When Redefining The Coworking Industry Became Essential

For a very long time, the coworking space and flexible office was treated as a given. Rows of desks, predictable finishes, tired lighting, generic furniture, coffee of varying severity, and the unspoken understanding that practicality alone was enough. It functioned, technically. But that is not the same as inspiring anyone, supporting anyone, or reflecting how people actually want to live and work now.

Then the world paused...

The pandemic did not invent flexible work, that happened much earlier with the WeWork boom, but it did force millions of people to reassess it in real time. Kitchen benches became desks. Dining rooms became boardrooms. Local cafés became unofficial satellite offices. Hotels, wellness venues and hospitality spaces suddenly began to feel more emotionally intelligent than many commercial workplaces ever had. People got used to warmth, atmosphere, convenience and environments with an actual pulse. Returning to the old model after that was never going to feel entirely convincing again.

That broader shift only strengthened something I had already believed for years, and been pushing uphill for quite some time: the future workplace could not simply be an office with nicer finishes and a reception desk pretending to be hospitality. It needed to become something more integrated. More human. More thoughtful. More complete.

That was my thinking behind Eclat.

Not just a place to work, and certainly not a serviced office in the most conventional sense. The ambition was to create an environment where brand, interior design, furniture, technology, operations and hospitality were not treated as separate ideas, but as parts of a single system. A workplace where each layer reinforced the others. Where the atmosphere matched the intent. Where the service matched the design. Where the technology supported the experience quietly rather than intrusively. And where the whole thing felt considered from first impression to final detail.

That idea sits at the centre of how I tend to think more broadly. Meaningful projects rarely emerge from one discipline acting alone. They happen at the intersection of disciplines. When people of different professional disciplines come together, to share the weight of the great idea; and unify to create something brilliant. Property determines possibility. Spatial design gives form to strategy. Technology shapes usability. Brand shapes perception. Operations determine whether any of it survives contact with reality. When those layers align, people may never consciously identify why a place feels coherent, but they feel it all the same. That belief is written across my site because it has informed the work itself.

And that is exactly why I never saw Eclat as a glorified fitout. The opportunity was not to make a prettier office. The opportunity was to challenge the underlying assumptions of what a workplace could be.

Why should a commercial environment feel cold, purely transactional or visually generic? Why should hospitality be reduced to a front desk smile and a coffee machine? Why should the most cared-for spaces in a building be the lobby and boardroom, while everything else is left to fend for itself under fluorescent lighting and the tyranny of “good enough”? Or "Let's just kick the can down the road".

Those questions mattered to me because they pointed to a larger cultural problem. Too many workplaces had been designed around operational minimums rather than human experience. They worked on paper. They leased. They functioned. But they rarely gave people much reason to feel connected to them. I wanted to build something that did.

Hospitality, in that context, was never intended as a decorative buzzword. It was not there to sit politely in a brochure beside phrases like premium offering or curated experience and then quietly disappear once someone signed the agreement. It was meant to be structural. Embedded. Active. Something expressed through design, atmosphere, service standards, operational detail, and the emotional tone of the environment itself.

Because real hospitality is not just service. It is care made visible.

Its the feeling that someone thought beyond the transaction. That the environment has been arranged with empathy, anticipation and discipline. That the furniture was not chosen merely to fill a room, but to support comfort, mood, posture and use. That light was considered. That circulation was considered. That acoustics were considered. That the person moving through the space was considered. It is the difference between being processed and being hosted.

That is a meaningful distinction.

And it is not easy to achieve at scale.

Applying true hospitality thinking to a large-format workplace is, frankly, a difficult and occasionally unreasonable ambition. It asks more of everyone involved. More restraint in design. More rigour in planning. More care in operations. More consistency in delivery. More thinking per square metre than most commercial models are willing to entertain. But that difficulty is also what makes it worthwhile. Because within that difficulty sits the possibility of genuine differentiation; not the performative kind, but the kind people feel without needing it explained to them.

That is where terms like luxury workspace, premium coworking, pro-working or curated office begin to wobble a little. Not because the terms themselves are useless, but because language alone cannot do the heavy lifting. A space is not elevated because the website says so. It's elevated when the experience earns that description. When the design feels resolved. When the transitions feel seamless. When people can sense the care in the details. When the service, environment and operational logic all point in the same direction. Otherwise it is just branding with good posture.

This is also why I have always been interested in the full footprint, not just the obvious hero moments.

A lot of commercial interiors put on their best suit in the reception area and then quietly lower their standards once you round the corner. Eclat was intended to resist that instinct. Every office, every hallway, every threshold, every shared setting had the potential to either reinforce the broader philosophy or undermine it. Design should not disappear the moment a person leaves the foyer. Care should not be concentrated only in the places that photograph well.

In my view, the most revealing spaces are often the ones people overlook. Corridors. Transitional zones. Everyday touchpoints. The unglamorous bits. Those are the places where a philosophy either holds or starts making excuses.

That same thinking extended beyond interiors into the broader framework of the business itself. Property was not just about acquiring square metres. Technology was not just about plugging things in. Brand was not just about what looked elegant on screen. Each was part of a larger system that needed to work together if the environment was going to feel complete, credible and durable over time. That systems approach runs through everything from philosophy to spatial logic, property strategy and technology infrastructure.

And perhaps that is the deeper point here.

The workplace is no longer just somewhere people go. It is something they interpret. Something they measure, consciously or not, against the quality of the environments they inhabit elsewhere in life. Homes have become more intentional. Hotels more immersive. Hospitality more design-aware. Consumer expectations more refined. The office does not get to sit outside that cultural shift as if none of it applies.

Whatever the case, people notice more now.

They notice whether a space feels human or mechanical. They notice whether design has been used to enrich the experience or simply decorate the transaction. They notice whether technology feels seamless or clumsy. They notice whether service feels and words spoken towards brand are sincere or scripted.

They notice whether a place has identity, or whether it looks like it was assembled from the same commercial mood board everyone else downloaded.

And increasingly, those observations matter.

Because how we work is inseparable from how we live. Wellbeing is not improved by slogans. It is influenced by the environments we move through every day, by whether they create friction or ease, stress or calm, anonymity or belonging. The future workplace, if it is going to justify its existence, should do more than accommodate labour. It should support people more intelligently than that.

So yes, coworking. Flexible workspace. Serviced office. Premium suite. Curated workplace. All of those terms describe something. They explain the format, the category, the commercial wrapper.

But they do not explain the deeper question.

What matters is how a place is conceived, how consistently it is delivered, what values shape it, and whether the people behind it are trying to build something interchangeable or something meaningful.

That is where the “why” comes in.

For me, that has always been the anchor. Not because it sounds good framed on a wall, but because it forces standards. Why should this exist? Why should anyone care? Why should it be done well? If those questions cannot be answered with conviction, the rest is just decoration and vocabulary.

Eclat, at its best, was my attempt to answer those questions through space, service, systems and design.

Not with noise. Not with excess. Not with trend-chasing. But with a quieter ambition: to create a workplace that felt warmer, smarter, more connected and more memorable than the models that came before it.

A workplace designed not simply to function, but to actually mean something, and to carry purpose.

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