ECLAT Melbourne & Vertical Placemaking

The next evolution of commercial real estate won't just be shaped by what we build, or where, but WHY we build; and how our buildings contribute to the people inhabiting them. Slowly but surely, every generation quietly redefines the purpose of its structures:

• Factories become lifestyle districts.

• Warehouses become homes.

• Railway yards become creative spaces.

• Our homes become businesses.

• The decrepit replaced with the new.

Places created for one economy in one age, gradually adapted to serve another as the world evolves. Commercial office towers are now entering a long overdue period of reconsideration. As tempted as I am to speak about the implications of AI, technology and robotics, that's a very different blog post. Stay tuned for that one!

For much of the past century, the purpose of a commercial skyscraper was perfectly clear and singular. Provide businesses with floor space, incentivised by a fitout contribution, delivering infrastructure, security and a centralised address. Their success measured through familiar metrics: occupancy, utilisation, operating costs, yield and capital value.

These measures remain essential. But they no longer tell the whole story. Work has become more mobile. Businesses have become more fluid. Technology has weakened the historic dependence on fixed office desk. And expectations around elevated design, hospitality, wellbeing, service and operational cohesion have risen considerably.

Conventional offices and the Melbourne coworking space remain important, they always will be; in one form or another, but significant change is coming. I believe their purpose is becoming larger. Its responsibilities greater. Their opportunities more profound. A signal of something deeper and more meaningful is on the horizon.

When I began assembling my thesis and business case in 2016 as the owner of ECLAT creative, years of quiet dedicated study; flexible workspace uptake was accelerating across international markets at breakneck speeds. Coworking was often discussed as a new property category: a more flexible alternative to the conventional lease, shorter commitments, greater shared infrastructure and the ability to expand or contract as businesses changed. But the more closely I studied the market, the less interested I became in coworking as a category unto itself.

Businesses were responding to environments where much of the burden of occupation had been removed. Furniture, meeting rooms, technology, reception, utilities, maintenance and day-to-day management were all brought together as a service. People could enter a resolved environment, skip the drama and difficulty of establishing an office themselves, and concentrate on their work.

They were also responding to a better experience. The emerging demand was for private space without isolation; flexibility without impermanence; professional infrastructure without friction. Occupiers wanted access to social spaces, authentic hospitality, cultural activity and other like-minded people to share those experiences with, while retaining the privacy and identity of their own businesses when they needed it.

I explored these propositions extensively. Beyond the typical inclusions and offerings of a standard coworking space, I believed fundamentally that it wasn't enough. There was evidence that occupiers had begun to understand commercial property differently.

The building was no longer being judged solely by the floor it provided. It was being judged by what that floor connected them to, and how each visit made them feel.

The commercial office as an incomplete system:

They're one of the densest concentrations of human and economic activity we have. Many thousands of people entering the same office building each day. Bringing knowledge, capital, expertise, ideas, passion and extraordinary potential through the lobby.

Yet most office buildings remain organised as collections of largely independent tenancies.

A business may occupy one floor for ten years without developing any meaningful relationships with the businesses immediately above or below. Hospitality may exist at ground level but remain operationally isolated. Shared amenities may be built, but only used intermittently, if at all. Events may occur in the lobby, but without a coordinated cultural connection to the buildings population. Put simply, If the amenities are an afterthought, don't expect tenants to think much about them, or often.

Vertically dense, yet internally fragmented. Its parts coexist. But they don't necessarily reinforce one another.

Commercial property development has become remarkably sophisticated in its coordination of physical systems. Structure, façades, vertical transport, mechanical services, fire engineering, technology and security are integrated through an exacting process. But the lived systems of the building are often considered separately, or not at all.

Leasing sits beside property management.

Property management sits beside hospitality.

Hospitality sits beside tenant engagement.

Technology sits between all of them.

Each may be competent in isolation while the whole remains less than the sum of its parts. This was the gap ECLAT was created to address. The proposition was not simply to insert a coworking space into the building. It was to connect the tower itself, each tenant, each floor, each moment; brought together in an aligned human economy supported by meaningfully designed spaces that encourage valuable connection.

From a vertical stack to a vertical precinct

I described creating vertical precincts of culture, activity and functionality within my proposal. At the time, this was framed through an integrated development model. Flexible workspace, private offices, hospitality venues, events spaces, wellness, accommodation, production facilities, retail and shared business infrastructure could be curated as a unified offering. The important idea was never the number of amenities, it was the relationship between them.

A café could sustain far more than day trade, extending its hospitality into evening modes akin to a bar and restaurant life cycle.

An event venue could enliven the development well after office hours, and uplift the work day. With curated and culturally rich ever-changing programming; bringing the outside world in.

Production facilities could serve residents needs while attracting new external users, fresh faces, new ideas, new economies.

Hospitality service itself, more broadly; could extend from the ground and rise up connecting through each and every single floor and tenancy.

Flexible workspace could absorb changes in tenant demand, provide smaller enterprises access and draw the entire building into curated common areas; hives of engagement.

Hotel suites, a wellness facility, gym and cultural amenity could introduce entirely different patterns of occupation and activity. Far beyond the work day, feeding hearts and minds.

Each part could contribute demand, character and economic value to the others. A synergy.

I referred to this as symbiotic commercial design: an approach in which every asset, operational amenity and system strengthened the whole.

The building would not simply contain a mixed collection of uses. It would operate as a coherent economic and cultural system. An engine to bolster and fuel activity.

Amenitization is not automatically integration. A tower can contain offices, restaurants, wellness and a hotel without any of them sharing a meaningful relationship, often they don't. They may occupy the same structure while functioning as separate commercial islands.

Integration requires intention, from the origin. It requires the right composition, but also the operational framework through which that composition is made useful, and a commitment to looking at property a little bit differently. That comes at a cost, but successful implementation, is priceless.

Placemaking cannot end at the lobby - Vertical Placemaking

Over several decades, the property industry has developed a much richer understanding of placemaking. We know that successful precincts are not created through architecture alone. They require activity, engagement, programming, access, identity and a careful relationship between public and private space.

This thinking has transformed streets, waterfronts, civic developments and mixed-use neighbourhoods. Yet in most CBD buildings, placemaking still stops at the lobby. Is it solely the responsibility of the developer, or the building manager? Or is there something or someone missing here?

At ground level, considerable attention may be given to arrival. But above it, the tower often returns to the much older logic: repeated floorplates, individual leases and limited shared life.

This is a curious divide, I thought.

In a dense city, enormous portions of daily urban life takes place above ground, often isolated. People spend more time inside commercial towers than they do in the streets between them, or even in their own homes.

The energy of the city should not stop at the pavement. It should rise throughout its buildings.

Vertical placemaking begins with recognising that the commercial tower is itself a form of precinct. Its population may be transient or permanent. Its spaces may range from private to communal. Its activity may change throughout the day. But, like any neighbourhood, its success depends upon the quality of relationships. That does not mean turning every office tower into an entertainment complex. Nor does it mean manufacturing compulsory interaction.

It means designing and operating the building so that participation, exchange and access are organic, and accessible when people seek them out and need them most.

It means encouraging the tower to become more generous to its occupants and more useful to the surrounding city.

It means creating commercial towers that are not simply hubs of productivity, but centres of lifestyle value, with purposefully designed amenities that draw people into a meaningful story that they can partake in and experience, and share with others, every single day.

The difference between amenity & contribution

The commercial property industry has responded to changing expectations by investing heavily in amenities. Tenant lounges, end-of-trip facilities, wellness rooms, terraces, shared meeting suites, food and beverage offerings, and event spaces are all now familiar elements of premium developments. These are important improvements.

But an amenity is not valuable merely because it exists. A beautifully designed lounge can remain empty. An event space can become a room celebrated occasionally but sits unused more often than not. A hospitality venue can be physically connected to a building while operationally detached from it. And a communal space can add complexity and confusion rather than enabling opportunity.

The difference lies in design and operations created with this synergy in mind, in strategy, in care, in discipline and in placemaking relationships. Amenities are physical provisions. Contribution is what those provisions make possible.

A meeting suite adds value when it allows tenants to host clients at a standard becomes a hospitality experience.

A hospitality venue contributes when it becomes part of the daily rhythm and identity of the building; enriching the senses.

Programming contributes when it reflects the interests, needs and capabilities of the people already there and champions the desires of new populations joining in.

Technology designed well makes access, behaviour, communication and service simpler; an invisible partner that serves to enable you.

Shared space becomes meaningful when it creates genuine human connection rather than merely satisfying a leasing checklist.

This dynamic was absolutely central to the ECLAT proposition. The purpose is not to fill a building with impressive features. It's to make those features operate together in harmony to reshape the day to day, every day.

COVID did not create the transition, it exposed it

It would be easy to describe this evolution as a response to COVID-19. That would be incomplete. The structural changes were already visible. Flexible workspace was expanding. Businesses were questioning long commitments. Employees were becoming more mobile. Hospitality was gently entering workplace strategy. Landlords were beginning to consider tenant experience as an asset-level concern.

The pandemic did not invent these movements. But it removed the luxury of postponing or neglecting them.

For a period, millions of people proved that large portions of knowledge work could be performed without entering a central office. The old relationship between attendance and productivity was disrupted almost overnight.

The office could no longer depend entirely upon necessity, those norms are gone.

The office must now clarify its value and its purpose. I propose that it needs to change entirely.

Covid did not make the commercial workplace irrelevant. It made undifferentiated workplaces less defensible, and less desirable. Once work could occur elsewhere, the relevant question was no longer simply whether an employee had a desk. It became:

What does this place make possible that cannot be recreated alone? Why should I bother commuting at all? How is this place investing in me as a tenant and a patron? And where is my rent payment actually going?

The same could be said of body corporate fees, and how this thinking is applied to residential developments; the same logic and questions are relevant.

The answer lies in the qualities that shared places have always offered at their best.

• Valuable Exchange.

• Endearing Visibility.

• Mutual Belonging.

• Quality Focus.

• Authentic Hospitality.

• Collective energy.

• Access to people.

• Sharing knowledge.

• Creating opportunity.

The office’s future is not secured by forcing a return to an older routine. But by becoming more worthy of the journey people want to experience daily.

JLL now describes hospitality as a means of attracting people back to the workplace and strengthening tenant retention, while its research into office-led mixed-use environments points to buildings increasingly functioning as live-work-play destinations rather than closed containers for office tenants alone. Indeed an expression finally aligned with my 2016 ethos.

These are contemporary expressions of a transition that had already begun. COVID simply made the consequences visible.

A market divided by relevance

The post-pandemic office market is often described through vacancy. Vacancy matters, but it can obscure the more important division taking place beneath it. The market is not moving uniformly away from offices. It is differentiating between them, altering how they function and the benefits they deliver.

Businesses continue to seek well-located, high-quality space capable of supporting hybrid work, employee experience and organisational identity. At the same time, less adaptable buildings face a more difficult path, particularly where physical constraints, fragmented operations or limited amenity make repositioning difficult. If the developer or the management team don't understand these nuances or respect the intimacies of this new framework, they may be left behind.

This is commonly described as a flight to quality. It can include architecture, interior design, environmental performance, floorplate efficiency, transport access and technical specification. Increasingly, it also includes service, flexibility, hospitality, programming, the wider ecosystems available to an occupier; and finally: respect of the creative disciplines that give it a name, face, voice and a smile.

JLL’s 2025 research into “lifestyle office markets” found that offices in vibrant mixed-use districts were attracting premium rents and outperforming broader markets because occupiers placed measurable value on the surrounding experience and brand-building potential of those locations. Similarly, CBRE's "2025 occupier survey" found that enhancing how places are fundamentally experienced had become the leading priority among respondents; a flight to ECLAT.

This supports a principle of disruption. A commercial tenancy cannot be understood only through the area inside its lease line. Its value is partly determined by everything beyond it.

Defining Partnerships

Many operators lease large areas of unimproved space, invest heavily in someone else’s property and attempt to recover that capital through their margins. Fit out contributions only take you so far, and all of this lovely talk of hospitality, interior design elevation and modern technology; comes at a cost.

The model enabled rapid growth, but it also created structural tension. Long property commitments sat beneath short customer commitments. Significant capital expenditure improved assets the operator did not own. Expansion could increase revenue while also multiplying fixed liabilities.

My proposition sought to align the operating platform more closely with property ownership and development. Instead of treating the workplace as a temporary layer inserted into another party’s building, ECLAT was intended to participate in the creation and long-term operation of the asset itself. A marriage between property and its beating heart.

Not every project requires the same ownership structure, and no single model is suitable for every market cycle. But the underlying lesson remains sound.

When the curator, developer and owner are aligned around the long-term performance of a building, better decisions become possible; especially when the curator is both a partner and the building manager, not just another tenant.

Capital expenditure can be assessed through the life of the asset and its cultural functions.

Hospitality can be operated to drive the building rather than merely fill retail space.

Shared infrastructure can be designed into the architecture rather than retrofitted around it.

Programming can evolve with and adapt to the tenant population and changing appetites.

The people responsible for articulating the promise of the building, and championing it creatively; remain involved in its promotion.

This alignment turns amenity from an expense into infrastructure. It also transforms the operating platform from a tenant into a key contributor to long term asset value.

Stewardship after completion

Commercial development is often narrated in age old language as a linear sequence:

• Acquire.

• Design.

• Approve.

• Build.

• Lease.

• Offload or,

• Retain.

Yet practical completion is only the beginning of the building’s real life, be it decades or a century. The quality of an urban place is never determined at the moment it opens. It's revealed through decades of use, and by how far into the future the developer could see when they devised their strategy.

• Tenants change.

• Businesses grow and contract.

• Hospitality concepts evolve.

• Technology advances.

• Social norms advance or revert.

• Neighbourhoods develop new patterns of movement and demand.

A building stuck in the past that cannot respond gradually becomes less relevant, regardless of the quality originally delivered. This is why foresight and stewardship matters.

Maintenance preserves what was built. Stewardship tends to how the building should behave, what the building must become next, and how it evolves to remain relevant.

It requires someone to observe how the asset is functioning as a whole. Which spaces are active? Which services are valued? Where is friction occurring? Which partnerships are strengthening the building? What is missing from its daily life? Are we really listening to the occupiers? And do we actually fundamentally understand or care about their lived experience? Do we have a duty of care?

These questions sit between the traditional boundaries of development, property management and hospitality. So then, should an entity be conceived to occupy that space and to ensure that relationships of care exist meaningfully? Not simply to brand or manage individual components, but to hold and nurture the relationships between them.

Consider every single professional discipline, contractor, stakeholder and process required to establish a modern commercial structure. When disciplines operate independently, the building becomes a collection of services. When they are aligned, the building becomes a living collective.

That alignment is what I created ECLAT for.

Commercial property as civic infrastructure. Office towers are privately owned, but their influence should extend far beyond the old mindset of property boundaries.

Commercial property is therefore not separate from civic life. It is one of its principal settings.

This does not mean every commercial tower should become public space. Nor should privacy, security or the distinct needs of individual occupiers be weakened. It means recognising that a major building has responsibilities and unrealised opportunities; beyond simply containing its leases.

• It can support culture.

• Create places of exchange.

• Share resources.

• Introduce activity beyond the conventional working day.

• Form partnerships with local institutions, businesses and makers.

• Contribute warmth, identity and usefulness to the area around it.

• And more important now than ever before, ensure that places are psychologically safe, physically responsible, promoting wellness, and mindful of the prevention of psychological harm within its boundaries.

I've described the ambition to create “gravity wells of culture, activity and productivity”: developments capable of becoming economic drivers and recognisable landmarks within their wider neighbourhoods.

Not as a fluffy sales pitch, or to create a middle man, but a truly authentic, empathetic, passionate, considerate partner with an active duty of care to give these buildings more heart, soul and purpose.

My language was ambitious back in 2016.

But the principle was simple.

A building should give back to people.

What then, should a commercial building become when floor space alone is no longer enough? That question is more urgent now than it was then.

Next Up, Melbourne CBD

I began with a proposition for altering elements of commercial real estate development. Its early form explored how property, flexible workspace, hospitality, culture and operations might be assembled into a more complete building.

But the idea was never intended to end at the boundary of a workplace. The building was the first scale. The city was always the larger one.

Melbourne does not need every commercial tower to offer the same amenities, be a carbon copy, pursue the same tenants or adopt the same identity. A healthy city is not created through repetition. It is created through diversity, distinct characters, renewed purpose, and new forms of contribution.

What our Melbourne CBD does need is a more generous relationship between its buildings and the life occurring within and around them.

Commercial towers should provide reasons to attend that cannot be reduced to obligation.

They should help businesses access resources, build relationships and provide environments beyond their individual capacities. They should allow hospitality, culture and work to reinforce rather than ignore one another. They should connect their vertical populations to the streets, institutions and neighbourhoods below. They should be conceived with operations in mind and engaged with that sense of stewardship.

The future of commercial real estate will still be shaped by capital, planning, construction and leasing. But it will also be shaped by something quieter, and arguably more important; especially on the eve of a new age driven by artificial intelligence and robotics.

The quality of the day a building makes possible, and a dedicated operator to manage those many sensitive connections. Lived human experience, must become the single most critical driver.

Not to place another brand inside a commercial tower. Not to add a floor of coworking and declare the building transformed. But to change the relationship between the parts at a fundamental level.

To create a partnership of property, hospitality, culture and operations capable of uplifting the lived experience of the whole building and, through it, contributing more meaningfully to the city itself.

Is a commercial tower merely a building, is it a professional habitat, or perhaps; it's a social operating system made tangible.

The work began with my 2016 thesis and a plan.

It emerged at ECLAT Hawthorn East.

My design and development enabled expanse.

Now it's time to see it applied to Melbourne CBD.

Further refined, scaled up, reaching beyond.

To Be Brilliant, together.

SOURCE: "ECLAT - Coworking Redefined" (2016) - Jesse Hayes

Article Author - Jesse Hayes

ECLAT FOUNDER & DIRECTOR