A coworking space for the 1% of workers

Imagine that you pull up to a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. You step out of the car and walk into the lobby, where the staff greets you by name and ushers you to an elevator. Upstairs, another staff member brings you coffee just the way you like it, minutes after you arrive. A barber is on hand to give you a fresh shave before an important Zoom call, and afterwards, you drop by a caviar tasting that’s happening in the shared lounge.

Amid an interior of travertine, green marble, and glass, a dedicated hospitality team and concierge service wants to make sure clients don’t waste time with the “little frictions” of everyday life. This “sanctuary” might sound like one of Manhattan’s luxury members-only clubs, but in fact, it’s a new kind of coworking space that caters to the 1% of workers. 

Industrious Reserve is a high-end coworking space meant for CEOs and business leaders. It’s supposed to give “the prestige of Park Avenue and the quiet luxury of a private club,” according to marketing materials. It’s designed for leaders with all-remote teams, or with home offices in other cities, who will now have a place to hold court.

“What we observe in our business is that people want a private club experience, but they also want their own office,” says Industrious President Anna Squires Levine, whose firm was recently bought by real estate services giant CBRE. “Just this morning, I had a private equity executive tell me ‘this is the product I’ve been waiting for. I do not want to sign my own 10-year lease. Why would I do that? Then I have to build it and manage it and figure out the Wi-Fi for 10 years. I want somewhere I can show up and feel like a boss.’”

The first location of Industrious Reserve, a high-end coworking space meant for CEOs and business leaders, will open soon inside the fifth and sixth floors of Manhattan’s Lever House, a famous modernist skyscraper. Reserve access starts at $7,000 a month per person, $9,500 if it includes one of the 44 private office suites (monthly membership costs for other Industrious locations in New York City vary between $399 and $1,700.)

The new ‘corner office’

The Reserve offering represents a significant departure from the classic corner office layout for corporate leadership, a design for status and hierarchy that reached its apex shortly after the International-Style Lever House opened in 1952. As much as it’s a story of service firms finding new ways to cater to increasingly wealthy clientele—after all, there’s no shortage of private club space or budget for high-end office amenities—it also speaks to the changing role of a modern CEO and their workspace.

Corporate leadership needs to showcase accessibility, transparency and cultural presence, says Todd Heiser, principal and co-managing director of Gensler’s Chicago office. But that doesn’t mean having the face of the company operate out of the lunchroom, or like many famous tech leaders, flipping open a laptop and sitting with the rank-and-file.

What Heiser says leaders desire now—and Reserve seeks to provide—is a place to work in close collaboration with the trusted team that makes a modern business function, almost like a capitalist situation room. 

In a world that requires lightning-fast decision-making, CEOs want proximity; they want to be able to assemble the executive team in minutes and work in a space that fosters faster alignment. Heiser pointed to Logan Roy’s office on Succession or Rebecca’s office on Ted Lasso as examples of leadership spaces that were both characters in their own right and typically open for rapid-fire meetings with advisers. One real-world example, the new HQ for Hyatt, includes space for leadership to quickly huddle, assemble, and lead team meetings outside of a stiff boardroom. 

The Capitalist Situation Room 

In the 1950s, office designers, influenced by notions of hierarchy and congruence theory, laid out workspaces to cleanly delineate hierarchy. Meanwhile, with today’s more open plan and collaborative design, the workplace power dynamic is dramatically demonstrated by access, says Heiser. It helps that shrinking office footprints also means axing luxurious private offices. Gensler found one in five workers today doesn’t have assigned seating, though execs do tend to have a reserved spot in most offices.

As opposed to the classic corner office—long a symbol of hierarchy and corporate power—this new functional layout that’s emerging more post-pandemic displays the leadership style of today’s LinkedIn CEO. “Employees read leadership spaces like cultural text,” says Heiser. “The layout, the openness, the adjacency all tell people what the organization values. It actually comes clearly from the top.”

Reserve, in both its name and lofty privacy, communicates exclusivity—it’s a considerable expense to join—but it also gets described as the type of space where a leader can collaborate with a team. Levine spoke about the design, by the in-house team at Industrious, as a fusion of physical, technological, and experiential, trying to create a turnkey experience for execs while also creating a sort of townhouse on Park Avenue vibe. The feeling of intimacy should be akin to a “secret, top-floor, light-filled brownstone in the middle of New York,” says Levine.

What sets Reserve apart, argues Levine, is the dichotomy; leaders can enjoy an intimate private office to meet with advisers, offering that connection to their top staff, as well as a semi-public space—members and guests only in the club—for socializing for larger gatherings. It’s a space for using time impactfully, being in the bunker with trusted advisers, and being the best version of yourself. 

Compared to the gigantic floorplates of modern high-rises, the Lever House is slim and elegant; in the afternoon, the sunlight from the window hits the middle of the floor. 

So far, membership interest has come from private equity firms, venture firms, hedge funds, and high-end retail and fashion shops. Levine says it’s either firms with big headquarters elsewhere who want a Manhattan outpost, or smaller, super distributed teams seeking a central meeting place. 

Levine expects the small handful of drop-in memberships and private offices to be snapped up well before the space opens in the spring, and Industrious plans further expansions of the concept in “pinnacle cities” such as Singapore, Tokyo, and Berlin.

“It takes a very special building and a very special landlord partner to make it happen,” says Levine. “We like to be thoughtful and methodical about the way that we expand so we know we can do it with a high degree of execution.

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