New York-based WeWork operates shared work spaces in three cities and opens its first Seattle space next month. This building in Los Angeles, like most of its spaces, features lots of glass and light. (Photo: WeWork)
The first floor of WeWork’s Seattle space, which opens Feb. 1, will feature an events space near reception and a large room for open coworking. Desks start at $300 a month. CLICK TO ZOOM. (Photo: WeWork)
Inside new construction on the corner of Yale Avenue North and Republican Street, builders are busy.
Seattle entrepreneurs are sporting hard hats to tour three dusty floors of 500 Yale Ave. N., and the crews have fewer than three weeks to turn its skeleton of wood, glass and metal into the largest, most ambitious coworking space Seattle has seen.
When it opens Feb. 1, the WeWork space in South Lake Union will show how neighborly work habits have become.
The 55,000-square-foot space will fit more than 800 workers — 57 at long, shared tables on the first floor and the rest in glass-walled rooms housing from one person to 18.
But what will make this assembly of desks a “coworking” space won’t be proximity. it will be pingpong tables. Unplanned happy hours. Regular talks and mixers on the first floor. It will be the free coffee and free beer (yes, beer), the décor fit for some hip young magazine and, if activities at any of the 15 spaces the New York-based company currently operates spread, crazy things like Mario Kart tournaments.
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