Eclat X The Local Project: Designing a Luxury Workspace Where Work, Hospitality and Atmosphere Meet

ECLAT x THE LOCAL PROJECT

When The Local Project featured Eclat as a luxury workspace and members’ lounge, it was rewarding to see the project understood through the lens it was always intended to occupy: not simply as an office, not merely as a coworking space, and not only as a hospitality environment, but as a more complete proposition for modern work.

This reflection is written from my perspective as Eclat’s founder and the designer behind the original brand, spatial and experience strategy for the Hawthorn East project.

The article observed something essential about Eclat: that it was designed around calm, intention, atmosphere and a more considered rhythm of professional life. That was never a decorative ambition. It was the foundation of the design strategy.

From the beginning, my objective was to create a workplace that felt materially resolved, emotionally warm and operationally intelligent. A space where design did not sit on the surface, but influenced how people arrived, worked, met, hosted, focused, moved through the day and connected with others.

Eclat Hawthorn East was conceived as a response to a very specific problem in the commercial workspace market. Too many workplaces had become either sterile and transactional, or visually styled without a deeper operational logic. At one end, traditional offices often prioritised efficiency at the expense of experience. At the other, many coworking spaces leaned heavily into novelty, colour and casual energy, but lacked the sense of permanence, privacy and refinement required by serious professionals.

The intent behind Eclat was different.

It was to create a luxury Melbourne Coworking space that treated work as something worthy of atmosphere, care and detail. A place where hospitality, interior design, technology, brand and service could operate together as one system.

A Workspace Designed Around Feeling, Not Just Function

The Local Project described Eclat as replacing the noise and sterility of traditional offices with spaces that feel more considered and closer to an extension of home. That observation goes directly to the heart of the project. The most successful work environments are not defined only by square metres, desks or meeting rooms. They are defined by how people feel inside them. A workspace can either sharpen attention or scatter it. It can either create confidence or friction. It can either support the quality of a conversation or reduce it to a transaction. At Eclat Hawthorn East, the design intent was to create an environment that allowed people to settle. Not in a passive sense, but in a way that improved clarity. The palette, lighting, furniture, spatial proportions and circulation were all considered through that lens. Calm was not intended to mean plain. Warmth was not intended to mean domestic. Luxury was not intended to mean excess. The ambition was restraint: a workspace with enough richness to feel elevated, enough softness to feel human, and enough discipline to remain professional.

That balance matters, particularly in the context of serviced offices, coworking and private business environments. Professionals are increasingly seeking spaces that do more than provide infrastructure. They want settings that help them think clearly, host well, and feel aligned with the standard of work they are trying to produce.

Bureau, Parlor and Galerie: A Family of Spaces

One of the most important aspects of Eclat was the development of its internal brand and spatial structure: Bureau, Parlor and Galerie. These were not simply names for different areas. They were intended to define different modes of working and gathering. Bureau formed the professional backbone of the environment. It was the place of focus, structure and daily work. The design language needed to support concentration without becoming cold. The objective was to give members a workspace that felt refined, quiet and capable; somewhere they could return to each day with a sense of order.

Parlor introduced the hospitality layer. It was designed for meetings, hosting, conversation and more social forms of professional engagement. Rather than treating meeting rooms as isolated boxes with a table and screen, the intent was to make them feel like private lounges: intimate, composed and suitable for moments where presentation and atmosphere matter.

Galerie represented the cultural and event layer of the concept. This Melbourne event venue allowed Eclat to extend beyond workstations and offices into programming, talks, gatherings and shared experience. This was important because Eclat was never intended to be a static real estate product. It was conceived as a living environment with the capacity to host ideas, people and culture.

Together, Bureau, Parlor and Galerie created a more complete framework for modern work: focus, connection and cultural engagement. That structure also gave the brand room to grow. It allowed Eclat to operate as more than a single workplace, and instead as a family of environments connected by one philosophy.

Hospitality as a Design Principle

Hospitality was central to the project from the beginning, but not as an add-on. In many workplace environments, hospitality is treated as a service layer applied after the fact: coffee, reception, catering, events, perhaps a lounge area. At Eclat, hospitality was intended to influence the entire experience. That meant thinking about arrival, welcome, hosting, movement, comfort, privacy, tone and ritual. It meant considering how a guest might feel when entering the building, how a member might use the space throughout the day, and how the environment could support both productivity and ease. Hospitality, in this context, was not about pretending an office was a hotel. It was about borrowing the attentiveness of hospitality and applying it to the workplace.

The aim was to create an environment where people felt looked after without being interrupted. Where service was present, but not performative. Where the design carried a sense of care before anyone said a word. This is one of the reasons the interior design had to be integrated with operations, technology and brand. A hospitality-led workspace cannot rely on aesthetics alone. The experience has to hold together at every touchpoint.

Materiality, Detail and Permanence

The Local Project rightly recognised the role of disciplined design, materials, lighting and proportions in the Eclat environment. The material strategy was deliberately grounded in warmth, tactility and endurance. The objective was not to chase trend. It was to create a workspace that could age with dignity.

That required a careful balance between custom elements, selected furniture, soft furnishings, lighting and spatial composition. The use of timber, textured fabrics, rugs, stone, sculptural lighting and custom joinery helped establish a sense of depth and comfort, while maintaining a professional level of restraint.

The furniture and spatial detailing developed through Forme Design were especially important to the identity of the project. Custom pieces helped anchor the environment and gave Eclat a physical language of its own. They also reinforced the idea that the project was not simply furnished, but authored.

In a luxury workspace, detail matters because it changes how the space is read. The weight of a desk, the tone of a lamp, the softness of a chair, the height of a table, the way light lands across a surface, these are not minor decisions. They accumulate into atmosphere.

That atmosphere becomes part of the property development and design discipline.

A Melbourne Workspace with a Different Rhythm

Eclat Hawthorn East was designed in response to the changing expectations of professionals, founders, consultants, creatives and business owners in Melbourne. The modern workplace no longer needs to be defined by the blunt categories of office, coworking space, meeting venue or members club. Those categories increasingly overlap. People want flexibility, but not chaos. They want community, but not constant exposure. They want hospitality, but not distraction. They want design, but not theatre. Eclat was created to sit within that tension.

It offered the infrastructure of a workplace, the atmosphere of a private lounge, and the cultural potential of a members environment. That combination was always central to the concept. The Hawthorn East location also mattered. Rather than relying on the default gravity of the CBD, Eclat demonstrated that a sophisticated workspace could exist in a more local, village-like context while still feeling metropolitan in standard. It gave the project a different pace: connected to Melbourne’s professional landscape, but removed from the intensity of the traditional corporate core.

That sense of place contributed to the project’s identity. Eclat was not designed to feel generic. It was intended to feel specific, layered and grounded. Eclat was never intended to compete only on the usual terms of coworking in Melbourne or serviced office availability. The proposition was more specific: a design-led workplace environment where private offices, meeting rooms, member hospitality, events and brand experience could operate as a coherent whole.

The Broader Design Philosophy Behind Eclat

For me, Eclat was always an exercise in integration. The project brought together interior design, brand strategy, workplace planning, hospitality thinking, digital systems, member experience and commercial positioning. Each part needed to reinforce the others.

A beautiful room is not enough if the operational experience fails. A strong brand is not enough if the space does not embody it. Technology is not enough if it feels disconnected from the way people actually move and work. Hospitality is not enough if the environment lacks structure and discipline.

The challenge was to make those elements feel like one idea.

That is why Eclat’s design language was never just about how the workspace looked. It was about how the business model, service experience and physical environment could align. The ultimate objective was continuity: a member should feel the same level of consideration in the architecture, the furniture, the language, the digital interface, the meeting experience and the atmosphere of the space.

That continuity is what separates a designed environment from a decorated one.

Responding to The Local Project’s Observations

The Local Project’s feature captured many of the qualities I hoped would be visible in the completed space: calm, intention, hospitality, atmosphere, material discipline and a more refined model of modern work.

As the designer and founder of Eclat, it is meaningful to see those ideas recognised externally. The project was never intended to follow a conventional coworking formula. It was intended to challenge the assumption that workspaces must choose between professionalism and warmth, between productivity and hospitality, between commercial function and emotional experience.

Eclat was designed to prove that those qualities can coexist.

A workspace can be commercially useful and deeply considered. It can support focus while encouraging connection. It can be luxurious without being excessive. It can feel calm without being passive. It can operate efficiently without feeling mechanical.

That was the design ambition.

And when viewed through that lens, Eclat Hawthorn East and the proposed Eclat Melbourne CBD sites stand as more than a workplace fitout. It represents a broader philosophy about how environments shape behaviour, identity and performance.

Final Reflection

Designing Eclat was never about creating an office with better furniture. It was about asking what a workplace could become if every element was treated as part of the same experience: the brand, the interiors, the hospitality, the technology, the service model, the rituals, the rooms, the way people gathered and the way they worked.

The answer was a luxury workspace and members lounge built around clarity, warmth and intention. A place for people to work well, host well, think clearly and feel connected to the environment around them. PROJECT: ECLAT DESIGNER: JESSE HAYES FOUNDED: 2016 OPENED: 2023

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VIEW THE LOCAL PROJECT ARTICLE