The best coworking spaces are furnished like hotels and lit like homes, and they have plenty to teach anyone planning an office of their own.
Coworking used to mean a folding table, a beanbag and a pot of filter coffee. That era is over. The operators doing it well now hire the same architects and interior studios behind boutique hotels and private clubs, and it shows in the joinery, the lighting and the way each room is zoned. I find these spaces fascinating, because they solve the same problem I see in homes all the time: how to make a room work hard without letting it look like work.
Good coworking space interior design is less about expensive furniture than about respect for the building and clear decisions about mood. Here are six spaces where the design does as much as the desks, and what each one can teach you about your own office, at home or anywhere else.
1. Fosbury & Sons Boitsfort, Brussels
The building alone is worth the trip. Fosbury & Sons took over the former headquarters of the cement company CBR, a nine-storey modernist landmark by the architect Constantin Brodzki. Its facade is made of 756 prefabricated convex concrete modules, and the repetition gives the whole block a sculptural, almost armored quality.
The interior studio Going East kept that concrete honest rather than hiding it, then softened it with wood, greenery and art from Brussels galleries including Rodolphe Janssen and Veerle Verbakel. It is a rare coworking space that treats the building's history as the main event instead of something to cover up.
What to borrow: work with the bones you have. If your office has a beam, a bay window or an awkward old fireplace, design around it. Old things look better with new things next to them, and a strong architectural feature does more for a room than anything you can buy.
2. The Work Project, CapitaSpring, Singapore
CapitaSpring is one of Singapore's most talked-about towers, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group with Carlo Ratti Associati. Partway up the 280-meter skyscraper sits the Green Oasis, a spiraling botanical promenade that wraps four connected levels in planting. The Work Project occupies levels 21, 39 and 40 of the tower, in interiors designed with the studio HASSELL.
What I admire here is the hospitality thinking. The company was founded by hoteliers, and the space reads that way: signature meeting rooms, acoustically considered phone booths and fully furnished private offices for teams that want their own four walls without giving up the polish of the shared floors. It is good proof that a serious office tower and a genuinely well-designed workspace are not mutually exclusive.
What to borrow: think like a hotelier. Ask what someone needs in their first five minutes in the room, a place to set down a bag, a lamp within reach, somewhere to sit that isn't the desk chair, and design for that.
3. Second Home, Lisbon
Set in the Mercado da Ribeira building and overlooking Lisbon's famous market hall, Second Home's Lisbon outpost is the plant lover's coworking space. The Spanish studio SelgasCano filled it with more than a thousand plants and trees, then ran long, curving tables through the room with potted plants doing the work of partitions. There isn't a cubicle wall in sight, yet every seat feels like its own pocket.
A radiant heating and cooling system and natural cross-ventilation keep the room comfortable without bulky ductwork, which is part of why the whole hall reads more like a conservatory than an office.
What to borrow: divide space with soft things. A tall plant, a folding screen or a rug that marks out a zone separates a desk from the rest of a room more gracefully than a wall. Green is a forever color for me, and nothing calms a working room faster. If you want to go further, here's my take on biophilic design at home.
4. Blender Workspace, NoMad, New York
Blender takes the eighth floor of a turn-of-the-century building at 135 Madison Avenue, and it skips the exposed brick and neon signage common to so many coworking spaces. Parts and Labor Design looked to the tones and materials of the mid-century instead: walnut, oak doors, brass hardware, timber floors, thick rugs and blackened steel walls that divide the space without closing it off. The café bar is framed in walnut and brass and lit with hand-blown glass globes, and the bathrooms are papered in a jungle print from the London studio Witch and Watchman.
The effect is closer to a private club than a shared office, and that is exactly the point.
What to borrow: use residential materials in a working room. A rug, a lamp with a fabric shade and one wallpapered surface will do more to make an office feel personal than any ergonomic gadget. I'd add a hint of red somewhere, too. It could be as small as the binding on a book.
5. Zoku, Amsterdam
Zoku blurs the line between hotel and workspace, and its design reflects that hybrid identity. The Amsterdam firm Concrete designed its lofts to shift the focus of the room from the bed to the living space. Each one fits a full kitchen, built-in storage and a four-person table, with the sleeping area raised on a platform reached by a retractable stair. Shared social floors and a rooftop garden give guests and members room to spread out and actually work.
What to borrow: Zoku is the best reference I know for anyone working from a small apartment. Lift or hide what you don't need during the day, and give the table pride of place. A tight footprint doesn't have to feel cramped when the layout is decisive.
6. Huckletree Kensington, London
Huckletree's Kensington location, designed by Material Works Architecture, was built around sustainability as much as style. Recycled plastics form the worktops and joinery, low-carbon graphene-based paints cover the walls, and the ground and top floors were deliberately left free of desks in favor of collaboration areas, a barista station, a members' bar and an open roof terrace.
It is a coworking space that makes its environmental commitments visible rather than tucking them into a footnote, and the design is better for it. Recycled surfaces now come in real color and pattern, and their speckled finishes are part of the charm.
What to borrow: give the room a place to stop working. Even in a small office, a chair by the window that isn't for work changes how the whole space feels.
What these spaces have in common
Look closely and the same handful of decisions repeat. Each space respects its building rather than dropping generic furniture into a generic shell. Each one zones the room by mood, with somewhere to focus, somewhere to talk and somewhere to rest. And each one leans on the materials of a home: wood, textiles, plants, art and lamplight.
That last point is the one I'd underline. Hard, bright, uniform surfaces are what make an office feel like an office. Texture and pattern are what make it feel like a place people want to be, the same principle behind layering textures and patterns in any room of the house. If you're planning a commercial space, it's also worth reading through the common mistakes in commercial interior design before you sign off on finishes.
Quick answers
What makes a coworking space well designed rather than just decorated?
The best examples treat the building's own architecture as part of the design. Fosbury & Sons and Second Home both work with the bones of a historic structure instead of covering them up, then zone the space by mood rather than by rows of desks.
Do design-led coworking spaces cost more than standard ones?
Generally, yes. The premium pays for real design work, hospitality-level service and often a more architecturally significant building, not just nicer furniture.
Can you get a private office in a design-forward coworking space?
Several operators on this list, The Work Project among them, offer private offices alongside their shared floors, so teams can have their own walls without losing the design standard of the wider space.
What can a home office borrow from coworking design?
Zone the room, bring in a rug and a lamp with a fabric shade, divide space with plants or screens instead of walls, and keep one seat that isn't for work.
