It wasn’t that long ago that co-working spaces were riding what seemed like a massive wave that would never break. New brands were launching every few months (East Room in Canada, Second Home in Europe and NeueHouse in the U.S. were just some of the more interesting iterations from a design perspective), while established co-working companies like WeWork were opening spaces at warp speed. Then WeWork started to teeter and eventually collapsed in the face of insurmountable debt and crippling losses, COVID-19 reared its disruptive head, and much of the planet was ordered to work from home. Suddenly, the future of co-working seemed anything but certain.

One of the turquoise-painted columns outside the events space, which is walled in by the building’s ruin-like former exterior, is inscribed with a description of the cork floors’ ecological benefits.

A few years on and co-working has survived, largely due to corporate employees who find themselves without an office to go back to post-lockdown. Many employers that had to off-load expensive real estate realized that plenty of jobs could be made remote fulltime, leaving some employees desperate to escape the chaos or loneliness of their home offices. One could even say that co-working is undergoing a modest but assured renaissance. Yet the landscape has undeniably changed. It had to, believes Dickon Hayward, founder of London-based practice Material Works Architecture. “I think it’s fair to say that co-working as a movement lost its way. When we first started seeing these spaces 10 to 15 years ago, it was much more about a homemade aesthetic and a community that was supportive of freelancers and entrepreneurs starting out, the antithesis of the corporate office.”

Climate-tech companies make use of the many informal work areas throughout the office, including this multi-use zone outside the royal blue Ideas Lab.

But that original leitmotif of self-sufficiency — finding an old loft that nobody wanted, furnishing it with some plywood desks and getting on with it — has all but disappeared, he continues. At the height of the co-working trend, companies started renting floors in new corporate offices in the city, keeping the polystyrene ceilings and carpet tiles but painting some type of inspiring slogan or graphic on the wall. “It became about paying lip service to an idea. Now, when you go into your average co-working space, you will find a team of 20 working for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ innovation arm or something like that.”

Last June, Hayward completed a co-working project that exemplifies what could be a future incarnation for the model, one that combines social impact with genuinely sustainable, low-carbon and affordable design. The client, Sustainable Ventures, is a self-described “ecosystem of climate-tech start-ups” founded in 2011; co-working is just one of its offerings, alongside support, advice and funding for nascent and exciting climate-tech businesses.

“Everyone here is a start-up using technology in some way to save the planet, which is an amazing premise that defined everything we did,” Hayward says as he shows me around their new Central London site. The other element that defined this project was the space itself: a generous 3,600-square-metre section of the fifth floor of London’s gargantuan early-20th- century County Hall, a Grade II listed Edwardian baroque–style building designed by Ralph Knott for London County Council. Though the rest of the building was still in use, that floor, with its crumbling concrete walls and pockmarked columns, had been mothballed for almost 40 years and was in a state of massive disrepair. “The windows were smashed out and pigeons were living here,” Hayward recalls.

A “two-person pod” provides a spot for intimate meetings or phone calls.

What ensued was a master class in doing more with less. Where possible, the architects worked with start-ups inventing materials out of by-products and waste (many of which rent space with or received assistance from Sustainable Ventures). The acoustic ceiling baffles in the café and reception area, for instance, are composed of lab-grown mycelium by a U.K. company called Biohm, which also created the undulated panelling that wraps the bar and reception desk and consists of coffee grounds and food waste, such as orange and beetroot peel, that produces different hues. “The panelling was made using bioresins and gravity rather than any forming processes, so it’s completely low-energy and biodegradable,” expands Hayward. The bar top, meanwhile, features mostly recycled terrazzo and aggregates — a material called Granby Rock fabricated by a Liverpool workshop.

The interior of the events space is kept raw and ready for any type of gathering.

Elsewhere, there are light fittings made out of cardboard tubes, so “the packaging is actually the fitting”; natural lime plaster that prevents mould and uses less energy to make; felt panels fashioned out of recycled airline and army uniforms (by a Dutch outfit called i-did); and modular plywood wall partitions by U.K. firm U-Build, a quarter of which were relocated from Sustainable Ventures’ prior space on the building’s third floor. Everything the architects could keep — such as the hardwood parquet flooring, existing bathroom tiling, many of the doors and even paint finishes — they did. And where they did source new objects or furniture, they tried to use reclaimed items, such as the stained hardwood worktops in the kitchen area derived from a school science lab in Hertfordshire. Some elements are still in the R & D phase and have yet to be installed, including a carbon- negative, moss-based wall cladding system for air purification in the reception area (where the R & D will continue).

The café is a showcase of sustainable materials, including the undulating panelling made of coffee grounds and food waste that wraps the bar and the acoustic baffles made of mycelium, both by Biohm.

“A lot of this stuff has never been made before,” Hayward enthuses. Because a lot of what they have used is so new and experimental, the project — paradoxically — could never get a SKA rating, an environmental benchmark tool for commercial fit-outs offered by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. “In order to get points, you have to go to the larger manufacturers who have the resources to get everything certified…There is a problem in the system somewhere.” To wit: The architects estimate that a whopping 11,150 tonnes of carbon were saved in this project compared to a standard fit-out.

The building is pioneering for other reasons. It pushes the boundaries of what a truly sustainable retrofit’s aesthetics can be, and it aims to understand — and gently transform — what people will accept. “A typical approach for an office would be to cover everything in plaster, raise the flooring to allow for cable runs and floor boxes, and create a suspended ceiling to hide the services,” says Hayward. “By simply not doing those things, you’re making a massive impact in terms of sustainability.” Not everybody likes the scuffed walls and ceilings, the raw concrete columns and beams, or the visible wiring fixed to the perimeter walls, he admits, but many do, because it conveys the character and history of the building and renders “everything a little bit more interesting.” And there’s enough texture, furniture and colour to offset the plywood and natural tones. In many places, the interior’s eco gestures, and their many benefits, are the literal writing on the walls.

Colour is used judiciously but effectively — in the form of blue banquette seating and sofas, and the very vivid blue of the so-called Ideas Lab, a glazed enclosed space near the reception area outfitted with only a desk and a whiteboard. Painted an alluring yellow, the dormer windows of one of the three main breakout spaces frame head-on views of Big Ben, and a low-carbon graphene-based turquoise animates the columns and beams of the events space, housed in a ’70s extension where the raw slanted wall of the building’s former exterior reappears like an excavated ruin. A major advantage of the low-maintenance design approach (where pipes and fan coil units are left exposed, nothing is covered up or finished and most things can be dismantled) is that if some companies need more space, they can be accommodated in a matter of days. In fact, this has already happened — showing the dexterity of this exceptionally thoughtful design.

Achieving a unique identity cannot be underrated in the competitive co-working world. Another London practice, Citizens Design Bureau, has also tried to reshape this realm. “It’s a difficult business model to make viable now,” explains Katy Marks, CDB’s founder, referring to the membership contracts that many co-working spaces require. “People’s lives have become a lot more peripatetic – so there has to be a lot more of a value add that is not just about a desk but about the community offering as well.” 

Marks was also a co-founder of Impact Hub, arguably one of the first co-working spaces to exist anywhere, back in 2005. She had been organizing major events around pressing social, ecological and global issues with a group of friends from school and had struggled to find affordable sites in central London or places that fit their vibe, ethically and aesthetically. “We also felt like we had built up these networks of amazing people and that it was crazy that we were all struggling with renting space, or working in bedrooms or living rooms instead of together in a place that was affordable and mutually nurturing.” Hot desking existed already (though only in more corporate environments and larger companies), and the idea of the shared workspace was also not new. But what was novel was the model of putting those two things together: organizations and individuals sharing space on a hot-desking time-based system. 

An Impact Hub in London’s Islington neighbourhood.

Impact Hub’s ethos and aim was to attract locally based social innovators with opportunities for collaboration and networking as well as to establish a pioneering, for that era, time-based shared workspace system. The look of their first hub in North London was ultra-sustainable – think: cardboard-based demountable furniture with plug in, plug out lighting and heating (from low-emission wood pellet stoves). “It was all designed so that we could make it ourselves and take it away and use it elsewhere if needed,” explains Marks. The combined package hit the zeitgeist and the idea took off, spawning many copycats. Launched as a not-for-profit, Impact Hub, remarkably, still is one – even though it’s now in 110 locations and 65 countries.

Marks moved on from Impact Hub a couple of years after helping to get it off the ground, but has continued disrupting and innovating in the sector. “One of our slogans when we were starting Impact Hub was ‘work isn’t working.’ We wanted people to think about work in different ways. But that moment has passed,” she says. “It has to be much more about creating a community, not just thinking about the work environment but also where you eat, where you socialize afterwards, how you grow and shrink within that space – because most startups don’t have a linear trajectory. We need more of an ecosystem of new ways of working.”

One answer to all these questions is another pioneering project of Marks and her cooperative architecture company: the Hackney Downs Studios, created between 2013 and 2016, which saw a former print factory in East London converted into a workspace community with a theatre, a cafe, childcare, a weekend market and more. This program of amenities taps into the way people don’t see “work and life as a binary” anymore, says Marks, and “the way the boundaries between work and social life have been blurred.”

The multi-purpose Hackney Downs Studio stages a production of Leviathan in 2014.

The latest generation of co-working spaces is more dispersed, less concentrated in large buildings or city centres, and not run by big companies. Some have even opened in suburbs and rural settings. Hackney Downs Studios has opened two spaces in Plymouth, in the southwestern English county of Devon, for instance; and one of Hayward’s clients is considering buying space in a former bank building on a high street outside London’s city centre to convert to workspace. 

As Marks says, people are rethinking everything about how they live and work. “Why do I have to do this ridiculous commute when I can work from home half the week and in a co-working space the other half and have a better work-life balance?” One upside of the COVID-19 era may be that people have been empowered on this front. “I think it has almost turbocharged people’s confidence to the point where they are saying, ‘Why is everyone acting like it’s impossible to live and work like this, when we know it is possible.’”