INSIDE THE BEST OFFICE ON EARTH
A spaceship full of ‘members’ with Macs: welcome to the workplace of the future
In the slate-grey 7am half-light, the building glows like a tumescent orange spaceship, throbbing with energy and unreleased power. At first, I was worried I wouldn’t find it, looking anxiously down at my phone maps, and up again at the rows of clothes, coffee and curry shops that line the street. The minute I happen upon it, the idea that I would have to hunt for it seems ludicrous, laughable, almost. Walking past Second Home would be like walking past a fire-pit on a glacier.
Three stories high, and covered entirely in transparent plastic that curves into and away from the façade like a wave, the ethereal glimmer comes from the thousand-odd Bauhaus lamps inside. Even at this unholy time of day, the place is a hive of industry: one guy in a suit talks quietly but firmly into a hands-free mouthpiece while pouring himself a coffee in the café. On the next floor up, two men (one still in full Lycralout cycling clobber) type frantically on MacBooks, while three women convene in a pod, sitting on midcentury chairs, surrounded by 6fthigh climbing plants, to practise a pitch. A curtain is drawn around the middle of the main working space on the ground floor – Tuesday morning yoga begins in an hour.
This isn’t a gym, a global technology giant (like Facebook or Google), nor the aforementioned spaceship. This is Second Home in Spitalfields, east London, a creative hub and freelance workspace, opened nearly three years ago by two of the most connected men in Britain. It’s somewhere you’ve probably never heard of, but where, at this precise moment, the CEOs and founders of the future are being wrought out of hard work, lightning-fast creativity, artisan fair-trade coffee, and some gluten-free peanut-butter cookies that I’ll come to later. It’s a paradigm of virtue – a building that runs off 100% green energy, a company that pays the London living wage. They’re opening two more spaces in London this year, and have already opened up in Lisbon. A temporary installation is soon to open in LA, ahead of a new permanent Second Home there, too. So if you haven’t heard of them yet, you will do soon.
I can still remember the first office I ever went to. I was six years old and allowed to go to work with my dad for the first time. His was an ’80s-style solicitors office near Fleet Street, packed with multi-coloured box files, and set to the soundtrack of a fax machine that mesmerised me. I sat in the boardroom and did colouring-in on stacks of printer paper. There was a stationery cupboard full of green biros and fusty brown envelopes.
It imprinted on me, very early on, that having a really impressive office is a sign to the world that you have made it. Something that – as I sit writing this from my hot desk at London’s coolest workspace, my notepad bathed by the light of an Anglepoise lamp, about to go into the free yoga class all members can access – really starts to mean something.
“An impressive office is a sign you’ve made it”
Second Home isn’t an office as you or I know it. It’s somewhere between a members’ club, the coolest coffee shop you can imagine, a museum and a Silicon Valley start-up that hit the big time. It doesn’t have clients or workers, but ‘members’ – who range from freelance graphic designers, coders and journalists, who take seats in one of the three ‘roaming’ areas, to small FinTech (financial tech, massively a thing, apparently) and FashTech (fashion tech, and ditto) businesses, charities and apps in fourto 30-person studios. Membership is carefully curated, with 20% selected because they do things all growing organisations need (venture capital, recruitment, branding), and the other 80% made of the widest possible range of industries. There are also a few familiar names: Kickstarter has its UK office here, as does TaskRabbit. Multinational law firm Taylor Wessing and EY (accountancy) are also in residence. The clients of some of the members? Google. Adidas. Selfridges.
“We started this place because we saw that the working world was changing,” says Rohan Silva, one of the co-founders of Second Home, and entrepreneurialism’s unofficial pin-up boy. He’s wearing odd socks, and his speech is littered with impossibly apt quotes from other brilliant business brains. In the hour we spend together, he references everyone from science-fiction writer William Gibson to Steve Jobs.
“Half of the new jobs created since the financial crisis have been in self-employment,” he tells me, softly spoken, yet always, always animated. “By the end of 2018, there could be more people self-employed in the UK than working in the public sector.* That’s great, but being an entrepreneur can also be a really lonely place. Here, people get the social benefits of being part of a larger organisation, even though you might only be a team of one.”
He’s not just talking about Fridaynight drinks (which Second Home has in the bar every week – imagine a slightly hipster Disaronno advert and you have some idea of just how good-looking everyone is here) and Christmas parties. That night, I’m going to a talk by the female authors of The Glass Wall (about the new workplace obstacle for women), free as part of the cultural programme all Second Home members can access. There are mindfulness sessions at 4pm most days, and talks by authors, business leaders and MPs in the bookshop they own opposite the main building. I look up from my screen at 3pm, and there’s a woman just reading the paper for no reason in one of the ‘no tech allowed’ reading rooms. I wait, and see if anyone gives her disapproving looks for skiving. No boss comes to fetch her. Now she’s not even reading, she’s just staring at the plants. This is outrageous! It’s a Tuesday! No one bats an eyelid.
Intrigued, I try it out for myself. Then a woman walks in and curls herself into one of the beige leather ›
“It allows for the flexibility creativity demands”
chairs. “I’m, er, just taking some time to, er… I got here at 7am!” I blurt out. It’ll take more than a few hanging baskets to shake off a professional lifetime of presentee-ism.“Me, too,” she smiles. “I’m preparing for our second round of funding, it’s full-on.”
Turns out this is one of Second Home’s FashTech members, Sophia Matveeva, co-founder of Style Counsel, an app that allows users to get real-time feedback on their outfits from a legion of fashion bloggers. She’s not even 34 years old and has had two careers already, has an MBA to her name and is already a CEO – an archetypal Second Home member.
For her, like many people I speak to here, one of the most precious benefits of Second Home is the access it grants her to other members. “When you join, the team here will ask you what your business goals are and who it would be useful for you to meet. Then they send a load of emails for you and – boom – connections that could have taken months or years of networking are already made,” she tells me. “A few months ago I had to hire a designer, but I’ve never done that before. I had no idea how to negotiate, or what questions I should ask. So I posted on the Slack channel, ‘Does anyone know anything about hiring a designer?’ and ended up having a coffee with someone that afternoon who’d been doing it for 10 years.”
Ah, yes. The Slack channel. For those who don’t live in the future, Slack is a messaging platform favoured by hip workplaces the world over. Second Home members join, and can see posts from SH staff [sample post: ‘Friday drinks are at 5.30pm – this week we’re serving… Moscow mules!’], and other members [sample post: ‘Does anyone have a spare MacBook charger?’ LIKE 15 TIMES A DAY]. It’s a digital water cooler, with people griping about facilities issues and trading intelligence.
Sophia also explains how basing herself here helps her attract the best talent.“The chance to work at Second Home is a huge draw, particularly for young people,” she tells me.“If you want to read The New Yorker at 3pm in the afternoon, do it. If you’re more productive at 2am in the morning – knock yourself out. This place allows for the flexibility that creativity demands.”
It’s not just talent that Second Home attracts, it’s money. Itself a start-up funded by investors, you can easily see how listing this as your base could be a kind of calling card. “In the beginning,” Sophia tells me, “before we even had an app or a site, I would invite prospective investors here to meet me. They were impressed.”
She’s right. Later, I have a meeting of my own in Jago – the Scandi-style café that greets you as you enter. My contact, from a company I’ve been trying to work with for months, is in awe. A 20-minute ‘coffee’ turns into an hour-and-a-half meeting. The SH effect is absolute.
Back at my laptop (a lonely Samsung netbook in a sea of Macs), I find that my desk has been colonised by three blokes with backpacks. I’m now sitting in the FinTech capital of London. My new desk-mate Rashid** has not one, but three HSBC mini calculators on his keyring. His business partner has a huge ‘techstars’ sticker on his laptop. I learn this is a prestigious incubator that their business went through. Rashid is speaking at Texan music/tech festival South by Southwest later this year (as you do) and asks if I’m going (alas, I’m not). Another of their colleagues joins just as he hands me a graphic novel about the financial crisis that he’s had self-published. The new guy is sporting a London Business School ‘Class Of 2017’ backpack. I kick my Sweaty Betty gym bag further under the table.
Later in the week, over green tea and those homemade peanut-butter cookies I mentioned earlier, I catch up with founder of Arganic, Dana Elemara. She left Goldman Sachs and started her business, importing sustainably sourced organic Argan Oil, five years ago. She now sells to Selfridges and Ottolenghi.
For her, Second Home’s value isn’t just practical, but ideological. “Every day when I walk in, there’s change happening,” she says, twirling her
jet-black hair. “From the arty outfits the reception team wear, to someone saying, ‘Hey, it’s a hot day, so we’ve got fro-yo for everyone…’ It makes you feel like you, too, can fly by the seat of your pants.” At SH, you are surrounded by role models, spurred on by a gentle competitiveness to do more, do it better, and do it your way.
After a week of working here, I get it. The goal of most offices is to keep homeostasis: to maintain the status quo, have a dress code, uniform lighting and decoration. Second Home turns that on its head. It actively encourages change; from the way the building and ecosystem evolves and swells with its members, to the constantly shifting cultural and #bebetter wellness programme that encourages people to move around to mix up their working day.
It’s a set-up that’s crucial to the formation of what one of the members I speak to calls the ‘slashslash’ generation: the success of Second Home rests on the premise that careers are no longer linear. Charlie, social media manager for SH, is also an illustrator. Corall, head of reception, is also a singer. A lot of the new graduates or freelancers that the businesses here employ demand the freedom to have a collage career, and corporates are going to have to change or risk losing out in the war for talent.
Is Second Home the best office in the world? I’ve not been to enough to know. Is it the office of the future? For all our sakes, I sincerely hope so.