Dial P for privacy: the phone booth is back
For much of the 20th century, the phone booth was a steadfast and essential installation of modern life, from bustling cities to tumbleweed-strewn desert gas stations.
But to lay eyes upon a phone booth now is to glimpse a relic of a seemingly ancient civilization.
As mobile phone use exploded and the pay phone was increasingly linked to crime, the booth began to disappear. At the same time, workplaces saw the rise of the open floor plan. We all saw (and heard) a proliferation of mobile phones, and with it, the irritating, distracting sound of a one-sided conversation from your cubicle mate.
Now, the phone booth — or at least a variation of it — is making a modest comeback.
When the women-only club and work space the Wing opened its first location in the Flatiron neighbourhood of Manhattan in
October 2016, the interior featured marble tables, pink velvet couches, and one small, windowless, reflective glass-doored room dubbed the Phone Booth. One year later, when another location of the Wing opened in SoHo, eight built-in, glass-doored call rooms were included in the design.
Audrey Gelman, one of the founders of the Wing, explained that the increase in phone booths came “as a direct result of member feedback.”
But these aren’t grimy street cubicles or sterile, forbidding isolation chambers.
“Each room is named after our favourite fictional female characters — like Ramona Quimby, Lieutenant Uhura and Lisa Simpson — and provides members with a quiet space for private conversation,” Gelman said.
Each tiny space is equipped with a power outlet, a shallow shelf, a stool and a quaint, nonfunctional — but highly Instagrammable — retro telephone. (A
third location of the Wing, in Dumbo, which opened this month, has four phone booths hidden behind bookshelves, Cluestyle.)
Five new, maple-sided, portable, modular Zenbooth phone booths were installed late last year at the 17th Street headquarters of Gizmodo Media Group.
Other companies that have recently purchased Zenbooths include Volkswagen, Lyft, Meetup and Capital One.
The Berkeley, Calif, company was started in 2016, and its products range from $3,995 (for a standard one-person booth) to $15,995 (for a two-person “executive” booth). The one-person booth is a soundproof, eco-friendly, American-made box that’s about 36 inches wide and 34 inches deep, with an insulated glass door, a ventilation fan, power outlets and a skylight — and it can be assembled in roughly an hour. (It does not, however, contain an actual phone.)
Sam Johnson, a co-founder of the company, said it produced “hundreds” of Zenbooths a month in 2017. This year, it’s on track to quadruple that production. But he doesn’t call them phone booths.
“We’re manufacturing quiet spaces and privacy,” he said.
Zenbooth is not the only freestanding office phone booth in the game. Companies like Cubicall, Nomad and TalkBox, and others, are offering up solutions to the modern office’s privacy problem.
Thus, the return of the phone booth signals a gesture toward more civility. Talking on the phone for others to overhear, especially in a work environment, has become at best an etiquette issue, and at worst, what Saval calls a pollutant. However small the footprint, the option for privacy is welcome.
As Gelman put it: “Sometimes you just need a minute to yourself.”