—Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, March 23, 1996
From the New York Times, August 18:
Hoping to lure workers back to their desks, companies are designing “work resorts,” luxe spaces meant to compete with the comforts and versatility of their living room.
Visitors to the Springline complex in Menlo Park, Calif., are surrounded by a sense of comfort and luxury often found at high-end hotels: off-white walls with a Roman clay finish, a gray-and-white marble coffee table and a white leather bench beneath an 8-by-4 resin canvas etched with the words “Hello, tomorrow.” Springline’s signature scent — hints of salty sea air, white water lily, dry musk and honeydew melon — linger in the air.
But Springline isn’t a hotel. It’s a “work resort,” meaning that its office space designs have taken a page from boutique hotels.
The complex is a 6.4-acre town square steps from the Menlo Park Caltrain station in San Francisco’s Bay Area. It includes two premium office buildings, nine restaurants, outdoor work spaces and terraces where people can mingle and connect, gym facilities, a high-end golf simulator, an upscale Italian grocery store and a 183-unit residential building. And like any good resort, it has a calendar of community events from craft cocktail fairs to silent discos.
With an office vacancy rate at about 20 percent in the United States, according to Cushman & Wakefield, downtown business districts are trying whatever they can to get workers back — including resort-like work spaces that match or surpass the comfort of their homes.
The concept comes from “the image of a resort, of a beautiful location or a beautiful building, something that makes you say, ‘I want to see this experience, I want to be there,’” said Matthias Hollwich, founding principal of the global design firm HWKN who is designing a work resort complex, Sky Island at Canada Water, in London. “It’s not like home. It’s not like the other office buildings. It’s novel.”
“So many people go into the office and say, ‘Why am I here? I could do exactly the same thing at home,’” he added. “So you have to offer something that is better, but it’s not about making it entertaining like a club. People still want to go to work to be efficient.”
Transforming traditional offices into work spaces with hotel-like amenities is referred to as “hotelification.” In this new iteration, there is the additional layer of the “hospitality experience,” which Amy Campbell, an architect and senior associate at Gensler in San Francisco, describes as “anticipating the needs of others and then creating accommodations for that.” Ms. Campbell said she was seeing hotelification in all sectors, including residences and airports — and called it “a niche market that we’re going to see grow.”
The concept exists in Ms. Campbell’s own office, she said, an experience she describes as “like walking into a spa.”....
....MUCH MORE
Still too much money/credit sloshing around in the system.
Take the CRE hits and move on. It's similar to the realization slowly sinking in for Ma & Pa Liu re: their Chinese residential nest-egg purchased in 2010: those days are done and gone and are never coming back.
