A Co-Working Space (With Caviar Benefits) Is Coming to Lever House

Next spring, the financial firms and hedge funds of Lever House, the mid-century trophy office tower known for its blue-green shimmer, will be joined by an unusual tenant: Industrious, a co-working company, which is taking over two floors.

Industrious has, as its name suggests, tried to differentiate itself from competitors like WeWork by offering co-working with a more professional atmosphere — shared workspaces without the Ping-Pong table and tequila vibe. (It was, fittingly, acquired by commercial brokerage CBRE for around $800 million in January.) It already offers higher-end co-working spaces (and has partnered with Equinox on some offices), just not, until now, this high-end. The company’s Lever House venture, known as Industrious Reserve, will be its first foray into luxury co-working, at a building that defined the look of glamorous modern corporate life in the 1950s. Here, the likelihood of bumping into 20-something freelancers and founders of fledgling start-ups at craft-beer mixers is pretty much nonexistent.

A rendering of one of the private offices in the space.
Photo: Industrious

Instead, Reserve is intended for established professionals and small firms that want all the perks of a trophy office space but don’t need the scale of one — like a family office or private-equity firm that isn’t large enough to rent an entire or half-floor of a building like One Vanderbilt or the New York–based executives of a company with headquarters elsewhere. “We’ve noticed that in the higher-end spaces, where we keep pushing up pricing, we can’t keep up with demand,” says Jamie Hodari, the CEO and co-founder of Industrious, who’s also CBRE’s chief commercial officer and CEO of building operations. “And the lower-end Industriouses, say, spaces we took over from other providers, which you would think people would be drawn to because it’s a bargain, have the lowest demand. This very much speaks to the moment we’re in now.”

The fact that co-working is now moving into the trophy office space is not really so surprising — trophy buildings, and the types of Fortune 100 companies that occupy them, have thrived since the pandemic. Ever since offices had to compete with the comforts of home, banks and finance firms have offered luxe perks to employees in exchange for a full return to office. (Less flush companies, meanwhile, have generally exchanged larger far-flung offices for smaller centrally located spaces that employees don’t have to visit every day.) And while more office landlords have started offering flex space in class-A office buildings — that is, pre-built smaller office spaces with flexible lease terms — Hodari notes that even the very nice office buildings leave something to be desired when it comes to hospitality. (Over 90 percent of Industrious spaces are already in class-A buildings.) “You might walk in every day through a gorgeous $40 million marble lobby, but you’re serving yourself from a Keurig and someone is putting out a bag of snacks that’s gone by the end of the day,” he says. At premium Industrious locations, there are nice pastries and fresh fruit, but the spaces aren’t staffed to the level of an Aman or a Michelin-starred restaurant — the stomping grounds of the intended Lever House clientele.

The shared spaces, as shown in this rendering, will include lounges with Shou Sugi Ban wood furniture and staff including baristas and mixologists.
Photo: Industrious

At Industrious’s Lever House location, instead of, say, an unattended percolator with a pot of coffee that slowly burns over the course of the morning, there’s a barista ready to make your drink of choice. Rather than West Elm–level furnishings (or worse, Wayfair), there will be tables topped in Italian marble, lounges with Shou Sugi Ban wood furniture, and a staircase made of the same travertine that’s used in Lever House’s plaza. And when you’re ready to unwind, a master mixologist will make you a drink with top-shelf alcohol; you can also drop into events like a caviar tasting hosted by Russian Standard Vodka. On some days, barbers will be available for beard trims, and lunch will be delivered to members’ offices with options like hand-rolled sushi made on-site. Building amenities are included in the membership as well, like access to the Lever Club, the building’s private club with two huge outdoor terraces, a bar, and a restaurant.

But what about the workspaces themselves? Instead of hot desks and phone booths, windowed private offices, most facing Park Avenue, will feature, in the words of Industrious president Anna Squires Levine, “turndown service.” It’s the office equivalent of what you might find at the St. Regis: At the end of the day, someone will make sure your office is restocked with your preferred snacks and favorite beverages, replenish your office supplies and put them back where they should be, and set the blinds to the level you like — the sort of thing that someone like a secretary might have seen to in decades past but that is now the responsibility of the (much rarer) executive assistant. All of this will be substantially more expensive than a $500 hot desk at a second-tier WeWork location: $25,000 to $45,000 a year for memberships with additional costs for private office suites. And it’s limited to a select few: There will be 44 private offices and a small number of additional memberships for, say, the out-of-town executive who mostly just needs a place to take meetings. “It’s a workspace, and it will function as a workspace, but it will have things in common with a members’ club,” says Hodari. “It’s the kind of place where, at the end of the day, you want to stay for a cocktail or a lecture from a Columbia professor. It’s not the kind of place where you’re going just to get credit from your employer.”

A rendering of the library, one of several common spaces in the c-suite co-working space.
Photo: Industrious

There’s an added perk of working at Lever House, Levine noted: Unlike some of the office behemoths that were built later on, the building has some of the smallest Midtown floorplates — each floor is about 8,400 square feet. So the space is filled with that rarest of office building amenities: natural light.

The company already has some members committed to the space, and Levine says the expectation is that all the offices will be taken by its opening in April. If all goes well, Industrious intends to expand the concept. I asked Levine what she made of the demand for trophy office space since the pandemic. “I think today, when people are choosing to come into an office, it’s not only to see other people but to feel like the best version of themselves,” she says. “They want to walk in and feel like, I’m a boss. I deserve to be here.”