The continued rise of the home office

We hear a lot of buzz about the popularity of people working at home, but how prevalent is it?  Here’s a snapshot via answering a few questions:

How many U.S. Americans are working at home? 28 million at least part time in 2006.
Is that number growing? That’s a 10% increase from the previous year and a 40% increase from 2002.
Do U.S. Americans have home offices?  7 out of 10 have offices or designated work stations, a 112% increases since 2000.
How

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The ‘creative treehouse’

If you’re looking for an affordable, creative place to work or hang out, you’re in luck if you live in Pittsburgh, or more precisely, Bellevue, Pennsylvania, 4.5 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. That’s where you’ll find the Creative Treehouse; a 7500 s.f. arts-oriented coworking space.  The key ingredients?  An inexpensive lease in a developing neighborhood.

The membership-structured (starting at a mere $25/month) space features:
- A creative service center that

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Paris’ version of coworking - with cafe

Of course a coworking site in Paris would have a cafe. Strangely enough, it’s one of the only coworking sites to include one, especially given the official definition of coworking as a “cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.“

La Cantine opened January 30, 2008, with 2200 square feet dedicated to three spaces:

- a café and coffee bar for meet-ups, information, exhibitions and project testing;
- a

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Attract more creatives with ‘anchored coworking’

Creatives, free agents, entrepreneurs and mobile knowledge workers may be driving the economy, but they aren’t going to be driving to work. They prefer avoiding isolation at home, but there are only so many coffeehouses, and even fewer coworking sites.

One growing source of spontaneous workplaces are anchored coworking sites - coworking sites provided by established companies who not only have extra space, but enjoy reserving it for

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Work-life balance city

Continuing our happiness theme from the previous entry, here’s one way to look at work-life balance happiness:

“In their interviews and surveys, Nash and Stevenson learned that successful professionals who were also happy had found ways to ‘switch and link’ - to switch the focus of their full attention with lightning speed among activities and people in different realms.

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Cubicleless in Seattle: Going creative (2 of 2)

So where do the creatives in Seattle go to cowork when all the other options seem less than fabulous?

As of November 1st, many of them are heading over to Office Nomads, a 5000 s.f., 40-member much-larger-than-usual shared workplace in Capitol Hill, Seattle’s walkable, diverse counterculture mecca. Considering there are 20 million ‘personal businesses’ in the U.S., they’re increasingly not alone in their quest.

Founded by young entrepreneurs

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Cubicleless in Seattle - The beginnings (1 of 2)

Maybe these refrains from Seattle entrepreneurs regarding office space, quoted in sound familiar…

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Don’t have a coworking site? Adopt a cafe

CooperBricolage (CooBric) is a coworking site company without a coworking site. They’re working on finding one, they say, but in the meantime they’re in the same dilemma as a lot of other entrepreneurs, free agents and home-workers who want a shared workplace to share ideas and conversation, but don’t have a common place to meet.

So CooBric found a cafe to serve as their interim coworking site, at Gramstand in Manhattan. Of course, it has to meet

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The keys to successful coworking spaces

A quick refresher on what coworking is: “the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.“

As this article on the Coworking Blog reveals, profitability is a common coworking space challenge. The primary reason? Coworkers still find it more individually profitable to do business at the

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Design your own office space

From an interview with Architect Magazine, I stated how the next generation of architects will work with the creative vision of progressive future tenants rather than the opinion of one developer, with a lot less ego to go around. At the Balcom Agency in Fort Worth, Texas, you can get a hint of things to come in interior design.

From a Design Sponge article, rather than spend the entire interior design budget on one firm, the company distributed $300 to each

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How’d you like to work in an office like this?

You may be among the millions of people who wish their workplace was a little more, shall we say, inspiring. Well, if you want an example of what such an office could look like, you may want to visit eOffice in London. Click here for a larger photo.

First of all, it’s in the heart of Soho (see pic on our About page), the media hub of London and a magnet for cool cafes, bars and coffeehouses, creatives and entrepreneurs. What good is a an

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Pittsburgh’s Cool Space Awards 2007

If you’re looking for a cool workplace you need a service like Pittsburgh Cool Space Locator, which finds office space for companies in the ‘coolest’ neighborhoods, as they say. If you’re seeking meaningful examples of cool workplaces, check out their annual Cool Space Awards (winners pictured), where you can get full profiles of the projects outlined below:

Reflect
Blacksmith Studio - Painstaking historic physical/cultural restoration (third right).
The

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Can a co-workplace; community and collaboration space for entrepreneurs and independents, be so cool that a mayor of one of the most important cities in the world feels it deserves its own day?

Apparently, yes, for May 10, 2007 is now officially Affinity Lab Day in Washington DC. The official recognition by the Mayor of DC, announced on the sixth anniversary of “The Lab“, follows:

Affinity Lab Day

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The ‘Innovate’ workplace

Where do you put your city’s most innovative companies?

Well, in Greenville, SC, the answer is easy. They’d obviously go into the Innovate Building.

What makes it worthy of the name, and more importantly, the companies?

The loft-like building is located downtown in a former textile mill built in 1908 with hand-molded brick, exposed timbers, and stunning solid maple flooring, yet it features state-of-the-art audio and visual communications systems; open,

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Does your workplace have a slide?

Yours would if you worked at Red Bull.

Last week, in How ‘play’ is going to shape our communities, we touched on the growing interest in using the motivational methodology behind ‘play‘ as the motivational infrastructure behind both education and work. Hey, if it works I’m all for it - anything other than sitting in a room with 100 other people being lectured to death.

I’m not sure the Red Bull headquarters is what they had in mind, but I can guarantee

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What are cool space companies looking for?

Continuing yesterday’s entry on the Cool Spaces Report, what are the people behind the relocating companies saying they prioritize?

The single most important relocation factors in the report are:
1. Specific location: 40%
2. Price: 19%
3. Proximity to homes upper management/workforce: 15%

As they say in real estate, location, location, location. The specific location is typically associated with a cool neighborhood to begin with, and the upper

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If your business is looking for cool space…

You ought to look at the newly published Cool Deals Report: Capturing the New Market in Urban Commercial Real Estate, “to learn what the most innovative companies want in an office and how urban and walkable communities provide it.“

If you’re in Pittsburgh, you should call the publisher of the report, Cool Space Locator, a nonprofit commercial real estate service that seeks out cool space for small and growing businesses, with cool space defined

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‘Seeeeeriously cool workplaces’

Tired of the office park, your home office or the downtown corporate office building? What kind of workplaces would you find in a cool town? One would think the author of a book called Happy Hour is 9 to 5 would have some answers, and Alexander Kjerulf does in 10 Seeeeriously Cool Workplaces.

His top 10 list with pictures and descriptions, in no particular order (though location-wise, they may not necessarily be in a cool neighborhood:

1. Pixar (pictured)-

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Part of Starbuck’s loyal following consists of entrepreneurs seeking creative places to work outside of the home, where the coffeehouse with wi-fi makes a pretty good alternative. After all, the CEO of Starbucks will tell you, “We’re not a coffee company, we’re a real estate company.“

At last there’s something better.  It’s called coworking, “the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are are interested in the synergy that can

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Region looks to gain jobs with ‘third place work centers’

The Grand Rapids, MI area lost 27,000 jobs between 2000 and 2004, but is it looking to regain them by ‘stealing companies from other cities’ like most economic development programs prioritize?

Not so. In BusinessWeek’s Towns Chasing Workers, Not Just Jobs, Greg Northrup, president of the West Michigan Strategic Alliance states, “The old model, where you used to chase people to invest in real estate [ie office parks] might not be the

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Art gallery by day, home by night

So you want to open an art gallery, but don’t have the budget?  Or how about just wanting to have your home double as an office with employees during the day?  The folks at I-Beam Design worked out quite the solution in this Manhattan loft.

The highlights:
- A revolving wall/door that separates the main gallery/workplace from the private section of the house by day, opens it up by night.
- Moving panels that hide your, ahem, flat-panel TV, in not one, but

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If you’re a member of any one of 29 entrepreneur/business networking organizations, this recently opened workplace - The Hubworking Centre (THC) in downtown London is indeed free.  The membership requirement is simply to ensure that it’s frequented by people who are running their own businesses, mainly because people enjoy being there to network with other entrepreneurs.

First question I’m sure is, how does the place make money?  They do so by charging for the following additional services: …

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While The Work Factory, presented yesterday, is a model for the creative class workplace, how it was established is just as representative of its role in a progressive economy. Once again, in the words of co-founder Ted Randler:

“Last year Work Magazine (Richmond, VA’s slick biz dev mag) and C3 (profiled here) held a business conference call, “What’s the Big Idea?“ We brought together corporate executives, designers, academics and media folks to spend the day in seminars and sessions dealing

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That’s a little contradictory, because the office is your ‘second place’, your home being the first, with your favorite hangout often referred to as the third place.  But that’s compelling the premise behind The Work Factory in Richmond, VA - the office as third place.

From $299 a month, like any true third place, you’ll have literally dozens of places to set up your laptop and get to work, as described by co-founder, Ted Randler:

“Between the community spaces and the meeting room, a $299

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A creative third place every downtown needs

Followers of this website know that we focus on neighborhoods and districts that attract the creative class, but if there ever was an example of a single venue that does so, it’s C3 (the Creative Change Center) and there’s really nothing like it anywhere.

Surprise, it’s not in Manhattan or Austin, but in Richmond, VA, which should be encouraging to cities that aren’t Manhattan or Austin.  Richmond, however, is a growing mecca of creativity

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