LOT-EK's renderings for Spacious's co-working hotel

Live-sleep-eat-in-it office space unveiled

Hotel in a shipping container aims to capitalise on underused urban space - good bye work life balance. .

The rise of the shared office knows no bounds. While individual co-working spaces are mushrooming in towns and cities across the globe, both fledgling and established chains are stretching their reach ever further.

Now the New York City real-estate firm Spacious has pushed the co-working compact a little further still, with the unveiling of its plans to create a ‘co-working hotel’.

Spacious’ founder, Preston Pesek, drafted in architects LOT-EK to execute his vision, which adds hotel beds into the usual open-plan office space offering.

 

LOT-EK's renderings for Spacious's co-working hotel
LOT-EK's renderings for Spacious's co-working hotel

Pesek picked the firm, because Spacious hopes to construct its multipurpose space from repurposed materials. LOT-EK’S team has spent the last few decades reimagining the uses of shipping containers, “as both a source of inspiration, as well as a source of materials from which to create buildings,” and has worked them into these designs.

To associate shipping containers with a company called Spacious seems a little specious, but LOT-EK hopes to avoid any cramped sensations by sawing through the boxes to create a central atrium and then glazing the outside wall so that the interior workings of the ‘hotel’ are open to the street.

“At every floor stepping balconies look into the atrium and are used as shared work space,” Spacious explains, meanwhile, “Private hotel rooms that turn into private offices open directly onto these balconies.”


LOT-EK's renderings for Spacious's co-working hotel
LOT-EK's renderings for Spacious's co-working hotel

The hotel rooms in Spacious’ concept double as office workstations, as the beds can be hidden away. Meanwhile, hotel guests can put their gear in the room’s lockable storage and sublet their room when they’re not using it.

This next phase in co-working makes logical sense. The shared-office chains are already opening branches overseas for their globe-trotting members – US company We Work has sites in Israel, The Netherlands and the UK. Why not combine that with a sleep over?

For more progressive, new building projects sign up for a free trial of the Phaidon Atlas, our peerless online resource; take a look at LOT-EK's page here.