistance.

For any event, exhibition or residency we host, we try to connect it to or be inspired by the ocean. All of our internal communication in the space with members has a little hint of the ocean. For example, you’ll always see a little seagull peeking out of the corner of all of our internal messaging. The kitchen has a big poster showing all the marine bird species found in the area. We have a 16 metre mural of a school of fish. At our reception store, you can buy merchandise from a local craftsman who makes handmade surfboard fins in his garage.

That’s what we mean by being “ocean-minded” — everything we do is, in some small way, connected back to the ocean.

The most unusual way I’ve heard of people finding us was a group of friends from Berlin who were looking to escape the German winter. They opened Google Maps and followed their Central European time zone southwards, looking for a place where they could work somewhere warm, in the same time zone, but specifically in an office with an ocean view. Our space floated to the top of maps. They saw some pictures and booked for a month!

3. Your philosophy of measuring success is a little different. Can you share more about it?

Michael: From the first time I saw the space, it was hard to imagine that this was ever going to be a super-profitable business, especially in Jeffrey’s Bay. So that was never the goal. It’s definitely much more of an experiment to prove whether a big coworking space can make a difference to a small town.

Based on this, we defined success across three things. Firstly, we wanted to bring money into the local economy that wasn’t there before, especially because so many people had just become unemployed, and tourism was struggling after COVID.

We saw the project as a way to attract a new type of traveller to town, somebody who stays for longer, with a decent disposable income.

Secondly, we want the space to bring experience and expertise to JBay that weren’t there before. We do this by attracting skilled working people to JBay, and then providing a platform to share their experience with others. Instead of coming just for a week of surfing, we encourage them to stay for a month or three months, make local connections and exchange their skills.

Recently, one of our local JBay automation labs started producing training content for a German company after the founder spent some time at the Green Room.

Finally, we see it as a way of setting an example in the town of what a sustainable business might look like. We knew the space would attract attention, and hoped that other local businesses might copy some of our practices.

Those were the main differences we thought we could make with the space. Financial sustainability is obviously ideal, but profit maximisation has never been the main goal. When you position your metrics like that, instead of maximising profit, staff make decisions in a different way. It’s subtle, but customers really notice something different.

4. What are some of the challenges you’ve had in building Green Room JBay?

Michael: The most daunting challenge was that Green Room JBay is a big office for a small town. At around 1,300 square metres in a town of around 40,000 people, and many people who only visit during the holidays, it was hard to imagine filling the space.

Thankfully, one of the old Billabong staff, who was busy closing things down, mentioned in passing that he’d been approached by quite a few people who were curious about using the space in some way. He kindly gave me a list of their names and numbers, and that became our first customer list.

Evidence of so much interest gave me confidence that our initial footfall was sufficient to start the momentum. Five years down the line, some folk from that list are still members!

Setting up the workspace on a tiny budget was the next challenge. Even though the office was left in a state that was almost ready-to-use, converting it to coworking required some intervention, which we needed to do on a tiny budget. We connected with some super-talented local artists and carpenters who, like much of the town, weren’t really motivated by money.

When they heard about our idea and the change we intended to make to the town, they wanted to help make it happen. Many local creatives volunteered their time to bring the Green Room to the state of ‘minimum viable product’ as a coworking space, and they did an amazing job. Curiously, almost all of them have subsequently received a bunch of work from people impressed with what they did in the space.

Finally, JBay is quite an affordable place (which also means that locals generally aren’t willing to pay much for stuff!). We had to find a way to attract local people and make enough revenue to sustain the big space.

To do this, we targeted people from outside of JBay who are used to paying more for a coworking space, and then played around quite a lot with the discount on the pricing of the longer-term packages to accommodate the locals. If you’re living in JBay, the long-term packages are much more affordable; that’s our ‘baseload’ of members, which has very low turnover.

5. In what ways have you seen Green Room JBay affect your local community?

Michael: I would say the space is definitely having an impact on the type of community that the town attracts – it’s definitely a bit more cosmopolitan. That said, JBay is still largely undiscovered and not a “digital nomad town” by any stretch of the imagination.

At any point in time, we might have a handful or two of nomads around. There have always been several international surfers visiting, but now you start to see more international surfers who have remote jobs. They stay for longer, spend more at local businesses and tend to integrate better with the local community.

We try to create a platform in the space for everyone, both local and international, to share their skills, stories and expertise. For example, every Thursday lunchtime, we facilitate a TED-style talk for people to share something they’re working on or are super passionate about. We call it “Off the Lips” — a play on words for a well-known surfing manoeuvre.

In line with our objectives, you don’t need to be a coworking member to attend the talks or any of our events. It’s completely open for people in town to walk into.

We’re really proud of how this has worked out – you’re in this little town near the southern tip of Africa, and you can walk into this space, and learn how an expert marketed Denmark as a niche destination, or how someone from France is replanting coral reefs in French Polynesia. It’s an opportunity to learn about the rest of the world, and conversely, for the rest of the world to meet and interact with our local community.

In the space, we have a large “common room”, which is probably one of the biggest indoor venues in town, so we get approached by people wanting to use the space, often for surf movie premieres or events. We’re always very open to that - we’re happy that the whole town can benefit from this space.

6. Has anything else evolved from the coworking space since opening?

Michael: We started noticing a trend where we had a few international travellers come through the space who could afford a nicer Airbnb, but instead of staying alone, they wanted to stay in a low-stress environment and community.

I first heard about “coliving” from visiting members, who mentioned how they’ll always search for a coworking space before accommodation. Around the same time, an old villa with sweeping views across the bay came up for sale. That’s where we had the idea of ‘JBay Coliving’ - the first coliving space in South Africa outside of Cape Town. Based on our insight, the coworking space would be a lead-generator for the coliving space.

Curiously, whilst setting up the Green Room, I’d also been adopted by a cat. The available villa was next door to where I lived, and I noticed the cat really loved playing in the villa garden. Knowing I still needed to travel to Angola, buying the villa next door and starting a business there was going to be really helpful to ensure there would always be someone to look after the cat when I travelled. I think the cat was actually more the reason I started JBay Coliving, rather than the business case!

It worked out well - the coliving space has been a great success and a very cool project. The cat adapted well to his new home and was loved by everyone. Sadly, he has since passed away, but his spirit still lives on in the villa. JBay Coliving has definitely been the biggest “side effect” that’s evolved from the Green Room.

More recently, we’ve also taken on some space next to the coworking space to create a maker space. There are many creative people in this town, including the people who helped us set up the space, who use it.

At the Green Room, it’s very complementary to have people who work with their hands work alongside people using laptops. Our coworking members provide an instant audience for the maker space, and the makers benefit from the coworking members’ skills. That’s our latest project.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #21 of People Make Coworking interviews Michael Sternberg, founder of Green Room JBay in South Africa.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

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The Tribe was intentionally designed as a small, sensory, home-like workspace that naturally encourages community interaction. But there’s a deeper purpose to it: addressing systemic barriers women face, especially for those starting and running a business.

Coworking can lead to business growth, connection, and personal development, not just for women, but also for people facing unemployment in an increasingly AI-driven world. Alongside running The Tribe, Stacey is also co-founder and editor of Athena Magazine, supporting women in business across Devon.

In this interview, Stacey reflects on launching a successful rural space for women, why coworking can create pathways for entrepreneurs in the age of AI, and how the coworking industry should evolve to empower more people in the future.

1. How did your previous coworking experiences influence you when you founded The Tribe?

Stacey: I discovered coworking by complete accident around 2008, when I read an article about it, and straight away knew this was going to be the future of work. I had no idea what coworking was before that. I just had a strong, bodily feeling that this was going to be huge, and everybody should know about it.

At the time, I was hatching a plan to exit my job in publishing and focus on my freelance interior design writing and my interiors blog. I decided that in the absence of a team, a coworking space was just what I needed, so I started googling and found one to try.

I had such high expectations for what the space could be, but as I sat at a desk, looked around, and saw people dotted around the room, I just thought, “How am I going to interact with those people?” There were so many invisible barriers; it felt like I’d be interrupting them if I went to talk to them.

The space once hosted a coffee morning where we were all ushered into a glass office for forced conversation. I enjoyed it, but we just went back to our desks afterwards. The coworking space just wasn’t living up to my expectations, and I got really disillusioned with it and eventually left. Shortly after, the place shut down. I wasn’t that surprised, because it just didn’t offer anything other than desks and Wi-Fi. I was so disappointed that coworking didn’t meet my expectations.

I looked for another coworking space and found a creative space. It was better, with more of a buzz and sense of community than in the first place, but again, I sat by myself and struggled to integrate. It felt like a waste of money because I was alone most of the time, and no one welcomed me. So, I left that one and almost gave up on coworking altogether. It was obviously not working for me in any of these spaces.

I didn’t really think about it much more until a couple of years later, when the first WeWork spaces opened, as it reignited my interest in coworking from a design point of view. It felt like an advancement because the WeWork spaces looked great, and I really believe that workspaces shouldn’t have to look like a boring corporate office. It got me quite excited, although I didn’t want to go to a WeWork.

Then I started seeing the female-led spaces popping up in New York and London. I really wanted one here in Devon, but I felt that no one’s going to try that in Devon. It just doesn’t make any sense on paper. But I quite like a challenge, and thought maybe I could make it work.

At the time, I was speaking to a business coach to figure out my next move in my writing career. I’d reached all my goals, written for the publications that I wanted to, and won lots of awards.

He said to me, “Go home and think about what you really want to do.” It quickly became apparent that what I really wanted to do was open an all-female coworking space.

2. What was The Tribe like when you first opened?

Stacey: Our first space was a converted house above a bookshop, which was completely inappropriate for a coworking space. The main office was probably the living room, and the smaller office was a tiny bedroom. There was a precarious staircase up to a toilet, and a kitchen downstairs.

If I were looking for a coworking space, it’s totally not what I would imagine, but it was all I could afford at the time.

I’d worked online as a writer for so long before that, I really doubted whether I could even run a bricks-and-mortar business, and I was petrified at the thought of paying all these bills every month. I needed something small to test the waters and see if I could even do it.

The Tribe opened in January 2020 and, obviously, shut down in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. We struggled to access government help because I was still in the handover period of my lease with my landlord (who was still down as the business rates payer and received all the relief). It took ages to undo all of that, but we survived the pandemic.

In 2023, we’d built the momentum again, and I felt like we could take off. But my landlord then announced they were selling the building. Luckily, they were buying a new building and said we could move in there, but there were legal complications throughout the process, and the move kept getting delayed.

I somehow managed to keep the community together; we worked in coffee shops together once a week, which was awful because it wasn’t what we were used to.

Six months after we moved out of the first space, I was ready to give up, and I was quite angry about it, because I really felt like this is what I’m meant to do with my life.

But instead of giving up, I looked on Rightmove and found the place we are in now. It’s an incredible converted barn in the middle of a beautiful rural village. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is.

I’d realised that I’d actually looked at this place after the pandemic, when I realised everybody needed a Zoom room, and we had no space for one in the old place. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of moving, but just had a look around. This place was way too expensive, but they’d just reduced the rent, which made it slightly more affordable. All of a sudden, it became a possibility.

3. How do you design a coworking space that naturally brings people together?

Stacey: It was really intentional for me to find a tiny space, because I didn’t want to get into a situation where you’ve got a vast open space and no one talking to each other.

We only had eight desks in total – five in one room and three in a slightly smaller room. People had their own individual desks, but they were sitting right opposite or right next to someone. There was a small gangway between the desks, and you had to walk past everybody else in the room to get to your desk. I wanted to make it so that you would be more uncomfortable not talking to the people in the room.

As it was small and could only hold a certain number of people, they got to know each other quite quickly. You can scale a community once you’ve got a community, but it’s much harder to build a community from an array of strangers in a giant space.

From a design perspective, I was obsessed with biophilic design and bringing the outdoors in. I just hated working in sterile corporate offices (it’s just so inconducive to creativity). It seems ludicrous to me that everyone designs workspaces like that.

I wanted my coworking space to feel like someone’s home office, with really earthy, grounded, natural colours. But the light in the room meant that it didn’t work out. So, I used pink instead; I didn’t want it to be a pink coworking space for women, but it just turned out that way. I also brought in lots of natural materials and plants to give the space a sensory feel.

4. What key business challenges do women face that The Tribe is specifically designed to help with?

Stacey: When I was researching whether or not it was a crazy idea to open a space for women, I came across Natwest’s Rose Review, which details the main barriers and challenges that women face when starting and growing a business. My first thought was that I can’t solve this. It’s systemic.

There are major barriers, such as caring responsibilities. Obviously, it’s better to have a coworking space with childcare, but I couldn’t afford that, nor did I have the space. But, when I stopped to think about it properly, I realised that there were plenty of things a female coworking space could do to support women overcome these barriers.

Challenges like risk aversion or risk awareness, for example. It’s not that women don’t take risks, but we take more calculated risks. Sometimes, this can stop us because we worry we might fail, so we might decide not to do something. When you’re in a room with other women who believe in you, they can peer coach you through that and help you see that you can do that thing or absorb that risk.

There’s also the perceived lack of experience or skills, and imposter syndrome. We can peer coach each other through that, too. Another one was a lack of relatable mentors, role models and networks. I can become that version of me who thrives at a networking event, but I don’t enjoy it, and I feel drained long afterwards.

Coworking is networking, but it’s more intense, more in-depth. You’re not just turning up to give your elevator pitch on the third Thursday of every month, and then you can’t remember all the people you’ve spoken to. With coworking, you’re sitting with those people for eight hours a day, which drastically speeds up relationship building.

You get to know your coworkers on a much deeper level: what do they want from their business? Who is their ideal client? What are they working on next? What kind of support do they need? You get to know that intimately, and then you can advocate for those people in the rooms that they’re not in, because you know them well.

When a new person comes into our space, and someone asks — “What do you do?” — they don’t realise, but they’re actually practising their elevator pitch. In the beginning, they can’t articulate it, and downplay their achievements or what they’re trying to do. But over time, I see them getting much more poignant and tight with their pitch. It’s really nice to watch these women grow in confidence.

I knew I didn’t have an abundance of resources or the financial backing to help women in the way they really needed. But I knew that even starting with the very basics would be enough to make a tangible difference to local women. I decided I’d rather do that than not try at all.

5. With AI changing the way we work, what role do you think coworking spaces can play in creating pathways for entrepreneurship?

Stacey: Honestly, it’s integral. If the mass unemployment prediction transpires to be true, I don’t think people will just sit around and accept it. A lot of people will start their own business out of necessity.

If you’ve been employed your entire life and aren’t born with an entrepreneurial spirit, or that feeling that you’ve always wanted to start your own business, you’re going to struggle to navigate that journey.

Government research has identified that there’s no defined pathway to entrepreneurship in the UK, so where do people go for support? There is support out there, but it’s from disparate organisations, offering a variety of business support programmes, a six-week bootcamp here, a one-to-one there, or a free meeting with this expert here. You’re getting the knowledge or training, but there isn’t really any ongoing wrap-around support.

The way I see it is that support is found in your local coworking spaces. It’s in your community, your town, your city; it’s local to you.

It’s permanent, so you’re not waiting for that monthly networking meeting to find like-minded people, or someone who can give you a bit of perspective, or celebrate those wins with you.

Coworking spaces are open all the time, and they’re in all different niches. My coworking space is for women, but in Devon, we’ve got a network of over 20 spaces overseen by the economic development department of our local council. One workspace down the road from us is for social enterprises. There’s another one which is big on outdoor pursuits and wellbeing, and another that offers a tech community.

There are all these different niche coworking spaces, so you can choose the one that meets your needs, and work alongside people who have already done what you’re hoping to do. Coworking spaces can offer that wraparound support, which is so badly needed.

Coworking spaces are the pathway to entrepreneurship. The coworking industry knows that, but I’m not sure people beyond the industry realise that yet. I just wish that the educational institutions and various business support organisations would signpost more to coworking spaces, as workspaces already have an entrepreneurial community and offer ongoing support.

We definitely need to be making more noise about the benefits of coworking and the role that these spaces can play in bridging the gap for entrepreneurs. We have a huge opportunity to show that coworking is the pathway to entrepreneurship, but to make this happen, we need to work together as a cohesive ecosystem.

6. What would you like the coworking industry to do better in the future?

Stacey: The coworking industry needs to come together more as one singular voice to position ourselves a bit better. At the moment, we’re all treading water and trying to survive in this challenging economic situation.

I don’t think coworking is the most profitable business model; it’s tough. But we definitely have an important role to play, and the industry needs to make this much clearer.

With AI, there’s going to be a whole piece around upskilling people for digital inclusion; people will need to get on board and learn these new skills so they don’t get left behind.

But AI is quite intimidating, and while online courses are available, there are a lot of people who may need a more hands-on, in-person training, which could be delivered to people in their local coworking spaces.

There is so much potential to embed the network of coworking spaces more deeply into the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a way that benefits the wider economy and our local communities.

I hope that we can come together to capitalise on this in the near future.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #20 of People Make Coworking interviews Stacey Sheppard at The Tribe, a coworking space for women, in Totnes, Devon.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

With a background in architecture, Jerome brings a unique design sensibility to coworking, blending functionality with user experience. His coworking spaces cater to a wide range of members – from entrepreneurs and freelancers to corporate teams seeking flexibility – embodying the ethos: “Work for yourself, not by yourself.”

Beyond running a growing coworking business, Jerome is committed to promoting inclusivity within the industry. In 2023, he launched ‘People of Coworking,’ an initiative that encourages industry conferences to broaden representation, increase access to opportunities, and promote inclusivity.

In this interview, Jerome shares his journey from architect to coworking founder, the evolution of BLANKSPACES, and insights into the future of coworking as a catalyst for community, choice, and entrepreneurial spirit.

1. You’ve been active in the coworking industry since its early days. What’s it been like to witness and be part of the coworking movement from its inception to today?

Jerome: I opened BLANKSPACES in 2008, in the very early days of coworking. At that time, there weren’t even a dozen coworking spaces in the U.S. We were all scrambling online, looking for each other, and trying to share best practices.

Sadly, there were a couple of coworking companies trying to one-up each other and get more press. Maybe that happens in every industry. But there are also a bunch of people who start with good intentions to further the movement.

It turns out that BLANKSPACES is now one of the oldest coworking companies in America, as many workspaces that launched in the 2006-2009 era have since closed. Now, there are a couple of exceptions, some of which closed for a couple of years around the pandemic, and then reopened. WorkBar in Boston launched about a year after BLANKSPACES.

Most optimistically, we’re right now at an inflection point of where coworking can be. This also happened around 2011-2012, at the end of the recession, when real estate prices and the cost of goods were cheap, and optimism was high.

Those who opened in the 2011-2013 era did well, but some of them were like Icarus, and got too close to the sun, and in the case of WeWork, rebounded.

We’re at another inflection point now. The high vacancy rates make the cost of real estate cheap or opportunistic, and many U.S coworking spaces are more mature. Therefore, we tend to avoid traditional leases; instead, looking at revenue sharing or management agreements.

Depending on the deal, leases may now come back in favour. However, I don’t think a lot of us will do that, because we’ve learned a lesson. It’s short-lived, but for those starting out, it’s a good time to do that. For coworking, this is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to really shine.

2. What’s the journey of running BLANKSPACES been like, and how has the coworking brand evolved?

Jerome: I’m basically customer number one. When I exited my architecture job to open my own firm, I always knew I wanted to share an office with a few people, not only for camaraderie, but to share some of the expensive equipment that architects need, like large printers, plotters, and scanners.

Ironically, architects mostly never joined my coworking space, so its whole premise never fully materialised. But other people did.

At first, I reflected on my previous jobs and said: “I’ve worked in a five-person company, a 20-person company, 50, and 100…how many people do I want to share this space with?” I arrived at between 40-50 people, which is what my first space held.

It took off from there, only temporarily at first, because I opened in early 2008, and then the recession hit that Fall. Everything got turned upside down, and I spent the next two years trying to climb back out of that.

I was then able to open my first expansion site in Santa Monica. That went well – we were ahead of budget and schedule, and it turned out to be a great location. But I experienced a partner issue and had to pivot and regrow again. This was during the growth era of coworking, from 2011 until 2018-2019. But our community is growing again, which is great.

It’s been interesting watching all these companies come into coworking and, unfortunately, some come out. This is the second time it’s happened, and I’m still wondering why.

When I opened in 2008, I was the first coworking space in SoCal. You have to remember that LA County is 10 million people; it’s a country in itself. That’s just massive, and we were the first and only coworking space for two years.

For somewhere as large as LA, the market is underserved. Among the boutique and local, regional operators, there really aren’t any. In terms of coworking and flexible spaces, London is so much farther ahead than we are.

3. How does your architectural background influence the way you design your workspaces?

Jerome: I’ve always been surprised and impressed that so many people have come into coworking with little to no knowledge of either design or construction, because our monthly rent is the highest expense. Whether it’s 30%, 50%, or 60% of your operating expenses…it’s huge.

Then, having to hire an architect to realise your vision sounds like something that would be lost in translation. As someone who can be his own architect, I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.

Over the years, I’ve learned the craft of coworking architecture, not just every square foot or square inch of the space, but also how design impacts operations and immediately impacts user experience.

Yes, I have the opportunity to be my own client and design a whole bunch of my spaces. However, I didn’t design all of them because we inherited what’s known as second-generation spaces (previous coworking spaces). So, my design contributions included adding lighting, paint, carpet, and some finishes.

But with our other coworking spaces, I literally started designing them from scratch. They were bare walls and floors. That’s been really good; it’s tested me on what I can do when I have a blank canvas, versus a canvas we inherit from someone else.

4. In your view, why does coworking naturally support communities of entrepreneurs and freelancers, and what more can be done to promote this?

Jerome: We currently have eight locations and five markets. We’ve started to understand that we can have multiple spaces in the same or adjacent neighbourhoods, and treat them as a region.

For example, we have one coworking space in Venice and another in Santa Monica (on the border of Venice). If we treat one as a neighbourhood spot, it’s only about 600 square metres, while the other one is 5,000 square metres – a behemoth.

Some people love that big, active vibe. Other people really like the neighbourhood, the quiet vibe. We’re able to offer both audiences and operate them differently, and understand how to scale up and scale down our operations.

The coworking and flexible space industry is much more fluid and quicker to respond to market demand than the traditional real estate industry, with coworking being more consumer-oriented. The biggest difference now is that corporates and enterprise companies are looking at coworking to meet some of their office needs. We’re grabbing that, which makes our sales process much quicker.

Our branding says: “Work for yourself, not by yourself.” We really cater to anyone and everyone who just needs a workspace.

75% of our community members are entrepreneurs and freelancers, but 25-30% are corporations. They want to feel entrepreneurial, and they like that vibe, joining our spaces and community to absorb that, even though they themselves are not entrepreneurs or freelancers.

The freedom of choice is quite liberating. Our Venice location was the corporate headquarters for Snapchat, so pre-pandemic, their employees had to come in and work there. Whereas now, people can choose to go to that same workspace. You can amenitise it, but the number one thing is the freedom of choice.

Choosing where and how to work is liberating, too. Those who work fully remote all the time have doubled in numbers since the pandemic. We, coworking spaces, could do better just by focusing.

5. Why did you launch ‘People of Coworking,’ and what gap were you hoping to fill in the industry?

Jerome: For a number of years, a bunch of us attending industry conferences got more and more dissatisfied with what we were seeing in the industry.

First and foremost, the most obvious was having all men on the panels; that was disheartening. But for some of us, we were also disappointed in the lack of diversity on stage. In terms of inclusion and equity, it’s setting us back.

I understand that conference organisers need to maximise attendance and price, so they go with what offers better ROI. But by not diversifying, they’re perpetuating a certain set of attendees and an ethos.

Either way, a bunch of us were quietly and separately discussing this, and I just got motivated to address this specific topic.

‘People of Coworking’, an initiative I started in 2023, is a double entendre. It stands for people of colour, and the idea was to nudge coworking organisers to diversify speakers at events.

Its strength in numbers; if the attendees can publicly pledge that they themselves would not speak on stage unless it’s diverse, then we can encourage conference organisers to realise that it’s time to make some changes.

The second initiative is that ‘People of Coworking’ lists ethnically diverse people who can and should be on stage. Some of them have been on stage. It’s a resource for conference organisers to tap into. The least we can do is diversify the programmers and public events, making debates more diverse.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #19 of People Make Coworking interviews Jerome Chang at BLANKSPACES.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Mantle Space began delivering serviced offices twenty years ago, after Guy bought the derelict Thremhall Park, near Stansted, developing it into a thriving 25,000 square foot office hub, which has since expanded to over 40,000 square feet. Now, Mantle is an interconnected network of eight flexible serviced offices operating across the Southeast.

Mantle has weathered major geopolitical and economic shocks, from the credit crunch, through to Brexit and COVID, maintaining growth and profitability through steady leadership and a disciplined operational playbook. Central to this success is a commitment to customer care: Guy personally maintains relationships with long-term members, demonstrating genuine hospitality. The results speak for themselves: Mantle is now the largest flex operator by desk numbers in the Cambridge area.

In this interview, Guy shares why understanding the unique needs of members matters, how to deliver personalised, professional, yet cost-effective, fit-outs, and how to future-proof buildings while improving their sustainability. Beyond operational success, Guy nurtures a workplace culture recognised for transparency, engagement, and inclusivity, with Mantle Space repeatedly recognised as a ‘Great Place to Work’.

1. You’ve been active in the workspace industry over the last 30 years. What’s that evolution been like?

Guy: When I was very young, I graduated with a real estate degree from City University and went to work for a large property company. I qualified as a surveyor, working with the company to run large development teams and refurbish properties in new buildings. It was an incredibly steep learning curve, but an exciting time.

At 24, I made the interesting decision that I could do it better myself. I left the company to set up Mantle and came back to Stansted, the part of the world where I grew up.

Initially, Mantle’s objective involved looking for development opportunities arising from the recently opened Stansted Airport. We worked on industrial developments, bought the shopping centre in Bishop Stortford, and traded various things.

We started with absolutely no equity, so I built it up from scratch. By 2005, we reached a critical point and had enough equity to buy and hold assets to generate an income.

I bought a derelict former Franciscan priory called Thremhall Park, right next to Stansted Airport. It was a Grade II listed wreck with a walled garden and a listed facade. Everything else was falling down, but we developed it into 25,000 square feet of offices. We now have over 40,000 square feet on site.

Our initial intention was to let it and sell it. But instead, I decided we would move our offices here and start running serviced offices. Every agent said to me, “You’re barking mad to do that. Why would you do that?” But I was determined to do it.

We set up Mantle Space, our own flexible serviced office operator from scratch, without any industry knowledge or experience. At the time, startups and small companies used serviced offices, but they didn’t have much traction or credibility. You couldn’t really value them because of the short leases, and there was only really Regus in the marketplace, which catered to a slightly lower cost, lower value market.

Since then, we’ve built a portfolio of eight flexible serviced offices across our region with robust systems and structures, adopting a model that delivers excellent customer care. That’s a cultural thing for us.

We’re a property company but also a flexible serviced operator. That’s been quite an interesting journey, and a lot has happened since we started. For example, technology changes enable more people to adopt a flexible working model, so we support our members with cloud systems and video conferencing solutions. It means that everybody doesn’t need to be in the same room every day, which drives demand for flexible workspace. We’ve seen the industry mature and been part of that journey.

COVID was an interesting driver. It became the catalyst for making flexible workspace mainstream for larger organisations facing lease events and managing agile working. Instead of taking 10,000 square feet on another 10-year lease, companies took flex space.

We’ve seen the transformation of flex since the beginning of COVID. Before, we had no flexible serviced occupiers of more than about 20-25 desks. Post-COVID, we had six flex occupiers of over 100 desks, with five of those renewing. The number of corporates using flex space has grown exponentially in these last few years; it’s been a massive transformation, so we’re now seeing a maturing marketplace.

We’ve got a very broad range of occupiers. We’re seeing more professional operators and a stronger focus on service. We’re now the biggest operator by desk numbers in the Cambridge area.

2. What does it take to serve a regional market effectively?

Guy: We’ve steered clear of London, focussing on strong southeastern towns outside of the capital, where there’s a broad range of different models and a slightly different marketplace.

Outside of London, you tend to have a higher proportion of professional, mature businesses: independent financial advisors, accountants, lawyers. You need to deliver excellent customer care and a professional service; price is also important to these occupiers. They’re not in the capital, partly because it’s an expensive place; however, they’ll have business interests or spend some of their time in London, so accessibility is important.

Connectivity with the local market and other regional centres needs to be maintained, so we try to connect our centre networks in Cambridge, Oxford, Stansted, or Stevenage, so that our occupiers can move between our centres.

We have really excellent teams delivering great client engagement. We’re satisfying them by understanding their business needs. That incorporates member networking events, facilitating connections and engaging with the local marketplace.

3. Mantle Space is writing an operator playbook built on genuine relationships, sustainable growth, and spaces that truly serve evolving needs. How does this work in practice?

Guy: We’ve got nearly 20 years of experience in running flexible serviced offices, and have grown in a controlled and sustained way, retaining growth and profitability despite experiencing some geopolitical shocks. We’ve done that because we’ve progressed steadily, sensibly, and securely.

Why is that important as a playbook? It means that we’re secure, trustworthy, and reliable. We focus on developing and maintaining genuine long-term relationships.

Our first service occupier was an IT support organisation supporting the NHS, called HD Clinical. They turned up the first month we opened, and took four desks. Then they took two rooms, and then a floor. After that, we converted the Coach House for them, which was about 3,500 square feet, and they stayed there for about six years before we built them a 9,000 square feet building that they’ve just signed a new 10-year lease on.

That journey involved having several negotiations with them at various times about their needs. For example, they require strong connectivity. We understand those needs and have proposed various solutions.

We get to know and understand our members. I don’t spend my whole life talking to all of our members (we’ve got a big team of people, and most members don’t talk to me), but I do have conversations with some of our long-standing and valuable customers. We’ve nurtured genuine relationships with our members, which means we can anticipate their needs and help them.

That gives what I describe as stickiness – it means that people stay. Our retention rate is four to five years. So, we’re not paying four years of agency fees, we’ve got security of income.

We’re quite keen on the principle of sustainable growth. Over the last few years, we’ve carried out ESG interventions and improved all our buildings’ EPC ratings. If a building has a working mechanical and electrical system, the intelligent decision is not to rip it all out halfway through its life. But when there is an opportunity to change something, we do, such as EVs and solar. We choose the right utility supplier, we’ve changed all the lighting, and we’re intelligently managing voltage. Sustainability is important to us.

Financial sustainability is important, too. When we were first set up, we spent a fortune on a telephone system that we didn’t need. However, we also spent money on lots of desks that we thought would need replacing five years later, but lasted 12 years instead.

However, we’re also evolving our spaces to reflect changes in people’s needs and fashions, as well as the way people work. For example, we’ve recently brought in better breakout space and some smaller desks that look a bit trendier. We’ve gathered deep knowledge, understanding, and experience for laying out our centres and optimising fit-outs.

We do all our own fit-outs, delivering quality for the right price, which is important because we’re working to a price point. All of those things are part of the playbook. From buying a building, or taking on somebody else’s space, appraising, evolving, fitting out, operating, and running a space – we do our own property management.

This means we can deliver quality right the way through the process, and that feeds into sustaining high retention rates.

4. What makes Mantle Space a ‘Great Place to Work’?

Guy: We’ve been nominated as a ‘Great Place to Work’ three years in a row. This year, we were also nominated as a great place to work for women, for welfare, and a great place to work in the construction and property sector. Our staff surveys show me that our people are proud, enthusiastic, and excited about where we are and what we do. It’s a cultural thing.

It starts with the determination to deliver excellent customer care. We’ve all got internal clients — our accounts team, centre manager, and property management team — we’re all providing a service.

I feel very strongly that everybody within the organisation should feel valued. Their voice should be heard. They should feel comfortable, confident, and safe in their role. That requires respect across the whole company.

A number of people within our organisation have been with us for a long time. They’ve developed and been promoted – I think that’s very valuable.

We’re transparent and communicate very clearly and effectively. If you ask one of our centre managers, I hope they’d have a clear idea of where we are and what we’re trying to achieve.

While I’m working at the front end to grow the business, and may not see them every week, I always record a video of all the things going on in the business for our summer event, and I make a speech. That event is always great fun.

I also hope everyone can see that I’m open and enthusiastic, and that rubs off. I’m pretty confident that everyone’s getting on well; I can tell by listening to our staff here at lunchtime in the breakout space who are laughing with each other. That’s important.

5. Looking ahead, what changes or innovations would you like to see in the flexible workspace industry?

Guy: We’ve been doing lots of interesting things at a purpose-built tech hub we’ve operated since 2020, called the Bradfield Centre on Cambridge Science Park, owned by Trinity College Cambridge.

It’s different from the rest of our centres because everybody is, by definition, tech. They have a desire to interact with each other and bounce serendipitous ideas. It’s got an auditorium, and every year, we organise the Trinity Bradfield Prize for Tech.

In the flex sector, there might be more specialisation, such as more sector-specific centres, like biotech, in the Knowledge Corridor (the region between Oxford and Cambridge). As Mantle expands its portfolio, we’re thinking about whether to specialise in certain circumstances. The flex space is a fascinating marketplace that’s evolving, and driven by people – you’ve got to understand people.

Understanding your client base is important. For instance, if you’ve got four or five different businesses doing completely different things, there isn’t so much of an imperative to interact. There is diversity within the flex world where different centres or hubs have different needs, and it’s good for the space to reflect the client base, their tone and aspirations.

I can see integration within the flex industry happening, as there’s been a lot of rapid growth, particularly in London. You can’t have that without some kind of consolidation.

Different people have tried various strategies. For example, some focus on coworking, while others provide cellularised offices. There is a geography that plays to that; for example, what you do in the regions differs from what you do in London. One size doesn’t fit all.

COVID encouraged people to look at different operational strategies. That will mean larger organisations taking up flex space, but also organisations operating within different locations, which plays into the need for individuals to have a great work-life balance. Our centres outside of London can help with that.

I expect more diversity within the occupier base, in terms of how they want to occupy space. There is an impact question too: flexible serviced offices are inherently much more sustainable than traditional offices. Why? Flexible serviced offices offer more efficiency in occupied buildings, with flex being potentially more sustainable on many fronts.

Right now, there is an opportunity for multi-occupancy buildings to address and support the ESG imperative. It doesn’t necessarily mean having a gym in the basement, but it does mean addressing individual and business needs. Flex spaces can drive that.

On the other hand, the financial imperative is that you’ve got a building you either own or you’re paying rent on, and you need to generate an income. For the flex market, the challenge is identifying the optimum configuration for that building to generate maximum income.

To do that, you’ve got to make the right mix of space opportunities to suit that building in that particular location. That’s the one-size-doesn’t-fit-all.

As a flex operator, you’ve got to understand the granularity of your marketplace and optimise the space. That’s the challenge moving ahead.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #18 of People Make Coworking interviews Guy Baker, CEO at Mantle Space.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Since opening its first space in 2018, Projects has built an impressive online presence – nearly 9,000 Instagram followers, and hundreds of likes, comments, saves, and shares on each post. The team also cultivates strong personal brands online, such as Managing Director Alex Young, who amplifies Projects’ story and its values even further. As a collective, the team has built an impressive marketing presence.

In this special edition of People Make Coworking, Alana shares all things marketing for coworking operators. What stands out most in our conversation is how authentic, people-first content can transform coworking marketing into something that truly connects. Read on to find out how.

1. Can you share a little about Projects and your role as Brand Manager?

Alana: Projects runs two coworking spaces in the heart of Brighton. We’re a certified B Corp workspace, on a mission to provide a home for better business. We operate workspaces where work isn’t just about fixed hours or static spaces, it’s about community, lifestyle, and, really importantly, flexibility.

In practice, our spaces are specifically designed to be incredibly beautiful, providing that ‘wow factor’ when you walk through the door. They’re also highly optimised and functional, with great WiFi, lots of phone booths, and amazing meeting rooms.

We create moments for connection, for our members and people who use our spaces, whether that’s in the coworking space, at a networking event, or a workshop.

We’re also creating moments where people can unwind, disconnect, and recharge. That might be through our yoga classes or work classes, or unwinding at one of our parties, where our community can have a bit of fun.

Lastly, we’re super passionate about creating flexibility for people. Every single day, the world of modern work is changing. As a workspace provider, we’re creating and adapting our environments to our members’ needs, not the other way around, to make their working life the best that it possibly can be.

My role as brand manager covers a scope of things: I’m responsible for brand strategy, marketing, and community engagement. Day to day, that could look like anything from creating posters and working on website changes, to working closely with our community and marketing lead, Ethan Phoenix Kentish, on all things socials and email marketing. I also drive our partnerships and event program.

2. Projects place its community at the heart of your marketing. What inspired you to do this, and how do you capture the vibe and culture?

Alana: Featuring people in our content is a no-brainer. Firstly, it’s the people in our spaces, our team, and our members who genuinely make it so special; they’re the ones activating it and bringing it to life. Capturing that for our social media and having that represent what it’s like to work at Projects makes complete sense.

From a strategic perspective, people connect with people. Showcasing our members working, thriving, and networking, whether that’s at an event or in one of our meeting rooms, authentically represents what’s happening within our spaces. That’s always been our top-performing content.

Within our spaces, our people help create our vibe and culture. They make our events successful, and they collaborate and create the magic. Within our walls, they work on endless amazing projects, which we like to highlight. Placing our community at the centre of our content captures that vibrancy, creativity, and life within our spaces.

For that same reason, we also choose to capture the wider Brighton community, such as local businesses, creatives, or independent brands, who may not be Projects members, but are part of the city’s wider fabric.

Our content highlights what happens within our spaces and what’s around them. This shows the energy within our spaces and the vibrancy of Brighton. For us, it’s all about celebrating the people in the community behind our space and Brighton.

3. Which social media channels work best for you and why?

Alana: Instagram is our core channel focus. We find that it’s perfect for showing the personality behind our space, and it works best for us in terms of brand awareness and reach.

The stats on some of our lifestyle pieces are wild! For example, one of our last posts received over 2000 likes and nearly 1000 saves – this really reflects the reach and brand awareness we’ve grown on Instagram.

Our second channel is, of course, LinkedIn. It’s where our work content does better and resonates more, whether that’s an announcement, professional insight, or blog post.

This year, we’ve also used LinkedIn specifically to repurpose team-generated content from Instagram. For example, if we post five beautiful pictures on Instagram, Ethan might repost them on LinkedIn with his own thoughts, perspective, and narrative. Repurposing that content to fit that specific platform has been really successful.

Our team is our brand and culture. Empowering our team is beneficial; it authentically shows who we are and the people behind the brand. For instance, Ethan is really passionate about men’s mental health and sustainability, so we empower him to focus on those topics and create narratives around them.

4. How do you embrace AI in your marketing?

Alana: Across the board, we’re trying to use AI to empower people to function better day to day. Things like improving processes and streamlining, especially within marketing, but not using AI to take ideas or that originality away.

For me, AI can streamline my processes so I have more time for creative thinking, brainstorming with Ethan, speeding up my emails, or responding to something faster. It’s freeing up time so originality can still happen.

We need to be mindful about how we’re using AI, especially for creativity. AI can be addictive; in that sense, it can be a slippery slope.

One of the most beautiful parts of my role is the people I work alongside. We support creative people who create amazing content for our brand. We certainly won’t be using any AI-generated images or video – I’d never want to take away that people element.

5. Are there any lessons or observations you’ve learned along the way that might inspire other coworking operators?

Alana: One massive lesson for us this year has been just how effective lifestyle content can be for our reach. Showing that broader culture around your space, whether it’s local businesses, restaurants, or news, can engage people. It’s a great way to localise your content.

Everything you do has to tie back to your brand; otherwise, it can feel disconnected. For example, when we feature a new Brighton restaurant, it feeds back into that community pillar of spotlighting local businesses, but also shows off our central location and the lifestyle benefits of working at Projects.

To broaden your reach, you have to be strategic about it, and not just post random, disconnected content. At Projects, we’re full of creators, foodies, and people who enjoy life outside of work. Leaning into that is always going to resonate. So, when we feature restaurants, we link that back to our brand. It’s a really good way for us to know what’s going on in the city.

We also feature local business owners in our Instagram roundups. I reach out to them about a partnership or offering a discount to our members. It’s a nice way for us to genuinely connect with other businesses within the city. And then when our members step outside our spaces, and go out with their friends or on weekends, they may benefit from that 10% discount for a local coffee shop or a restaurant.

Ethan and I work from the spaces every single day to feed that authenticity, as we’re able to capture those moments in the spaces. Having a localised presence is really beneficial as we can witness moments in the spaces that represent us, and capture them in our content. That’s invaluable.

It also means we’re not fabricating it. You can try to recreate the moment, but in our case, it’s genuine. Especially nowadays, where people see through the inauthenticity, it means that brands have to be more creative and authentic online. This can only be a good thing moving forward.

People Make Coworking: Special Edition

This special edition (#17) of People Make Coworking features Alana Harris, Brand Manager at Projects coworking spaces in Brighton. People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Read more coworking stories

Creating Content That Connects at GCUC UK

To dig deeper into creating content that connects, join me tomorrow at GCUC UK – I’m facilitating a workshop at 2pm that does exactly that. I’d love to see you there.

In the meantime, check out this additional resource to help support your marketing.

What began with just one member has since grown into two locations, with Melissa opening a second site in January dedicated to longer-term offices and meeting rooms just a few steps away from the original space. Both coworking spaces are housed in historic buildings infused with a bold, creative touch and brought to life by a vibrant community of local professionals – plus Rey, Melissa’s much-loved dog, and Buick’s official mascot.

In this interview, Melissa reflects on her coworking journey, the inspiration behind Buick Mackane’s distinctive branding (any guesses where the name comes from?), and what Melissa believes is the best part about coworking.

1. What led you to found Buick Mackane, and what has that journey been like?

Melissa: In many ways, it feels like I’ve been here forever, but I only founded Buick Mackane four and a half years ago.

At the time, I was working as a freelancer to provide market insight for food manufacturers and interrogate supermarket data recommendations. I don’t have any background in coworking other than being a user of coworking spaces before founding my own. But despite trying a few different places for a number of months or years, I couldn’t find anywhere in Newbury that I really wanted to spend my time in.

I saved some money to do something with it, and thought I’d give it a go myself. That was it, really. I found a space and created a community of people who were ready to start using it. On the first day, there was only me and one other lady – that was the beginning of Buick.

Earlier this year, I opened the second space, which is primarily designed around long-term private offices (we only have one in the original location at West Mills). We found people were leaving because their company was growing and wanted their own dedicated space, but I couldn’t offer that. So, I took on the lease on the second building in January.

Now, we have 11 different-sized offices for long-term rental, along with a couple of meeting spaces.

Ironically, the ‘new’ space is older than the first – a Tudor building around 500 years old with beams that come from dismantled old ships. Our original coworking space is about 150 years old.

Having two spaces is relatively new, exciting, and challenging. Luckily, they’re located only a few minutes walk apart, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to manage it. Most days, I’ll go between the two spaces with Rey, the dog. She’s a big part of Buick. She’s here every day and is one of the reasons why people love coming here.

2. From the name itself to the vibrant murals in the coworking space, your branding is bold and distinctive. What was the inspiration behind Buick Mackane’s creative identity?

Melissa: Lots of people assume that I did something creative for work. There’s always been something creative in me, and founding the coworking space has allowed me to manifest that.

At Buick Mackane, I’ve created a space that I want to work in – a bright, colorful, energetic, dynamic space, quite different from where most of us live. Whether that was right or wrong, I don’t know. It felt bright and bold.

The fishman mural, which I now use across my branding, was created by a fantastic artist and book illustrator who lives in Scotland. I gave her a very loose brief around where the name came from, and she came up with this mural, which inspired much of the rest of the building.

Buick Mackane is not a very well-known T Rex song; however, I really struggled with coming up with a name for a new business that’s unique and catchy. Obviously, most coworking spaces are based around work and studying, but I wanted Buick to be something different, fun, and not necessarily about work, as it extends beyond a nine-to-five workplace.

Buick Mackane fitted in with me the way I am, and how I’d like the space to be perceived and used.

3. Working alone can be especially isolating for freelancers. Why do you think it’s important they have a dedicated space like Buick Mackane, and how do you support them?

Melissa: From my experience of working as a freelancer, I could be working from home all day, not having spoken to anybody other than the dog, which is unfulfilling.

What’s really important about coworking is that you have a chance to make connections with people, however small they are, whether that’s just saying ‘hello’ to the same person on your walk to work, or coming in and seeing somebody you know at the desk. Those small interactions with people really make a difference to how you feel on that day – I think coworking makes us all feel a bit better.

So, coming to a place like this, or even just getting out of the house, does make a big difference to how you feel and your productivity. When you go home at night, you feel great because you’ve been somewhere else all day, whereas if you’re sitting at home working, there are no boundaries as you’re surrounded by your work, or your laptop is next to you, and you can’t switch off.

Newbury is quite a small, rural community made up of people of different ages and backgrounds. At Buick Mackane, we have freelancers, but certainly not all freelancers, by any stretch – some people are employed, whose employers now pay for them to use the space. That seems to be a legacy of COVID.

Nowadays, as many local businesses don’t have their own dedicated space or don’t have enough space to host meetings, they come to us. Some people have started their own businesses, but don’t want to work at home alone. For example, we’ve got a husband and wife here who work together as architects, but they don’t want to be sitting at home together.

4. Buick Mackane is rooted in Newbury. How do you collaborate with and support local businesses?

Melissa: Newbury is a small place, so everybody knows everybody here.

We have craft-based businesses coming in to host evening workshops, and we give the space to a couple of local charities, such as a support group for families with very sick children and their siblings, who meet here once a month. Another group provides support for women in coercive relationships, so they come into this lounge space for a chat together. Our local Pride organisation comes to Buick for monthly meetings.

Our lounge space is very popular, because it’s quite casual. It’s not like an office space, more like a home from home, which appeals to different groups. It works really well for the sibling support group, who wouldn’t fit in another space.

Occasionally, people come in who aren’t based in Newbury, as the town is quite central between places like Bath and London. But primarily, it’s local businesses and people using our space.

5. How does Buick Mackane put “everything people need” right on their doorstep, in terms of services and amenities?

Melissa: What we’re trying to do here is provide everything on your doorstep. It’s things like spreading the word that we have an in-house accountant. Someone else here has just started working with the accountant and asked another member for legal assistance, as we’ve also got a paralegal in the building.

Coworking is about making everybody aware of all the skill sets within the building, and the benefits of having a professional to talk with face-to-face about whatever it is – your accounting, legal issues, or speaking with an architect.

For instance, I mentioned to some of our members that my other half wanted a guitar for his birthday, and one of them recommended a great guitar shop in Farnham. It was this amazing shop! Another member recommended that we should try a fantastic restaurant there, too. So, within the space of a couple of minutes, I’d got a great guitar shop recommendation and somewhere to go for dinner afterwards.

I keep saying it, but Newbury is a small place. In most small towns, you’re surprised at the skill set in the area. The best thing about this place is that it brings people together, and local people work with each other, rather than working online or with somebody that you’ll never meet.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #16 of People Make Coworking interviews Melissa Richards, founder of Buick Mackane, a shared flexible workspace in Newbury, Berkshire.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

As Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Hub, Australia’s leading flexible workspace operator, John’s focus is on scaling nationwide as a hospitality-first model that blends premium design, thoughtful amenities, hospitality-led service, and a strong sense of community and brand. While the buildings and services are important, John is clear on what makes Hub thrive: their people.

In this interview, John shares how the Hub brand has scaled nationally without losing the essence of hospitality and community, how Hub implements important environmental and social impact initiatives, and what’s next as the workplace continues to evolve.

1. What’s your journey in the coworking industry been like, and what brought you to Hub Australia?

John: My tuning into the coworking industry was progressive. I started my career in traditional commercial real estate, spending my early years with CBRE in the UK and Europe, before moving to Australia to join DTZ in 2003.

I sparked an interest in the coworking industry around 2009-2010, and started paying attention to what was happening in the US. At that time, the Australian coworking industry was very small, but the market was shifting and the use of office space changing. Coworking was becoming a growing trend, and I sensed that there was much more to it than the simple sharing of space.

This interest led me to write a few papers about coworking targeted at a real estate audience, my clients, and colleagues at the time. Through that work, I got to know some of the Australian coworking operators who were just getting going, along with more traditional serviced office operators. One of those coworking operators was Brad Krauskopf, the founder of Hub. We began collaborating on a few papers and conferences together, including GCUC.

Fast forward to 2016, I was Head of Office Agency at Knight Frank, and leased a whole building in Sydney to Brad for Hub Hyde Park. Around that same time, Brad had secured private equity investment for Hub and was building an executive team to help with its growth. This created an opportunity with equity in what I believed was the best operator in Australia at the time. I would, with bias, say the very same thing today, of course!

Hub was a great combination of a good company, with a clear growth trajectory and capital behind it, in a sector that I'd really grown passionate about. When the excitement didn’t subside, I made the leap from agency into coworking in early 2018 when I joined Hub.

2. How has Hub Australia grown into a leader in workspace experiences, and what key principles guide your team in creating personalised, community-focussed spaces?

John: Hub’s journey began in 2011 in a very modest 200 square metre space, in a quirky Melbourne building called Donkey Wheel House. Around this time, a new wave of freelancers emerged around the globe, stemming from the 2008 global financial crisis. Whilst this was before my time at Hub, I understood that it was lovely and the people were great, but it was pretty tough to make profit. From a financial perspective, it unfortunately didn't work.

The real turning point came when Brad proved that a hospitality-led service model, with a good range of amenities, a superior member experience, and placing food and beverage offering at the centre of that hospitality experience, actually worked, and was scalable for Hub.

Throughout 2016, Hub Southern Cross in Melbourne, a 4,000 square metre space, was designed and built, opening in January 2017. Ironically, it’s directly opposite Donkey Wheel House. At the time, Hub Southern Cross was the largest coworking space in Australia, and certainly the first to have F&B central to the hospitality offering. That was a bit of an industry game-changer.

WeWork only arrived in Australia in late 2016, but its model woke up a few investors to the opportunities in the Australian coworking sector. That allowed Hub to raise capital and roll out more of the larger format, amenity-rich, and hospitality-centric spaces, the start of Hub’s growth trajectory.

We're a hospitality business, first and foremost. The desks are what people think they're buying from us, but that's just a commodity. The real value of what we do is the experience we provide.

We offer a broad range of amenities, great service, flexibility, and we make sure that all of our customers, their guests, our landlord, partners, in fact, anyone that steps foot across the threshold of a Hub space, have a great day at work. That’s what really underpins everything that we do.

And no surprise, what brings that to life in all of our spaces is our people.

3. How do you prioritise environmental and social impact in Hub’s daily operations?

John: For many years, impact has been an important part of our brand proposition. We genuinely believe that businesses can and should be a force for good, beyond just making a profit.

We were one of the first businesses in Australia across all sectors, and definitely the first coworking operator, to become a B Corp. That provides a really good framework for operating an impact-driven business, and holds you to high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. It's intentionally quite challenging, but that's something we've maintained year on year since 2013.

This resonates with our customers because it provides them with a tool for attracting talent to their businesses in the knowledge that they're in a space with values beyond just making a profit. It’s equally important for attracting employees to our own team.

Every one of our locations has been carbon neutral since 2020. We manage it through the Australian Government's Climate Active Programme. This is again valuable for our customers and employees.

There are a few other layers that sit around that. From a social enterprise perspective, we have a Flexi Impact Program, where we give away 1% of our desks every year to not-for-profit and social enterprises. They can come into our space, enjoy the benefits of the community free of charge, and grow their enterprise or not-for-profit. We're always over-subscribed for that, which is really nice.

We've also got a Reconciliation Action Plan, endorsed by Reconciliation Australia. That's our pledge to build meaningful relationships with indigenous-led businesses and communities, supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

4. As Hub expands to new locations, how do you ensure each site reflects the mission and core brand values while adapting to local needs?

John: We've got 16 locations right now, and are growing steadily. We’ve recently launched our first Perth location, we have a second location in Adelaide opening shortly, we will open a second site in Perth in February, and we've just signed a management agreement for a second site in Canberra.

We aim to balance the scale of a national network while retaining local identity and the warmth of local clubhouses. It means that people in their own community and in their own space feel like part of that community, in that space, but also have access to the full national network.

We’ve taken a place-based approach, so we intentionally don't adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. We invest in understanding the character of the building, the likely customer demographic, the location, and the city it’s situated in.

For instance, Hub Collins Street (Melbourne) is in a beautiful old heritage building. Hub Hyde Park (Sydney) is an old department store with character. Meanwhile, it’s a different climate at Hub Anzac Square (Brisbane, Queensland), where we have a heavily popular rooftop. Parliament Station (Melbourne) is designed in the Le Corbusier style. In contrast, Hub Elizabeth Quay in Perth is a brand new office development.

Different customers like different things. In Sydney, Customs House is right on Circular Quay — a state heritage building with heaps of character. We've designed it with a darker edge. But, just around the corner, is Brookfield Place – a modern, premium-grade glass tower. Those two customer bases aren’t going to like the other building. So, customer demographic really plays into each of our locations.

From a design perspective, they've all got their own unique character. But if you walk into one of our spaces, it should feel like a Hub. Not just because there's a sign on the front desk, but because of the consistency coming through the hospitality and service, along with the functional backbone of the space. Our customers can go from site to site and intuitively know how the space works and how to find their way around.

We're growing at such a pace that we can afford to spend the time to engage the right designer for the right asset, and the right community for that space. So, they've all got their own unique flavour and spin on what is essentially Hub, but they're all in different locations, in different buildings with different communities in them. So that's been really important to us.

We've pivoted now in how we approach partnerships with landlords. When you're doing a management agreement, the landlord has a greater say in various things around how you run the business and how you design the space. Those partnerships are fantastic for us, providing us with a different spin on how we interpret some of the brand aspects.

For example, we're about to open our second site in Perth in partnership with Brookfield Properties, calling it ‘One Two Five By Hub.’ It’s a sub-brand that allows us to be a little bit more creative on the design side and work with what Brookfield desires for that particular asset and their tenant base.

5. Are you seeing any new types of amenities that Hub customers are asking for?

John: You've got to be careful when you put great weight on what people ask for, because you do get some weird and wonderful requests. You've got to consider what’s a gimmick and what has genuine meaning for customers.

Some of our amenities are a baseline offering, like gymnasiums - or what we call ‘move rooms’ – along with relaxation and wellness spaces, parents' spaces, recording rooms, and a range of lounge and meeting spaces. But we're also experimenting with listening rooms that are linked to wellness — a place you can go to switch off, relax, and listen to music with record players, vinyl, and an immersive theme. In some of our spaces, we've got our food and beverage offerings, cafes, and bars.

Looking further afield at some of our competitors, we’ve seen things like golf simulators and games rooms, but they don't fit all spaces. When I go overseas, I'm always intrigued to see what other operators are doing. I'm heading to Chicago for GWA next month, and I'll be getting around as many spaces as I can to see what's happening. London is where I’ve been most impressed – the market is really mature, and the intense competition drives creativity.

I love the design of some of the wellness spaces and shared spaces. For example, open auditoriums where you don't have space to enclose them, and then dealing with privacy through technology, microphones, and noise-cancelling headphones. We tinkered with a silent disco room a few years ago, but that didn’t last very long!

Because every square metre is so valuable, it either has to generate revenue or be an amenity for the customer. If it's not doing either of those things, then that's a problem.

We’re always keen to experiment with what’s next. For us, it’s doubling down on getting the hospitality, F&B, and business lounges right first, before focussing on the amenities around that. We’re keeping an eye on the broader expectations of the workforce, not just in flexible work, but also what we’re seeing in some of the amazing workspaces that corporates are delivering for themselves in leased spaces. We can definitely lean into that.

6. What are you most looking forward to about the future of coworking and flexible workspaces?

John: The evolution of the office sector is fascinating. Changes in work practices are well documented (there's still a binary argument around that), but it’s forcing a change in how office space is used and what landlords need to provide to attract quality tenants. Obviously, that's where flexible workspace can really add value.

The office used to be a sort of production line for tasks; now, businesses see the office as a strategic tool. For some of those businesses, that still means a traditional lease on a long term, but they're probably designing and using their spaces in a very different way. For others, it means pivoting into the flexible workspace sector, or it’s an element of both – some traditional office space for headquarters while utilising flex space for projects and branch spaces.

I find that shift and evolution in workplace practices fascinating. The outflows are only positive for the flexible workspace sector. Alongside that is the flight to experience, impacting landlords, who can't just provide white box office space anymore.

There's also the amenity play, the service, the workspace hospitality. What does that mean for buildings? Coworking operators are really well placed to step outside of the usual bounds of flexible workspace and into that whole building amenity and service offering.

Operators are developing strength in the brand, consistency in the brand offering, and what that stands for to them and their customers. We’ve seen that already, but I can only see that really firming up.

We look at the flex space industry and the coworking sector, like we do with hotels, and you'll know a hotel that you would love to go on holiday tomorrow if you had the money, and you know a hotel where you’ll stay if you're on a business trip. They're probably two different things, for a reason, because your needs differ, and those hotel chain brands offer different things. Likewise, brand in the flex space sector will become paramount - businesses will be drawn to workspace brands that align with theirs.

But on top of all of that, coworking is in a really great spot at the moment. It was tough coming out of Covid, but we're on the other side of it now. Demand shifts have changed the very nature of work and how workspaces are used, and now we're seeing opportunities growing out of that.

All of this, absolutely everything, is really positive for the sector, so we’ve got a lot to be upbeat about.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking interviews coworking founders who share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Edition #15 of People Make Coworking interviews John Preece, Chief Operations Officer at Hub Australia, the country’s leading flexible workspace operator.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Read more coworking stories

Sarah and Phil’s commitment to keeping things local is woven into everything they do, and their dedication to nurturing a creative community speaks for itself — at least half of their members have been with them for over five years.

In this conversation, Sarah and Phil reveal how ongoing, human-centered improvements propel Buro’s growth, why circularity is a foundational principle shaping everything at Buro, and how small coworking operators can embrace simplicity, authenticity, and hyper-local connections in their spaces.

1. What's the journey been like in establishing a neighbourhood coworking space in London?

Sarah: Ours is a typical story where the developers had committed to a certain amount of social housing, and were planning to transform a few units into private residential. The units were previously artist studios where Phil had been shooting as a photographer. As he studied at Goldsmiths in Brockley, Phil knew the area really well and could see the neighbourhood was changing at that time.

We were looking for additional income streams, so the idea of building a coworking space was serendipitous, as it gave us a place to work. Before our space came up, we’d both been in coworking spaces — we always liked its principles.

I saw other coworking operators provide communal meeting spaces. When we first opened Buro, we invested in a studio and communal space for our community to bring their clients here. But we quickly realised they weren’t bringing their clients to Brockley, so we reconfigured the space.

I look at what other coworking operators are doing, and think they must put in a lot of work in to run their spaces. We’re keeping it simple: one flat price, no upselling, no extras – and that's worked for us, although it might not work in other spaces.

It's got to be the right space in the right neighborhood. It’s been seven years now. We started off with great people, who have stayed with us as we’ve grown.

Phil: We’re lucky, because the amount of space we took on doesn't exist anymore, and anyone trying to do it now would struggle. The authorities are building more housing, but smaller industrial sites are being taken over. I’d like to see councils making space on every ground floor of residential flats for small businesses.

You also need to build a space that can adapt, because there could be another pandemic, or heat waves, or a change in the clients you bring in. That’s what we’ve focussed on at Buro.

2. I love your approach to sustainability in workspace design — can you share more about your circularity focus?

Phil: Buro was a shell when we started. To fit it out, we went to reclamation yards and adapted the space. For example, we reused all the panels from the artist studios to make the dividing walls. For the walls, we used old floorboards and scaffold boards, and even reclaimed a 70s Puffin bookcase for our library. There’s a ‘chic’ look to these pieces.

We know many ex-artists, so we brought them in to help fit the space out. We never pack people in – we had massive desks, and were generous with the space, as I know how photographers and animators like using two screens. Those big desks really served us well in COVID.

Sarah: The circularity focus has always been there, and sustainability aligns with our values. I've looked at our whole procurement – we’ve switched to more ethical tea, coffee, and milk brands. We'll always try to buy local or from B-Corp companies for things like our washing and cleaning materials.

Reusing things is the right thing to do, isn't it? Phil has brought creativity to the space – his pictures are hanging on the walls. We’ve also brought in plants and other theatrical touches.

We can be quite self-indulgent with Buro, but we try different things, and the reaction is lovely when people come into the space. After all, we're coworkers too, and we've created a space that we'd like to work in.

We're always trying to make the place nicer, rather than perfect. For instance, if our artists have art books, we'll build them shelves. We’ve got a soundproof booth for video conference calls, which we put a second screen in. We make constant improvements. In the hospitality business, it doesn't have to be one size fits all. We know everybody pretty well, and most of our community has been with us for a really long time — it's personal and boutique.

There’s no air conditioning or built-in heating in the space. Although we resisted for a few years, we realised that you can’t work in those conditions. A couple of times a year, we rented an AC unit and used old-fashioned heaters. But our running costs were through the roof.

We've always been self-funded. Recently, Lewisham council gave us a small green grant for a new heating and AC system. Although it’s a five-figure investment, it’ll bring down our monthly costs. In seven years, we’ve never closed, but we’ve just shut for a week to install it.

It wasn’t until I started working with the council, which looks at circular models, that I realised the extent to which coworking is one of the most circular business models.

3. How do you engage with your local community?

Phil: We’ve always worked with the local brewery when we host parties. Mont58 Coffee in Brockley delivers all our coffee; they started a coffee grinding business from their garden around the same time as we launched (we were introduced by a neighbour). On our street, there's a bakery, where we encourage our coworkers to buy their bread.

Sarah: We've always tried to work with local suppliers, like for our annual Christmas party, I'll find catering from a ‘mom and pop’ food trader. We've opened up low-rent desks to community and arts spaces. If we can, we’ll always offer a concession if people can’t afford the rate card.

A couple of years ago, Lewisham launched an amazing green audit programme. We scored quite well on the fact that most of our coworkers are local and cycle, walk in, or use public transport.

We’re a commercial entity and not on the high street. People don't necessarily know we're here because we’re a B2B space. However, supporting local charities, school fetes, and arts organisations has been good for business – it’s how we find our clients, like people whose kids go to one of the local schools.

Phil: Our neighbourhood coworker is typically someone in their mid-thirties with two young kids. They’ve got to drop off and pick up, so they need a place where they can work intensely for about 6.5 hours before running out the door to get to school in 5 minutes (without hopping on a hot bus). They might come back to the space after putting the kids to bed, or come in on Saturdays. Local coworking isn’t about table tennis or those “fun” things.

Our community makes connections in our space. After chatting in the kitchen, one of our members hired an architect (another member) to get his extension done. A few of them also get together outside of work to socialise.

Sarah: These kinds of things happen organically, and people support each other. For example, one of our members spoke at the local Telegraph Hill Festival, and some of our coworkers went to support him.

We see other coworking spaces hosting weekly events, and we’ve thought about what we offer beyond desks. We host a Christmas party where our coworkers can bring their partners, and we’ll have a few beers together in the summer. But we’re not doing forced fun. Ultimately, the costs of these things get passed on to our coworkers, even if an event appears to be free. People don’t always want that.

4. How have your professional backgrounds shaped your community?

Phil: I used to work in magazines where we’d do 2-3 shoots a week and then travel back to a lab. Photography felt like a job that always got me out of the house. But when the industry changed, you no longer needed to go out to develop films. I ended up being out on shoots less often, around every 2-3 weeks, and spent the rest of the time working at home. But when I work from home, I’ll find just about anything to do except the thing that I need to do! Now, when I make the journey into Buro, I’ll do 8 hours of solid work.

I knew that running a coworking space couldn’t be a vanity project when we started. I wanted it to be a bit more diverse and a place where I could work. I don’t know if anyone really notices, but I like to put different photos up on the walls, like an exhibition. My philosophy is that I want to walk into a space that I would like, and everyone’s first impression is: “This is a really interesting space.”

Sarah: We spend very little on marketing, but Phil creates great images, and our children are good with social media. We’re about to launch on TikTok because of one of the teenagers!

I've been in the events industry for 30 years, starting with a company in the US, and I now work with brands delivering large-scale events, such as the big UK festivals. The events industry thrives on doing the right thing locally, environmentally, and sustainably. My background is all about understanding what audiences want.

Coworking is a hospitality business – where we make people feel comfortable, provide delicious coffee, and that connection piece.

People want to work with interesting, creative people. Brockley is changing, but we’re doing as much as we can to maintain our creative community. Most of them are freelancers, are gender diverse, and from a mix of backgrounds.

Phil: As we’re attracting more FinTech and UX people, we’re constantly investing in how the IT and the electrics work, and thinking about how the space could work a bit better.

The cost of living and rising house prices in London are unfortunately pricing out its creatives. People sell their London homes and move out to places like Hastings and Margate, thinking they can work from the garden, but they still need those connections.

5. It sounds like you really put your community’s needs first. How do you go about this?

Sarah: When the government called for businesses to shut down and employees to work from home during lockdown, coworking was on a limb. We decided to close and freeze everyone’s payments – it felt like the right thing to do. One member said he just couldn’t work from home, so we wrote a COVID policy for him to come in. Within two months, everyone else in our community begged us to come into the workspace. They lived in small flats or had children. Working from home isn’t all it's cracked up to be!

To accommodate, we brought in measures, such as separating the toilets, but we weren’t policing them. That’s the vibe in our space – we have a mix of cool, interesting people who are very respectful of each other. Coworking spaces attract a certain sort of person.

Phil: Our prices are affordable, and we’ve always been understanding of people’s financial situations. Although we have a policy of no part-timers, we’ll work around it if someone has been with us long enough.

Sarah: Recently, we had someone come back from maternity leave who is with us part-time.

We have a great bunch of welcoming and diverse people. You can put in all the nice things like cool desks and plants, but ultimately, it’s the people who make a coworking space interesting, and that’s what makes them stay.

We’ve almost always been full, and at least half of our community has been with us for over 5 years. People either leave for financial reasons or they move from the area. Our very first coworker is now one of the deputy editors at the FT – I was so proud when I read one of her articles in the paper this weekend.

Phil: One of our claims to fame is that the second series of the BBC TV show ‘Motherland’ was written in our space.

Sarah: We follow our coworkers on social media, and we see their success. We’ve become incubators for a number of creatives who have gone on to set up their own studios. It’s great to feel like we’ve helped them work out their business models and progress their careers [at this point has something in her eye].

About People Make Coworking

The interview series where coworking founders share their journeys of building communities and workspaces. People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement.

Edition #14 of People Make Coworking interviewed Sarah Greene and Phil Fisk, co-founders at Buro, Brockley’s only dedicated coworking space in London.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Read more coworking stories

Over the years, Darren has managed a portfolio of offices, retail spaces, and a hotel, gaining hands-on experience in hospitality. By 2018, he was ready for a new challenge.

As the coworking movement began to gain traction globally, Darren saw an opportunity to fuse interests in technology, design, and service into a more human-centric office model. This led to the founding of Roamwork, located in Cape Town’s up-and-coming East City Precinct.

What started as a single floor in a refurbished building has since grown into a 4,500-square-metre hub, delivering high-quality private offices and tailored services. In this interview, Darren shares the lessons learned as Roamwork scaled and how his team perfected the art of hospitality.

1. What inspired the founding of Roamwork, and how has the space evolved since opening?

Darren: Providing services and hospitality to people getting on with their businesses was something I wanted to do while working in commercial property back in the early 2000s. However, it required onsite management, and at that stage, we couldn’t justify the resources.

In 2018, I was looking for something new. The property management company I worked with bought and redeveloped this building on Harrington Street, gutting the floors and creating five stories of offices and parking while retaining the envelope of the building.

We took a lease for a 2,200-square-metre space on the second floor and created a flexible workspace, predominantly private offices. We installed SALTO Systems and looked at our tech right from the start.

Back then, shared workspaces weren't a big thing in South Africa, although WeWork was the big driver in marketing the coworking model internationally.

People think coworking is just about hot desks and a big open space — we have to educate them that it’s more than that. You can have a private office with all the services covered: furniture, meeting rooms, WiFi, cleaning, tea and coffee. That's always been our challenge.

We opened in December 2018, originally, under a management agreement with another coworking brand. When COVID hit, the space wasn’t financially sustainable under that model. After taking over in August 2020 and rebranding as Roamwork, we took a hands-on approach and gradually filled the space. By 2022, demand had grown so much that we were turning people away. By that point, people understood the benefits of taking smaller offices over working from home.

In 2023, the landlord assigned the fourth floor to us. After changing the layout and adding a 100-square-metre event space, we now manage 4,500 square meters in this building. We employed an event manager to work with our community manager. In a coworking space, you need an event space for your members. It’s also used by people outside. The event space is a fantastic addition to our offering, but we have lots more opportunities to grow and host additional events.

2. The workspace design at Roamwork is striking and thoughtfully curated. What was the vision behind it, and how did you bring that to life?

Darren: The building lent itself to an industrial feel - steel and concrete, with exposed services and soffits. The shopfronts were specifically designed to create a slim steel finish, utilising aluminium shopfronts.

However, the industrial look brought a few downsides. Acoustics, for instance, is a massive bugbear of mine. I can hear a slight echo, and I want to fix it. But we work on that sort of thing as we go along, like putting carpets into the fourth-floor offices.

When we started, we densified the space with offices. But, it’s a deep building, and we initially battled to rent out the central core offices, which lack natural light. These were only filled once all the window offices were occupied. When we designed the fourth floor, we left the central core as open-plan to provide more hot desking and breakout space. The challenge now is filling this space for profitability.

Earlier this year, the space was useful in accommodating a national client on short notice. They required workspace for 100 employees for a few months in between office moves. It worked out so well, they didn’t want to leave when their new offices were ready!

Throughout our space, we have hot-desk seating that grows and contracts depending on the time of year. Besides our monthly hot desk plans, we offer Bulk Day Passes of 5, 10, 15, and 20-day passes, valid for three months, and can be shared with friends and partners. In the spring and summer months, many digital nomads travel to Cape Town. These offerings are ideal for their needs, giving them the flexibility to work and travel in the city.

Our benchmark for offices is 80% occupancy. We have the full range from one-seaters right up to a 40-seater. We’ve spread out hot desks and dedicated desks, but find that most people migrate to an office eventually.

The landlord wanted to reactivate the building lobby, so it was given to us. The lobby has a Bootlegger coffee shop — a popular local brand operating two satellite cafes on each floor, providing coffee and food for our members and visitors. Besides the hot desking space in the lobby, we also added two meeting rooms to form part of our offering.

We’re located on the fringe of the City Bowl (the suburban area where people live), so we’re appealing to people who want to use meeting rooms or get out of the house for work. There are a few things we're working on here.

3. What benefits does integrating the in-house art gallery and other services bring to your community?

Darren: We provide offices, but we like to ask: “What else do people want?” For example, we built a studio with an infinity curve in our workspace in collaboration with one of our members who runs a creative agency. We hoped it would offer something different and useful for our members, expanding our reach to external users.

It was a fantastic idea, but it didn’t work for several reasons – it was too expensive for people to shoot there, and there were acoustic challenges. This year, we turned it into an office for one of our members whose business has grown. This turned out to be a better use of the space.

We also built one of our fourth-floor rooms as a podcast studio initially, providing acoustic treatment within. We intended to offer the full service: studio, equipment, production, but in the end, we felt that most people would bring their own. The room is ultimately multipurpose and occasionally used as a podcast studio, but it’s mostly used as a meeting room.

The lesson is: investing and providing unique and specialised services doesn’t always work out. The best option is sticking to our core of ‘offering space’ and aligned services.

The art at Roamwork is more than just a backdrop – it’s a defining feature of the space. Some pieces form part of a private collection, while others have been curated through Art Gazette, an initiative connecting contemporary artists with global workspaces. The result is a bold and eclectic mix, with a strong leaning toward abstract works. Visitors often pause, taking it in. The art is one of those unexpected elements that make the space feel alive and deeply considered.

During my attendance at Coworking Europe 2023 in Porto, I toured a workspace with great furniture, but I immediately noticed these white walls, and felt that something was missing. We’re fortunate to have our art collection; it makes a huge difference to people’s environments.

4. Community is clearly at the heart of Roamwork. How do you support your members and help them build meaningful connections?

Darren: I sometimes feel that we don’t hold enough community events, but members seem to connect naturally within the workspace, while getting a coffee at the cafe, or preparing lunch in the canteen. They work in a broad spectrum of businesses and creative talent — I believe this diversity is the catalyst for people to feel comfortable connecting with each other.

Saying that, our broad community has been key to our success. I don’t believe in having a specialised offering. We have people in finance, engineers, interior designers, architects, and digital media professionals.

I’m driven by the ability to connect people. Social media is brand building, but Google brings the leads in, and word of mouth. People who visit for a meeting are intrigued by the environment, and they always ask for a tour. At some point, these interactions convert visitors into members.

As coworking professionals, it’s important to know more about your members’ expertise and their businesses. This helps connect people within the space, especially new members.

We intentionally gave our IT support contractor an office so they can be ‘on call’ to deal with any IT issues. By being here, they’ve also managed to secure new clients, helping their business grow.

Likewise, a friend of mine with a successful online electrical supply company moved to Cape Town from Durban, taking up a hot desk and eventually an office. In no time, he was connecting with other members, like interior designers and architects, and built a presence in Cape Town. This is a difficult place to break into, but he was very open to meeting people and connecting within the space. He’s now expanded his team of electricians and opened a retail outlet shop in the city.

It’s one of several stories where success has led to the loss of members. But it's extremely satisfying to know that Roamwork played a role in their success - others will follow!

Many international companies are opening offices in Cape Town and utilising local talent. For instance, a US company in the legal field joined us last year with a 25-seater office. They’re growing and have just moved to a 40-seater office. They mostly work on USA time zones (some of them work until midnight), but we’re open 24 hours. They could find their own office, but they don’t want that; they enjoy our services and support.

A UK media company now occupies the 25-seater office that the lawyers moved from. We’re also getting another office ready for a UK marketing company. We anticipate them growing, so my concern is that we run out of space for those teams, but we’ll look at the options when the time comes.

We pride ourselves on creating flexible options for clients; a finance company just joined us on a mixed membership package – an 8-seater office with dedicated desking in the open-plan area. They also purchase Day Pass Packages for their hybrid employees, which not only offers flexibility, but also allows them to keep their costs down.

5. Roamwork is located in one of Cape Town’s most vibrant neighbourhoods. What role does Roamwork play in the area's continued growth?

Darren: Roamwork is located in the East City Precinct, on the fringe of Cape Town’s CBD, a hub where people have been returning to since the early 2010s. There are art galleries and restaurants — this neighbourhood has grown, and it’s become quite a buzz. In the last year, some short-stay aparthotels have been built here, with plans for new restaurant openings and other retail within the node.

We’re redoing our original second-floor reception area, which is exciting. It’s always been our main barista cafe where the team welcomes members and guests to the space. We plan to create a new coffee bar with a member's soft seating lounge. The coffee shop is a meeting point where people connect while waiting for their coffee — it’s surrounded by general activity at the front desk.

Our brilliant team is vested in our members' and guests’ well-being. I heard about Will Guidara, and the one story that stuck with me was about the New York hot dogs. When a guest broke her shoe’s heel, I asked my hostess to buy some glue from the shop around the corner. It was a small gesture that didn’t cost much, but our guest will remember it for a long time.

Our small team has mostly been with us from the start. They all know what is expected of them and continuously go the extra mile so that members and visitors feel at home.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking is an interview series where coworking founders share their journeys of building communities and workspaces.

Read more coworking stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Since its opening last year, HurstWorks has evolved far beyond its origins as a coworking space, anchoring a growing ecosystem of wellness spaces, meeting lounges, and community-driven initiatives that blend productivity with connection, creativity, and care. Whether it’s hosting art exhibitions, supporting men's mental health, or helping freelancers find their community, HurstWorks plays a transformational role in local placemaking.

In this interview, Rob shares his journey from the corporate world to community changemaker, the lessons learned from launching a village coworking space, and why coworking spaces are sparking a powerful high street revival.

1. What inspired you to start HurstWorks, and what gap in the market were you filling?

Rob: A few influences led to the opening of HurstWorks. With my wife, Rachael, we develop out-of-love high street buildings as part of our Better High Streets vision. Our point of reference is – what can we do in our small way as property owners and developers (and people interested in helping the local community), to take vacant premises on the high streets and renovate them.

Part of this work involves understanding that the circumstances are different for each high street. We’re relatively blessed here in Hurstpierpoint. But even in an affluent place, some of our local businesses have struggled with high rates and the cost-of-living crisis.

It’s important to offer a variety of experiences and update those on the high street to the way the modern consumer works. That's been the inspiration behind the scenes.

A large number of villagers commute to Brighton or London, and we have a lot of freelancers, small business owners, and scaling entrepreneurs. There was a coworking space here before the pandemic, but it unfortunately didn't survive the stresses of the COVID era. We identified a local market for coworking, so we thought we’d give it a go, and alighted on opening a coworking space.

We use the real estate to meet local needs as best we can. When we acquired our premises for HurstWorks, we ended up developing two units — one for coworking, the other for wellness — side by side as a symbiotic business model. Alongside coworking, we have two other premises on the same high street — one that offers treatment rooms and a therapy room, the other is for movement classes and a cafe, featuring a larger work lounge. It means I can now incorporate off-sites or bigger group meetings for up to 20 people, whereas previously, we were restricted to four or five in our relatively small meeting space.

I started to call time on my city career because I wasn't spending enough time with my children and didn't really know the community. Whereas these days, I feel very much connected to our community, which is wonderful.

2. How does HurstWorks fit into your ‘Better High Streets’ vision, and what role do you see coworking spaces playing in revitalising local communities?

Rob: The purpose, value, and power of high streets is this combined place where people meet, collaborate, work, and live together. For high streets to compete with online shopping and out-of-town shopping spaces, you've got to create experiences and service-type businesses that give people a reason to come.

It's part of a delicate balance of other factors. Is there accessible parking and transport links? Are there places for people to get food to eat? There’s an ecosystem on every high street, but there are also opportunities – a coworking space was an obvious gap here, and there was a need for it.

An awful lot of people struggle with working from home. Feelings of isolation are probably most often cited, as well as the productivity challenge. I certainly found it difficult to work from home towards the end of my corporate career. There are many distractions, and the setup doesn't necessarily enable a separation between your work and home persona. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing, if you like.

It's important to become part of a community. When we look at properties and high streets, I think that coworking will remain a mainstay idea, because it acts as a real focal point and a magnet. You can also use the space for other things.

By day, we might have upwards of 14 people hot desking, coworking, having an off-site, doing an interview (all the usual coworking things). We also engage with the local community in many different ways.

3. Can you share some examples of how HurstWorks operates within your local ecosystem?

Rob: Having a building with a sole use case can be a struggle. For instance, Hurstpierpoint had an art gallery, but it didn't survive COVID. So, HurstWorks now doubles as a local art gallery where local artists exhibit their work, rotating every six to eight weeks. Again, we're lucky on the location front, as many fantastically talented artists are located in this region.

We also support local events. There's a famous and extremely old fair that's been going since the 1300s, attracting around 7,000 people to the village. We’re part of the committee — it’s an absolute minefield to organise, requiring the help of many volunteers. The coworking space facilitates our meetings and briefings; people can gather here, have a cup of coffee, and chat through plans.

At HurstWorks, we've also formed a running club and a cycling group where, every Saturday, I'll see if anyone wants to go for a ride. It's just another way to connect with people.

We’ve identified a gap for a men's wellbeing group too. We have male therapists and classes, have brought in a sobriety coach, and guys come together to talk and explore different topics. This week, we've invited someone to talk about anger management. As we're blessed to be close to the South Downs National Park, we organised a walk for the men’s wellbeing group and chatted away.

You can firmly believe that you just learn from everyone that you engage with here at HurstWorks. It’s great to watch when members and our pay-as-you-go customers collaborate on projects and experience serendipitous moments.

After joining HurstWorks and meeting our network, one of our members decided that recruitment sales just wasn't for him and started a content creation business. Nine months later, it’s flourishing. We now work closely together, he’s helped boost our social media presence, and given us valuable advice. Turns out, everyone needs a videographer in their lives!

4. What are the lessons you’ve learned from running HurstWorks, and what can you share with someone starting a coworking space in a small town or on the local high street?

Rob: There’s a cliché around coworking — that it's for young startups with the latest tech. Well, we serve many different age groups and profiles, and are split down the middle between female and male members.

People talk about the community side of coworking, but it's 100% true. You grow your presence and serve more people by engaging with a community in different ways.

You've got to put a lot of your energy into it and be patient with it. We've been going for over a year, and I think: “How much more could we have done to be visible in the locality?” So, patience is important.

In the UK, the running costs of any high street business are not insubstantial regarding business rates and navigating the cost of electricity, heating in winter, and cooling in summer. You have to know your numbers and be clear when you set out.

We’re a different model from some in that we don't lease the building; we own it as part of the business enterprise. That's brought us some security, as paying a commercial lease is challenging, and I don't think the economies of scale will work in a smaller location like we have just now.

As we think about another location, we would certainly welcome bigger premises. But, what we've been able to do is test most of the processes here — from reaching out to potential customers to how we onboard and manage them — and experience those sticky moments that you don't ever think to respond to until they arise. In the early days, we were probably a bit too organised for our own good as we’d both just left corporate (where you tend to think in terms of systems and risk logs).

My view on technology is: don't choose your software packages until you've opened them and had a few months to work through what you need. We use Nexudus; it’s a good, stable system. Although we’re quite small on the spectrum of users, coworking software tidies up the invoices, financing, and task management. As we’ve got to be careful when taking payments, we have external IT help from someone within our network.

We also offer a virtual office service. Some people have taken us up on that, and it struck me that I probably should have been given ‘the okay’ from HMRC as we were setting it up. I don't know how many other small local coworking spaces have HMRC coverage, but they should probably check that out, because it's definitely a requirement.

Ultimately, you’ve just got to learn week by week, and ask: ‘What can we do better next week?’

5. How do you go beyond providing workspace to support entrepreneurs and freelancers on their business journeys?

Rob: Rachael and I work together to provide coaching and courses to support businesses in the area. I'm a trained life coach, and Rachael, who was a business consultant working with big corporations, provides small business coaching alongside business startup support. So we walk the walk and help other people along the journey.

The life coaching piece is all about helping people rediscover their values, especially if they feel disconnected. We work on what's important, the wheel of life, limiting beliefs, those sorts of things. Rachael does much more around the business side of things, like the need to spend 90 minutes a day thinking about your business.

In a couple of weeks, we're hosting an all-day workshop on social media for small businesses. It's a challenge to stay on top of social media marketing, do it well, and still be human in your approach. Our workshop is all about resetting your social media. You'll come away with a 90-day content plan, ready to load it into a scheduler, and be much more disciplined.

The value of having a coffee shop as part of what we do means we end up having really interesting chats with people who give us inspiration for our workshops. But some of the practitioners, who are more directly involved with our business, are just starting out and trying to transform their health and wellbeing practice into a true career. They become too busy dealing with clients or feeling shy about developing a social media presence.

Being a small business owner and entrepreneur is a tough place to be right now. It can be very lonely, frustrating, and exhilarating – you can't sleep because you're really excited, or you’re worried about something. That's another reason why I find that coworking and wellbeing align quite nicely. Our lived experience of running small businesses enables us to help in that way.

Now and again, people ask me for help when they're thinking about their corporate careers. But there are fewer corporate workers here in Hurstpierpoint than entrepreneurs and freelancers. For our community, HurstWorks has become home.

About People Make Coworking

Celebrating the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement, People Make Coworking is a blog series that shares stories from catalysts of the coworking movement and community builders about the power of connection.

Read more stories

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Fento Coworking doesn’t only serve its internal coworking community, though. Having built a symbiotic bond within its local neighbourhood, Fento Coworking operates as part of a thriving ecosystem of independent businesses and people of different generations in its village-style surroundings on the outskirts of the city of Vigo.

In this interview, Cristina shares her journey of building a coworking space from the ground up, the unique ways Fento integrates with its local environment, and the key to nurturing a genuine sense of community.

1. What was your journey of launching Fento Coworking like?

Cristina: We had an idea of what we would love to have in a coworking space, but we had no idea about coworking management, as we were only users before launching our own space. Fento is a small coworking space – it was important that the space worked for the kind of life we wanted to have, but also became a place that people loved coming to.

We asked ourselves: “What do we want from the coworking space, and how can we offer that to others?” We want to be here and build a great relationship with our people. We realised that we had to be authentic and present at our coworking space. With our coworkers, we learned to cover their needs while finding a balance with ours – it’s been a very organic process.

We had challenges in the beginning, but we’re a good mix to solve them – I studied business, and my partner works in tech. In two years, we’ve automated almost everything in our workspace, making day-to-day tasks, like preparing invoices, much easier, saving us time.

Here in Spain, coworking is more focussed on business, and it’s a serious place. We didn’t want to do that. Fento coworking is a place to come to work, and not be at home, and find people you feel comfortable with. We’re more or less like a small family.

From the start, we’ve been very lucky with most of the people coming to Fento. They have a positive attitude, are eager to contribute, and help us improve. Authenticity is the key, and over time, we’ve practiced this in how we communicate and build our community.

2. How does Fento Coworking contribute to the local community beyond providing workspace?

Cristina: What's generally promoted about coworking spaces in Spain is that they're workspaces for entrepreneurs and people looking to do business, But, there's a large audience that doesn't identify with that at all, like freelancers and entrepreneurs, who just want to share a space, be in a relaxing and calm environment, and build real relationships. We believe that's what Fento Coworking provides.

We're located on the outskirts of the city of Vigo in Galicia. Although we’re relatively close to the city (it’s about a 20-minute walk away) and quite well-connected, I like to say we’re a hybrid between urban and rural coworking. This area feels more like a small village in the countryside. There are horses, tractors, and people working in their gardens around here. We also have pilgrims taking the Camino de Santiago passage every day — a route that goes right past our coworking space.

The local community is small, but we’ve always felt welcomed and accepted. Many of them are older and don’t understand what coworking is. We often find ourselves explaining to them that, while we all share the same space, we work on different things. Sometimes I think our local community offers more to us than we offer them – they always like to ask what we’re up to and where we’re going. We feel loved.

Our members feel at ease in a pleasant, community-based environment. Everyone knows us – the baker, the hairdresser, and the girl at the cafeteria – and we’ve gotten to know them.

Our community members go to the local bread store, get their hair cut locally, shop at the supermarket, Bascapi, or visit our next door neighbour – Ola Ceramic Studio by Abi Castillo. You don’t need to travel into the city centre because we have small shops, making everything around here feel like a village. It’s lovely that everyone says ‘hello’ to one another out on the street. It’s a symbiotic relationship all around.

3. You do community really well. What's your secret to community building?

Cristina: People tend to first come in with a fear of exposing themselves. But at Fento, nobody is trying to be someone they’re not – everyone is relaxed and natural. They soon realise that we don't try to impress anyone, we respect and accept everyone for who they are. For example, some of our remote workers work for big international companies, but you’d never know that.

Understanding this makes people feel comfortable about opening up and getting to know each other and letting themselves be known, generating trust and creating a safe space where everyone feels comfortable.

Although everyone can be very focussed on their work while they’re here, there are two things we do every day together. Our community always makes time for a morning coffee as a group, and they eat lunch together. If we were just working all day, we wouldn’t make the time to have conversations with each other. It makes such a difference.

Having a meal together encourages you to open up and talk to people – you start to feel a connection. When you come back to work, you feel different. Our community chooses to spend time together, and it works.

We’ve had several people who left our coworking space (either because they’ve had to return to the office or moved away from the area), but they always come back. Whether they pop back in when they’re in the area or stay connected online, our members experience such a strong connection to Fento.

They tell us how much they miss having moments together and working here, so it makes us feel reassured that we’re doing something right. They’ve built true friendships – it's really beautiful.

4. What’s the most memorable feedback you’ve received from a member?

Cristina: One of our lovely community members, Eva, comes in from time to time with her dog. She once sent me a voice message sharing that the experience of coming into Fento Coworking has changed her energy. Before, she found things difficult and experienced low energy, but since joining our workspace, she comes home from work full of energy and feels more like herself again. It was all thanks to us.

That’s the nicest thing anyone can tell you about your coworking space and the feeling they have when they spend time there. It made me so happy to hear it. I'm always so grateful for the feedback.

5. Fento is a pet-friendly workspace. What are some of the benefits of bringing a pet to work?

Cristina: There are so many benefits of bringing a pet to work, mainly the peace of mind that comes with not having to leave your pet alone for so many hours at home. That's part of having a dog that owners tend to worry about, as dogs require more care.

The second benefit is the connection we feel to animals. The joy of being welcomed when walking through the door changes the day for many of us. For the people who love pets but can’t have one themselves for whatever reason, being able to spend their day with animals here is wonderful. It frees us from the stresses of everyday life.

Our love for animals connects people. We always find that everyone ends up taking care of all the pets that come in regularly and asking about them. But it’s not just animals that long for care – humans, too, love to be cared for, and this is what we do for our community at Fento.

People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement. By exploring the community, connection, and collaborations – the ‘co’ of coworking – this blog series shares stories from catalysts of the coworking movement and community builders.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Fifteen years later, Shazia is still leading the way, not just in coworking, but in how we design, operate, and measure truly inclusive spaces. Running her consultancy, Inclusive Placemaking, Shazia helps organisations drive social impact with purpose while remaining commercially viable.

In this interview, Shazia shares the importance of social impact, how real, connected communities are built, and what coworking spaces can do to address inequalities across intersectionalities to create more resilient ecosystems.

1. What’s your journey of launching a business combining coworking and flexible childcare been like?

Shazia: I’ve always wanted to start my own business. Before launching Third Door, I worked in audience research at BBC Radio 5 Live and then at Nokia. But, after having my first child, I found myself wanting to continue working without compromising on being present for her. That’s where the idea for Third Door began.

One day, while meeting a friend who was also a new mum, we struggled to hold a proper conversation because our babies wouldn’t nap. I said, half-joking, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone could just look after the girls for a bit while we got some work done?”

That moment planted a seed.

Soon after, I came across an American space called Cubes and Crayons. Offering yoga, a workspace, and a creche, it introduced me to a new term: coworking. I didn’t know much about coworking at the time, but I became fascinated with it.

Back at work, I realised the traditional 9–5 setup just didn’t work for many parents — especially mothers. So when I was pregnant with my second child, I took voluntary redundancy and decided to pursue the idea seriously.

Our research involved speaking to other parents as much as we could. We weren’t trying to compete in an existing childcare or workspace market; we were creating a new category altogether.

Some people loved the idea. Others didn’t get it. But I trusted my gut. We launched in Wandsworth in 2010, not in central or East London (where coworking was growing), but in a residential area where working parents actually lived. That decision was deliberate. We knew our audience because we were them.

At the time, I didn’t realise how challenging it would be. Both coworking and flexible childcare were still new ideas, and bringing them together under one roof came with its own challenges, such as regulations, logistics, and endless problem-solving.

But we made it work — and in doing so, we changed the conversation about what modern work and parenting could look like.

2. What was the Third Door community like when you first opened?

Shazia: Those early days were interesting. We were marketing to working parents, who didn’t know what coworking was, so I spent my first five years at Third Door explaining what coworking was and why it was needed.

We set up a crèche and registered with Ofsted, which was fortunate, as some people just wanted to use the nursery. Once WeWork came, we were described as ‘WeWork with a nursery’!

Our reason for setting up was always about flexible childcare. We offered different products, such as pay-as-you-go and a package of hours, which quickly changed to a wide range of membership subscriptions, and a regular monthly turnover.

Integrating the nursery and coworking space was our foundation; everything else evolved around that core. We listened to our community, shaping the events they wanted, built meaningful connections, introduced extracurricular activities (like yoga and tennis for the children), and developed a unique pedagogy focused on nurturing confident, resilient young minds. These were all really important.

3. How did you make Third Door an inclusive space?

Shazia: In the beginning, our main focus was financial sustainability. We opened Third Door to all working parents, but quite quickly, noticed a particular group gravitating towards us: freelancers, self-employed parents, and remote workers — especially mothers. These were people who needed flexibility and a supportive space, not just a desk and a nursery space. Over time, they became our core community.

While we welcomed everyone (even those without children), our space was fundamentally designed with children and their parents in mind. It was professional but child-friendly. That was rare at the time.

As the business evolved, so did our community. Being based in Wandsworth, our initial outreach was very local, but as we started getting press coverage — including a feature in The Guardian — word spread. At the same time, I was sharing my personal experiences online: about being a working mum, navigating motherhood and entrepreneurship, and speaking honestly about equality. That resonated, especially with other mothers.

People travelled from across London — sometimes further — to be part of Third Door, because they felt it was a safe, welcoming space for them and their children, particularly for people of colour. That wasn’t by design, but it reflected the values I shared and lived out loud. People saw themselves represented in me, in the team, in how we ran things.

4. Do you think it would be as challenging today to set up a coworking and flexible childcare business as it was when you did it?

Shazia: With a background in research, I naturally approached starting the business by asking questions — lots of them. I spent time on the ground, listening, observing, testing, and refining. That’s why the product worked so well, and why we weren’t afraid to adapt as we went. We were constantly evolving in response to what our community needed.

If I could give one piece of advice, it would be: build your community first. That was the foundation of Third Door. From the nursery to the booking system, everything was designed around the needs of working parents. We didn’t just bolt childcare onto a coworking space. We built them both together from the ground up.

We were early adopters of flexibility. Parents could book childcare from as little as two hours a day or 30 hours a month, all the way up to full-time. To make that work, we built our own software — there was nothing on the market at the time that could manage that kind of flexibility.

But flexibility wasn’t widely understood then, even by staff. At first, hiring was difficult because people in childcare were used to rigid systems. I studied for the Early Years Teacher Status (EYTS) qualification, and it gave me a deep understanding of the sector, helping me recruit and lead a team who could deliver quality care in a new, more adaptable way.

Coworking was still in its infancy, but the childcare sector had been the same for 30 years. It isn’t built for modern working lives — especially not for non-9-to-5 parents. There is huge potential for innovation if you're willing to challenge the status quo and think big.

The need is still there. Childcare costs remain astronomical, and flexible, community-rooted solutions like Third Door made a real difference. Some newer workspaces are stepping up to address this issue… I’m a superfan of Oru Space — they’ve wrapped coworking, wellness, sustainability, and a nursery into one community-first offer. Their founder, Vibushan Thirukumar, even brings his Sri Lankan heritage into the restaurant menu. It’s a beautiful example of how business can reflect people’s lives and identities.

5. What could the coworking industry do to be more inclusive?

Shazia: Many people in the coworking industry say they’re making spaces more accessible or affordable, but inclusion isn’t just about price. It’s not about handing out a free desk or ticking a diversity box.

Real inclusion means asking: Who feels like they belong here? That starts with language, marketing, interior design, staffing…everything. You have to build inclusion from the ground up, not retrofit it.

When we created Third Door, I didn’t consciously design it as an inclusive space. But I was vocal online about being a working mum, equality, and my values — that drew people in. Black and Asian women, in particular, travelled long distances to use our space because they felt it was safe and welcoming. That wasn't by design, so imagine what’s possible when you design intentionally for inclusion.

The truth is, the coworking industry still isn’t inclusive. Most of it is built around selling square footage, not building community. There's little understanding of why certain groups don’t show up in these spaces. You can’t create inclusive environments without acknowledging structural inequalities, migration stories, or even the legacy of colonialism. You have to be willing to dig deep.

There are practical things the industry can do right now, like adding more female toilets or including a proper multi-faith room. It’s such a basic need, but many operators treat it as an afterthought, if they include it at all. Inclusion shouldn’t be reactive — it should be part of the blueprint.

Many workspace operators say they’re different, but if you’re not truly connected to your end user, it shows. Too often, landlords just replicate the same model, assuming everyone will come. But unless you actively engage with different communities — and empower people from those communities to lead — you’re just reinforcing the same old norms.

6. How do you see the coworking industry evolving in the future?

Shazia: The real estate and coworking industries need a serious shake-up. Too often, the same types of spaces are built without thinking beyond profit or about the true needs of the community. I’d love to see bigger players partnering with smaller, independent operators to create a diverse ecosystem where niche, community-rooted spaces can grow, and tenants can scale up into larger spaces over time.

We also need to design for the next generation. My children already live in a more diverse, connected world, but the industry isn’t reflecting that. More third spaces, like libraries and theatres, should include well-designed coworking that builds real community, not just have desks and Wi-Fi.

There’s a lot of performative “inclusion” out there, but offering discounted rates without true agency can feel patronising. Instead, spaces need to be built with communities, fostering genuine equity and belonging. Women, especially women of colour, are natural community leaders and deserve more opportunities to shape their local economies.

Coworking is evolving beyond just desks—it’s a way to organise people, care, and work in a fragmented world. When designed intentionally around equity and community, it has the power to create something truly transformative.

People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement. By exploring the community, connection, and collaborations – the ‘co’ of coworking – this blog series shares stories from catalysts of the coworking movement and community builders.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Kernville Cowork’s strong community roots have led to the development of Justin’s second space – Sierra Shared Spaces – built specifically for its community, by the community. Its mission is to expand the impact of shared spaces in the Kern River Valley and other rural communities, as Kernville Cowork has evolved into the region’s leading startup hub.

When Justin isn’t managing a busy coworking space and entrepreneurial coworking community, you’ll find him out on the mountains and lakes of the Kern River Valley. In this interview, Justin opens up about his remarkable journey in rural coworking.

1. What inspired you to establish coworking spaces in rural areas?

Justin: Kernville Cowork is in the rural California town of Kernville, where the Kern River flows through the Kern River Valley. It's in the mountains in the Southern Sierra Nevadas, and Lake Isabella is in the centre. We have world-class whitewater, mountain biking, climbing, fishing, camping, hiking, lake sports, wind sports, off-road, and many other outdoor opportunities; it's amazing.

I’m the seventh generation of my family to live in this area. I grew up here, but ended up moving out of town to Sacramento for about 10 years until I got a great remote job enabling me to work from anywhere. That’s when we moved back to the Kern River Valley – there was no reason to keep living in Sacramento. I couldn’t think of a better place to raise my kids with all these outdoor opportunities here.

After moving back, I was sitting in my little home office, staring out the window and thinking: “It'd be great if more people had access to this.” I’d regularly be on video calls with my coworkers based all over the world, and I’d show them videos of the area. They’d get excited and say, “I want to live there!” This was almost always followed up by “How’s the internet there?”

This was back in 2016/2017. There were lots of other changes I wanted to see in the valley around education and entrepreneurship, etc. But I couldn't figure out how to drive that change. At the time, I wasn't aware of any other rural coworking spaces. Of course, they existed, but I had no idea if this would work.

Meanwhile, my friend in Bakersfield was building a coworking space. I’d never heard of coworking before. So I watched what he was doing. Eventually, I got the feeling that coworking was the right vehicle for the change I wanted to see in my local area.

We organised a ‘Jelly’ meetup at the local coffee shop for anybody who wanted to work together during the day. We had a decent number of people show up, and felt that coworking was something we could do. I rented a building, bought a bunch of IKEA furniture, and the rest is history.

2. How did you approach the idea of "a space built by the community, for the community," and what role do your members play in shaping your spaces?

Justin: We opened Kernville Cowork to accomplish our mission in 2018 and moved locations a little over three years ago, which involved a large renovation. Based on our success with such a tiny space and the impact we’ve seen in the community, we're now working on a larger project to build a larger community hub: Sierra Shared Spaces.

We’ve experienced different transitions – from building the first coworking space, to building and outfitting the second space that we relocated to, and then this community hub, which will be on the other side of Lake Isabella.

When it comes to ‘how’ to build the space, this is one of those areas I try to turn my brain off. I'm very deliberately trying not to brainstorm about names of what we're going to call the new community hub once it's built, because I believe the community is going to come up with a name for it, and they’ll probably come up with it on a different timeline than I would expect. So I'm not forcing it.

Our goal was always that this space would be by and for the community. As we’ve gone along, we’ve learned more ways to involve the community. It's like raising a kid – it’s really exciting to see them grow up and, as they get older, see them developing a personality, tastes, interests, and which direction they're heading in.

In building a coworking space, there are some kinds of ground truths that I know. For example, needing a certain number of private offices and different amenities. But we allow our members to make decisions and take charge in certain ways.

In our current space, some of our members have taken the lead on the interior design and the visuals – they went in a totally different direction than I ever would have thought of doing. It looks phenomenal, and everybody who walks in is taken aback by it.

In our first building, we were surrounded by wood, which felt authentic to the area and its mountain community. For the new space we’re in now, the members had this great idea to cover an entire wall in wood, taking our brand colours – dark green, rust orange, and dark blue – and doing a beautiful white wash piece across the whole wall. The wood feels like it belongs here (in a rural community) and that splash of colour shows that we're doing something new, something you haven't seen before…it's a cool feature.

We're currently in the planning phase for the new Community Hub. We’re getting the community together, hosting co-creation events, and trying to allow different ways for people to provide feedback as much as possible, whether through conversation, putting ideas on post-it notes and attaching them to different places on the wall or on tables, building with Legos or drawing, or using all their senses, written word, and poetry. We're finding ways for the community to share what they want and need, about how the new space will look and feel.

3. In what ways do Sierra Shared Spaces and Kernville Cowork support local entrepreneurs and small businesses?

Justin: Tourism is the major economic driver in this area. We've got what I believe to be the best whitewater west of the Mississippi, with a fairly defined season, because the Kern River starts up on Mount Whitney (the highest point in the lower 48 states).

When the snow melts, the water rises to a level where you can raft on it around mid-April, and, depending on how much snow pack we get on Mount Whitney, it may last a couple of months. Many businesses cater to those tourists and get the majority of their revenue within a few months of each other in the spring and summer months.

Seeing that people were generally only able to come up here two or three days at a time, I had this idea that if we give them a place to work, they would spend longer here, and maybe eventually, they’ll question why they’re driving back to their “sardine cans”. They’ll consider living, working, playing, and spending their money here while getting their paycheck from LA, San Francisco, or Silicon Valley.

That's where our motto: ‘Work Where You Play,’ came from. We're seeing it year after year – people will come up on a Friday expecting to take their last call in their RV, or their hotel room, and it just doesn't work out – the kids are running in, and the WiFi isn’t working, and there are all sorts of issues.

They run into the coworking space with 15 minutes to spare before a call and ask to work here. We set them up, and they fall in love with the idea, with the community. They go out to coffee or lunch with us, and the next thing you know, they've come back later that summer, or they’ve planned their vacation around having a workspace.

By expanding the time guests stay in town, we're supporting local businesses. More directly, we've organised entrepreneurship meetups and created entrepreneur resources. We're starting to see growth in local business startups, too.

As we're catering to micro businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, remote workers, laptop vacationers, and digital nomads, the coworking business side of things is really interesting. There are wild fluctuations where, as soon as the rafting season starts, a lot of customers come in for the summer and use day passes. This isn’t very common in coworking.

I’ve also seen this new trend of white water raft guides who raft on weekends, but during the week, they’re marketers, accountants, and web developers. Coming here, they can keep their day job and be a weekend warrior out on the river.

4. What unique challenges have you encountered while establishing and growing coworking spaces in rural areas?

Justin: The Kern River Valley is beautiful and amazing; it's one of my favorite places. But there are many challenges. It's not easy, and I don't think anybody would get into what I do to make money because it's very difficult.

In terms of population, about 15,000 people live around the lake. The potential customer base is significantly lower than if we were in a city, meaning we have to focus on building relationships, because we can't afford a lot of turnover. If members leave, it's really hard to replace them because there aren't many more people here who have businesses or who are remote workers.

One of the issues is that this area is very geographically isolated, and the closest city, Bakersfield, is an hour away. If you want to start a business or you need any other kind of assistance or support, you have to drive through Kern River canyon, which is very curvy, and people are quite frankly afraid of it. Bakersfield has all of the resources, many of which we rarely see come up into the valley. I often say it feels like it's about five times further from Bakersfield to Kernville than Kernville to Bakersfield.

We're unincorporated, so there's no city government here, with the closest thing being the county government (and Kern County is massive). We don't have a local champion to help us find funding, and, as with many rural communities, there's generational poverty.

Maybe 30 years ago, this area was thriving, but it has seen a lack of investment and creation of new businesses. At this point, the median household income is $35,000 per year in the Kern River Valley, with half of households making less than that. 54% of our children under 18 are below the poverty line.

There are certainly issues common to being rural, in terms of having to think differently, build differently, and diversify income streams to try to patch together a business model that'll work.

After having many conversations with folks who run rural coworking spaces, I keep hearing that when you have a coworking space in a rural community, you become the area’s de facto economic development agency. We've really seen it – over the last few years, we’ve transformed into an economic development partner for our community who want to start projects, ideas, or businesses. That's been pretty exciting.

5. How do you envision the future of rural coworking?

Justin: When we started this in 2018, I told everybody I could that we're living in a time now where you don't have to live where you work. You can work where you want to live. I must have been really good at spreading that message, because right around March 2020, everybody got the same message.

I've seen it referred to lately as the future of work, where we're seeing this pendulum shift back and forth between fully remote and full HQ, where everybody is in the same place. The loudest voices in the media say that everybody needs to be back in a single company office. Oftentimes, those voices are from people with a vested interest because they own the real estate in those office buildings.

It paints a very different picture than what's going on in terms of the average company. Even in terms of how smaller companies choose to build. A trend we’re seeing is a model where you have an HQ as a hub, and then you have satellites scattered around smaller towns, enabling more people to experience rural coworking.

Rural coworking also has the power to change the narrative around isolation in our communities. I really admire the work that Tony Bacigalupo of New Work Cities is doing on overcoming loneliness and the power of communities (when we think about the future of coworking communities). Nearly every week, Tony and I speak about how coworking spaces tackle the loneliness crisis.

Then, there’s how rural communities can provide incredible work/life balance, with incredible access to the great outdoors and all the activities that go along with it. I can walk across the street from the coworking space and go whitewater kayaking on my lunch break (without any of my coworkers knowing). My kids love the fact that on the way back from school, we can just pull up at the bottom of a rock, get a rope out, and go climbing. Or go hiking on the nature trails.

You have to travel to access those kinds of opportunities in urban areas, and I suspect access to nature is something most people are looking for.

People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement. By exploring the community, connection, and collaborations – the ‘co’ of coworking – this blog series shares stories from catalysts of the coworking movement and community builders.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.

Now, Charlotte is managing three coworking locations in Canada and partnering with landlords to bring vibrant coworking spaces into communities where people crave connection. She believes that coworking creates meaningful opportunities for people to work, connect, and thrive—by transforming underutilised spaces into welcoming, flexible environments that support local entrepreneurs, remote workers, and small businesses.

In this article, Charlotte shares The Village Hive’s remarkable growth journey, her outlook on hospitality (and the importance of hiring the right community manager), and what she finds most rewarding in running a coworking business.

Photo credit: The Village Hive

1. What inspired the inception of The Village Hive, and how has the community evolved as you've expanded across three locations?

Charlotte: Each year, I used to attend the TED X talks in Toronto, but in 2015, they sold out. I heard they were broadcasting live at the Center for Social Innovation (one of the first coworking spaces in Toronto). Back then, I had no idea coworking spaces even existed, but I went there to watch the speakers.

It's a good thing I didn't get that ticket for the TED X Toronto, because going to this coworking space changed my life. I was really intrigued by this workspace – it was an old historic building in Toronto with tables, chairs, a little cafe, comfy couches, offices, boardrooms, meeting spaces, and people working in different areas of the space. Some people were focused on their work, others were chatting and connecting…I thought it was a really cool concept.

At the time, I worked part-time in healthcare as a Director of Medical Affairs at a local hospital, and part-time as a consultant (which I loved). But, I didn’t like working from home when I wasn’t in the hospital. I found it lonely.

When I had children, I could work from home after my maternity leave, which was great on one hand, because I could pick my kids up right after school or daycare. However, I missed the water cooler chat and connecting with people in person. I’d also feel guilty if I hadn’t done anything around the house, like the laundry, cleaning, and even getting dinner ready at the end of the day.

After visiting the coworking space in Toronto, I wondered if other people working from home craved connection and a change of scenery, and if such a space was needed in Markham (the city where I live). The ideas kept popping into my head, and I began looking for other opportunities beyond working at the hospital.

There was this beautiful schoolhouse that intrigued me. I drove by it many times, and always wondered what was going on inside. Then one day, I noticed a ‘for lease’ sign come up. I went to look at it, and thought: “I wonder if I could open a coworking space here?” Shortly after, I left my job at the hospital and opened up my first coworking space in Markham in January 2016, and haven't looked back since.

I've always felt drawn to entrepreneurship and building something centered around human connection. Even in my previous roles—whether in human resources, career counselling, or advising—I was focused on helping people, fostering collaboration, and supporting community. Creating a coworking space felt like a natural extension of that passion.

Unfortunately, because of office closures during COVID, I had to let go of some of my space in my original Markham location. But, I had already been approached by a landlord in Toronto who was considering bringing coworking into one of his vacant offices. Despite the uncertainty of COVID, we opened up my second space in North York.

We kept opening and closing, but it gave us some time to slowly build the business, get all the policies and procedures in place, explore the needs of our members, hire the right community manager, and get a good grasp of what this space could be.

Seeing the success of our North York location, the landlord was open to bringing coworking to another one of his office buildings in Midtown Toronto, where one of the tenants was leaving. This is how The Village Hive has evolved and expanded to three locations. It’s been an amazing journey.

Photo credit: The Village Hive

2. Community-driven programming is a key part of your coworking model. Have there been any stand-out events or initiatives?

Charlotte: We’ve had hundreds of events since opening our first space. During COVID, we ran online member events with different guest speakers, and even coworked online together (as many of our members felt isolated at home).

There have been many standout events, particularly those organised by Monica, my amazing community manager, who loves hosting. She has German heritage, so every year, she organises Oktoberfest, and people absolutely love it. We set up a barbecue outside, my husband comes to barbecue, and Monica decorates. It’s probably our biggest event of the year.

Monica comes from the hospitality industry. That's a background I highly recommend for anyone hiring. Community managers need to be more than just organised – they must be warm, outgoing, and excited to bring people together. It's not just about hosting a social event, it's about creating an atmosphere where members feel welcome, engaged, and like they’re part of something special.

Our members also host a ‘lunch and learn,’ where they can share their expertise. For example, one of our members runs an e-commerce company, and he’s on top of things with AI, which everybody wants to learn about. They're not selling their businesses. They're just offering support, whether for CRM or marketing, or, in Filip’s case, AI. These events are really well attended.

Today, we're having a ‘make your own sandwich bar and social’ while at another location, one of our members (who's a psychotherapist), is running an event on ‘how to connect, take advantage of being in a coworking space, and make connections beyond your desk’. It’s really cool when our members get involved.

I'm exploring opening up a coworking location in other suburbs of Toronto, and I've been getting positive feedback about the need and desire for a coworking space there. Next month, we're hosting a pop-up coworking event at an art gallery in the city of Aurora to see how that goes. If we see high demand, then we'll look at properties to open up a coworking space. We’ll approach the municipalities, economic development, the Chambers of Commerce, and the boards of trade to see if there's interest in some sort of partnership.

Photo credit: The Village Hive

3. What’s the most rewarding part of watching your members grow professionally and personally through the connections made in your spaces?

Charlotte: Some of our members will jump from space to space and fully take advantage of connecting with people at each location. Recently, I met one of my members who had been at one of our locations and moved to another. Just catching up with him, and talking to him about his kids, and what’s new with him, created moments of excitement.

I went into the kitchen to make a coffee yesterday, and my heart was full seeing people chatting and laughing with each other. Those conversations don’t happen if you're working from home, or even if you're just sitting at your desk all day.

We have many software developers and people in the tech industry at one of my locations. What started as a group of strangers has become a supportive community—now they're collaborating on projects, offering advice, and helping each other troubleshoot tech issues. They're sharing meals, ideas, and inspiration. That’s exactly why I created these spaces—to spark meaningful connections and community.

The revenue that comes from renting desks and having event and meeting spaces isn’t why I do this. It's all about seeing the laughter through the bad times and celebrating the good. The most rewarding part is the genuine connections, trust, and friendships built over time.

4. In your experience, how does coworking transform underperforming properties, and what role does community play in this transformation?

Charlotte: I've been operating my coworking business for coming on 10 years now, and have been approached by many landlords and realtors with offices for lease or sale who are interested in bringing coworking into their buildings. It’s kind of morphed into doing consulting work and working with an American colleague in the coworking industry on some projects where companies come to us with vacant space to fill. I’m loving this work.

Coworking has the power to breathe new life into underperforming properties by turning unused space into hubs of activity. For example, my North York location is part of a larger warehouse that houses a self-storage facility. When we first opened, the storage team included us in their newsletter, and some of their customers realised they could also use the coworking space for meetings or as a dedicated office.

What was once a single-use property now supports over 20 businesses—bringing energy, foot traffic, and a stronger sense of community to the area. That’s the transformation coworking can create—not just for the building, but for the entire neighbourhood.

At our midtown Toronto location (which is in an executive office building), my business partner (the landlord) has noticed more vibrancy in his building. He’s been fixing up offices to accommodate the current needs of the changing work environment. Nobody really wants to rent out or sign 10-year leases anymore – landlords are realising that flex space is what people are looking for and are being more flexible in terms of leases or having flex space or coworking in their portfolios.

If you have a vacant office, and so many do, why not bring coworking in and test it out? If it doesn’t work out and a large tenant comes along, there’s no loss – the idea is flexibility. Be open to trying new things and observing the demands of the office market. The struggle is finding the landlord who’s open to that idea, because they prefer one company signing a 10-year lease. It's not happening.

Our original space in Markham is very close to Main Street, so our members will walk over to buy lunch and come back. Coworking brings vibrancy, not just to commercial buildings, but to communities and neighbourhoods.

Photo credit: The Village Hive

5. What future innovations or trends do you imagine will shape how people connect and collaborate in coworking spaces?

Charlotte: Hybrid work is here to stay, although many companies are calling employees back to the office. I hear this a lot: “Nobody wants to go back to the office.” However, we're meeting a lot of people who miss going to the office.

Going to a coworking space is a little different because you're choosing where and when to go to work, and meeting people from different industries. In larger cities, you have a choice of which coworking space you can work from. People like different spaces for different reasons.

Even though our members can work from home, they choose to come to a coworking space because they crave connection. I'm glad we can use Zoom, because if not, then conversations and connections wouldn't happen, but if I really wanted to get to know someone, I'd rather meet them in person.

Hybrid is here to stay, but people crave connections. A lot of big companies have let go of their main headquarters, and their staff work remotely. They're coming in and using our meeting space or event space for team building events, and they love it.

They get to see each other once a week or once a month and use the space, but they don't have to worry about covering their monthly overheads and expenses in an office. It’s easy to book, and we've got the best staff to make their time more enjoyable and seamless – we're enjoying having these bigger companies coming in more regularly.

More than ever, people crave the opportunity to bounce ideas off others, especially remote workers, small teams, and entrepreneurs. That’s where the role of a community manager becomes so important. It’s not just about providing a desk—it’s about curating experiences that spark conversation, creativity, and a sense of belonging.

You can easily sit in a coworking space all day without talking to anyone, but a great community manager creates those intentional moments that bring people together—through wellness initiatives, networking, and cross-sector events. I’ve been lucky to have incredible staff who really understand how to build that kind of vibrant, connected environment.

I see opportunities to work with municipalities to open up coworking spaces in cities where maybe there aren’t any, and where people don't want to travel far. For instance, if you live in the suburbs of a big city, you're not going to hop on a subway or train and go downtown to a coworking space. In the future, I see more local coworking spaces popping up, whether independent or in collaboration with municipalities.

We often hear from new members that they appreciate our personal touch. Many have tried larger coworking brands, but found something missing—like being greeted by their name or feeling genuinely welcomed. At The Village Hive, our community managers go beyond front-desk duties; they create meaningful connections and moments that make people feel seen, supported, and part of something. Our 5 start Google Reviews all talk about how great Serene and Monica are.

What I see continuing to happen in the coworking industry is the continued rise of independent, hospitality-focused coworking brands in communities and neighbourhoods closer to people’s homes, where people can connect and come together for collective causes and support the local economy.

People Make Coworking celebrates the people who make up the fabric of the global coworking movement. By exploring the community, connection, and collaborations – the ‘co’ of coworking – this blog series shares stories from catalysts of the coworking movement and community builders.

If you’d like to share your story in ‘co’, please get in touch. I’d love to speak with you for a future feature.