Neue kind of office

Walking into Neuehouse, a hip work space that opened last year on the fringes of Gramercy Park in New York City, you get the sense that everyone knows each other, that perhaps they are all employees in the same company, working and at times socialising together.

But they are not. Surrounded by warm coffee colours, soft lighting and beautiful pieces of art, these are “co-workers” – people who would ordinarily find themselves in a Starbucks coffee shop or a hotel lobby seeking free wireless internet for a few hours of work on their projects between meetings.

The people behind Neuehouse describe this space as “a membership work collective catering to ‘solopreneurs’ and teams of up to 10 people in film, design, publishing, the arts and tech”.

The space is a cross between an office and private club. Almost half of the 50,000 square feet of space over five floors is communal. Neuehouse has about 600 members paying different types of fees to suit their working arrangements, ranging from $200 (€145) a month for evening use to $1,500 a month per person for private space for teams of up to 15 people. Many members are foreign and frequent travellers.

The concept is targeted at the increasing number of entrepreneurs who want to be surrounded by similarly creative people from different industries in an aesthetically pleasing work environment but who want to avoid being locked into horrifically expensive, long-term leases on offices in Manhattan.

Howard Schultz, the brains behind the expansion of the Starbucks chain, described the type of environment that Neuehouse is trying to create as the “third space”.

The managing partner of Neuehouse is 30-year-old Irish expat James O’Reilly. “It’s not your home, it’s not your office, it is this third space where people don’t want to be in a traditional office and don’t want to work out of their small, crappy apartment,” he says.

The Gallery, a space on the ground floor, named after the auction house and gallery that previously occupied the space on East 25th Street in Manhattan, has 20-foot high ceilings and terracotta walls in a room illuminated by 16-feet high windows. Neuehouse calls this the “public square” of its community.

At the centre of the ground floor is a restaurant and coffee bar that seems to act as a magnet drawing workers from their laptops and different disciplines to socialise.

Downstairs, there is a kitchen, a screening room and a recording studio and broadcast facility, as well as boardrooms and secluded areas offering privacy to members away from the shared space.

“There is no work-life balance any more,” says O’Reilly, who was raised in Kildare. “There is a balance in your work: you can be social when you want to be, you can engage with other people. A big part of this space is recognising that people are tired of working in isolation. People come here and realise that there is real value being around like-minded people from different industries who are just doing interesting things and can offer some sort of inspiration.”

Technology has also changed how people work, he says. Aspirations have shifted. The Ivy League college graduate is no longer seeking a career in Goldman Sachs but hoping to become the next Mark Zuckerberg building the next Facebook with a requirement to have no more than a skeletal staff working from minimal office space. The Irishman points out that the online messaging service WhatsApp – bought by Facebook for $19 billion (€14 billion) in February – had just 50 employees.

“Entrepreneurism is on the rise – it has never been more glamorous to be an entrepreneur,” says O’Reilly. “All this change is happening but commercial real estate is still stuck in the 1980s. It says you have to sign a five or 10-year lease and it means a lot of capital commitment with a security deposit, brokers’ fees and all sorts of build-out fees. It is inflexible.”

Large office rental companies have traditionally served Fortune 500 companies and big professional firms of accountants and lawyers, but drab carpet tiles and dropped ceilings tend not to cater for entrepreneurs or creative companies. “It’s where beige goes to die,” says O’Reilly. “It is that bland.”

In contrast, Neuehouse has chosen to colour in this new blurred line between work and leisure space. Architect David Rockwell, a partner in the business, designed this impressive building by mixing soft cappuccino hues while retaining the original steel girders and concrete columns of an old manufacturing building in New York’s Flatiron District. He is better known as the theatre set designer of the Broadway musical Kinky Boots and for the restoration of Grand Central Station in New York.

“When you think about great hospitality, it is theatre: you have got a stage and it changes; it should change through the day. This is the stage for everybody to come in each day,” says O’Reilly.

Rita Nakouzi runs her own trend forecasting business, Four Point Five, out of Neuehouse working for clients such as fashion retailers and advertising agencies. She used to run her own office in New York but when the recession hit the cost of renting and maintaining staff made her rethink how she works.

“It is almost like they are curating people [at Neuehouse],” she says. “I wasn’t aware of how significant the dynamic would be among people here. I have met friends and gotten projects through conversations here. It is a very creative and fruitful community. It opens your perspective too.”

A business and law graduate from Griffith College Dublin, O’Reilly moved to New York about six years ago. During college, he enjoyed the typical student gap-year. After hitch-hiking around New Zealand, working in Fiji, digging holes in Sydney and backpacking through South America, he finished his degree and later worked at NCB Stockbrokers, which wasn’t for him. He left for Barcelona to do an MBA.

While in Spain, O’Reilly spotted Ace Hotel, one of the chain of hipster hotels developed out of Portland, Oregon. In the trendy lobbies of this international hotel chain, O’Reilly saw the potential for a shared co-working space amid the Mac laptops, plaid shirts and peculiarly grown facial hair. He harried the hotel company until they succumbed and offered him an internship in New York.

“I just thought they were hitting on something that really resonated with me,” he says. “They were focusing on creative hotel guests, not just guys who are interns at magazines but also the guys who own the magazines. They have struck a chord welcoming a local community into their lobbies.”

O’Reilly teamed up with two venture capitalists and serial tech entrepreneurs, Joshua Abram from New York and Alan Murray from Kentucky, to throw around a few ideas. While trying to poach executives from the likes of Google or Goldman Sachs for their start-up businesses, Abram and Murray discovered that it mattered to these people where they worked, and they were not happy to work out of a Starbucks or hotel lobby. They developed the concept of a co-working space.

The goal is to open between 15 and 20 similar office spaces internationally over the next five years with $10 million in backing from 20 wealthy investors. The company will open in London and LA next year. Other prospective locations include Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo and possibly Dublin.

“Dublin is actually up there,” says O’Reilly. “We looked at one or two things about six months ago. When we consider a new city we look at diversity within the industry so, for example, San Francisco is a really interesting city with a great cultural vibe but it is really focused on tech so we are sensitive to go into that area where it is that strongly focused on any one industry.”

O’Reilly’s family in Ireland are in both property and hospitality. His father Declan is a property developer, and his mother Margaret an interior designer. His parents moved from Kildare to Dublin and now live on Dartmouth Square near the Grand Canal. His brother Stephen runs Pitt Bros, an American-style BBQ restaurant on George’s Street in Dublin and the East Point Café Bar near the Point Depot.

The downturn and the decline in the Manhattan market in the financial crisis encouraged people to seek flexibility on property commitments, says O’Reilly.

“There was a lot of tension and fear when Lehman Brothers went down in 2008,” he said. “You could see people cycling out of any long-term commitments. Whenever there is uncertainty ahead in the economy, people aren’t signing long-term agreements. They are looking for increased flexibility.”

This “third space” offers that flexibility for fast-changing working lives.