The Great Room, South Bridge in Singapore has been honoured with the International Design Award (IDA) 2023!
The IDA recognises, celebrates and promotes legendary design visionaries and to uncover emerging talent in Architecture, Interior, Product Design and more. This incredible recognition is a testament to our commitment to excellence and innovation in coworking space design.
KulörGroup has been instrumental in creating this unique co-working space in Singapore that marries the country’s rich heritage with modern efficiency. Lead designer Christopher Chua’s dedication to hospitality design and mastery in merging history with modernity shines through in our South Bridge location. His creative vision has transformed the iconic Eu Yan Sang building into an extraordinary coworking haven, having meticulously preserved historical features and blending them with up-to-date designs for a captivating mix of old and new. Committed to local codes, The final space boasts private offices, hot desks areas, meeting rooms, event spaces, and a café, all in a setting designed to inspire today’s professionals.
We extend our congratulations to Christopher, KulorGroup, for their creative brilliance and representatives of The Great Room, Norasilah Praseio, Angela Chin and the rest of the Design team for their support and dedication to bringing our vision to life. Thank you to our members and community for being part of this inspiring journey!
The Great Room by Industrious is coworking inspired by hospitality, with 150+ international locations across APAC, US and Europe where members have access to all workspaces in our global network.
Flexibility is the way of the future in the world of work, and on-demand space opens up a whole host of opportunities for businesses. Forget downsizing or upsizing. Now, it’s all about rightsizing by creating a bespoke office space that supports your company mission, and your people. Find out how coworking can help you build an agile business by providing a flexible base to work from.
In the world of workplace solutions, it’s becoming increasingly clear that cookie-cutter offices just won’t cut it.
What happens when your business suddenly expands? When you take on a new project, and you need to hire three new people, but you don’t have any room in your office? What happens if local restrictions mean your business suddenly has to downsize? You’re left with wasted office space – and you’re paying for it with money that could be put to far better use elsewhere.
Evidently, one-size-fits-all solutions do not fit all.
The Great Room One Taikoo Place, Hong Kong
What really suits your team depends on the size of your team, the nature of your work, where your team is, how you work and when you work. It also depends on factors that are outside your control – like pandemic restrictions, economic patterns, and consumer behaviour.
What you need is space that can be rightsized for the needs of your business.
Rightsizing and how it supports your business
Every office provides a mix of individual space – workstations, private offices – and group and amenity space. Individual space probably makes up 30 to 40% of your square footage, yet it gets used most of the time (say, 70% of the time).
Group space and your amenity space, those spaces where people gather, make up 60 to 70% of your square footage, yet they only get used 30 to 40% of the time (according to VenturePoint). These are the spaces in which staff print documents, where they drink coffee, have meetings, and so on.
The Great Room Raffles Arcade, Singapore
Rightsizing happens when you balance group, amenity and individual space against office costs. By rightsizing, you maximise on business savings by only paying for what you need, while creating the ideal conditions in which to optimise employee performance.
Factors to consider in the rightsizing process are square footage; lease terms; usage data (the nature of your spaces, how many of them there are, how that space is used, which spaces are used and which aren’t, plus headcount); and running costs.
Coworking spaces offer flexible solutions for the agile business
Coworking spaces like The Great Room provide adaptable solutions that enable your business to operate in the most agile way possible. With a coworking space, you can work with flex-lease clauses. Your business can begin with a rental contract based on monthly or yearly terms. You can start with a certain number of desks and/or a certain amount of office space, with the option to increase this as your lease progresses, depending on headcount and business needs.
The flexible nature of the coworking space contract was a huge support to PALO IT as their own business changed through the shifts of the pandemic. PALO IT needed to expand their team to more than 50 employees in 2022, and they needed an office for them, pronto. “The Great Room customised a tailormade space for us,” says Jing Lei, Managing Director for PALO IT in Hong Kong. The Great Room split an existing 50-person office in two, enabling PALO IT to slot into one half and accommodate their whole team. This supported our move to a larger space without the hassle.”
As a global innovation consultancy and agile software development company whose mission is to help companies use “tech as a force for good”, PALO IT understands the value of adaptability better than most.
“Businesses have no choice but to transform under the current situation,” says Lei. “Everyone is looking for expert support to structure their new ways of working; support that also meshes with their corporate governance. For instance, implementing an agile-targeted operating model (ATOM) to accelerate transformation into a data-driven organisation. Also, to facilitate teams through automation.”
This is what PALO IT does best, so it’s no surprise that “market demand has accelerated our business’s growth,” says Lei. “The Great Room has been a great help with both our internal and external events, and in welcoming our guests who come to our office.”
The Great Room Ngee Ann City, Singapore
PALO IT needed a collaborative environment where they could welcome clients and other guests, and courteous staff to support this. “It’s comfortable, friendly, and in a great location that’s close to our clients and partners,” agrees Lei. “Not to mention the great staff at The Great Room!”
It’s here that The Great Room excels: its conveniently located venues; the courteous, helpful staff; and the mix of communal and private meeting spaces – from the central ‘Great Room’, which is luxuriously appointed – to the meeting rooms, large and small.
Get customised support for your business at The Great Room
The Great Room also provides all the amenities as part of the coworking package. There’s barista-level, artisan coffee, internet, furniture, access to office equipment such as printers and more. By streamlining the costs associated with group and amenity space, The Great Room, like other coworking space providers, helps businesses balance their office outlays. In this way, The Great Room helps organisations rightsize, and with ease.
The Great Room has seven locations across Asia’s gateway cities. All are located in prime neighbourhoods, with a range of flexible options available for businesses keen to grow but struggling to figure out how to do so. The Great Room’s expert staff are also on hand to provide advice on how to customise your workspace to suit your business needs.
Find out how we can help your business adapt to the flexible future of work. Select the city below for more details.
Flexibility is the way of the future in the world of work, and on-demand space opens up a whole host of opportunities for businesses taking a hybrid approach.
When it comes to work trends for 2022, flexibility is the name of the game. People are choosing – in fact, many are demanding – flexibility; in where they work, when they work and how they work.
Flex is the way forward for everyone from start-ups to established organisations
This shift shows that hybrid, flexible working arrangements aren’t just for start-ups and solopreneurs. It’s not simply for those who are bootstrapping their business, or who are trying to save on costs (although that’s a definite benefit of flexible arrangements). It’s for any and every business that wants to be agile and that wants to expand and contract its workspace based on their needs that month, that week – or even that day.
Take OnTheList, for example. The members-only luxury flash sales company didn’t need a full service office; what they needed was somewhere to host client meetings in Hong Kong’s dynamic Quarry Bay district. “I was looking for a space that could accommodate different needs: meeting clients for coffee to catch up in a formal yet cosy environment with coffee and tea available; somewhere relatively quiet and with private space for business meetings,” says Mathilde Betinas, APAC Business Development Manager for OnTheList.
Ethica Wines, meanwhile, was expanding into the Asia-Pacific region from the US and they needed a Bangkok base for their Regional Sales Manager, Diego Sebastian Todone. “Being the only person from my company in the region and having to travel most of the time (in a normal world), I wanted to find a place that would cover all the needs of a full-scale office with the flexibility that a shared office offers,” says Todone.
“When I was looking for a place to use as an everyday base, I came across The Great Room. When I visited, it was love at first sight!”
For Todone, The Great Room offered all the advantages of having your own office. “It gives me access to concierge and printers, meeting rooms, a high-speed network, and a beautiful space to talk business with clients and partners.”
At the same time, however, a coworking space such as this one does away with the hassles that a traditional office entails: This includes a long-term lease, buying furniture and office equipment and committing to larger floor space to make room for facilities like meeting rooms and pantry areas that are necessary, yet will be underutilised. With a luxury coworking space like The Great Room, you shift to variable costs that you can control.
On-demand workspace supports greater flexibility
The best part? You get to choose what your costs look like by working with The Great Room to create a tailor-made package you can change whenever you need to. The Great Room offers a whole realm of on-demand services to support maximum flexibility.
You could, for example, choose to combine a private office space with hotdesking, like Bangkok-based luxury hospitality group AZOTELS does. This hybrid arrangement gives AZOTELS staff the flexibility to work in a quiet space when they need to focus, or to mingle when they want a more dynamic vibe. They can also purchase The Great Room’s Day Passes on-demand, when they have more staff coming into the office.
Perhaps, like Ethica Wines, you may want to work flexibly and meet your clients somewhere that feels aligned with your brand – somewhere that evokes five-star style. The Great Room’s Hot Desk memberships are the perfect solution, giving you access to the Workhall and Drawing Room, where the elegant surroundings, coupled with an array of lounge seating options, set the scene for connecting with clients and working productively.
Flexible access to the Drawing Room is part of The Great Room’s appeal for OnTheList. “You can select your working space depending on the number of guests you are expecting: you can go for a small coffee table for a one-on-one catch-up, or you can go for the sofa area for larger gatherings,” says Betinas. And “I can create my remote office space whenever I need I can just walk in with the day pass without having to worry about availability.”
For Ethica (Wines), The Great Room’s premium aesthetic and hospitality mindset suits their needs nicely. “The environment is very work oriented; it’s friendly, but at the same time very professional and upscale. This is really important for (us), as it mirrors the image that we want to give to our customers and partners that visit us at The Great Room,” says Todone. “Anything you need, the staff will always help you with a smile on their face. This is super valuable, because it puts you in the best mood to focus on what you have to do.”
Get customised support for your business at The Great Room
With hybrid ways of working increasingly the modus operandi, these businesses demonstrate just how well on-demand solutions can support their businesses in an era when flexibility is the only way forward. Whether you’re looking for regular desk access, a private office for a few weeks, or a meeting room for that important meeting, or a prestigious corporate address, it’s all possible at The Great Room.
The Great Room has seven locations across Asia’s gateway cities, including five in Singapore. All are located in prime neighbourhoods, with a range of options available – from on-demand space to fixed, private workspace for larger teams. Find out how we can help your business adapt to the future of work. Select your city below to learn more.
Find oUT HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS ADAPT TO THE FLEXIBLE FUTURE OF WORK. SELECT THE CITY BELOW FOR MORE DETAILS.
How coworking can complement your company’s talent-growth strategies
The COVID-19 pandemic is unchartered waters for the global economy. It’s a period that calls for all hands on deck—a crucial time for businesses to focus on its people. Of all the fires to be putting out during this critical era, staff attrition shouldn’t be one of them.
Staff retention efforts go beyond engaging your team with stimulating work and enabling career progression plans that allow employees to grow with the company. It’s the soft touches that are just as critical in boosting morale, promoting a sense of well-being, and ultimately, encouraging your superstar workers to thrive during volatile times.
The Great Room Centennial Tower, Singapore
Community War Chest
Hiring right is the first step to any organisation’s talent strategy, but also the most difficult to achieve. Some might say it takes various serendipitous opportunities to recruit the best talent, but there are things you can do to push the needle in the right direction. Putting yourself in the right place, with the like-minded people who can strengthen your work tribe is certainly one way.
One of our members interviewed several candidates to fill a top associate position, but in vain. He then connected with a team member at a recruitment company within The Great Room community. The recruiters presented him with just one candidate, resulting in the perfect person for the job. Each of The Great Room’s coworking space is a natural ecosystem that attracts a diverse, yet like-minded pool of professionals across different industries. It is a community to grow roots and thrive in.
Toughing it, Not Roughing it
It might seem like a natural move to cut expenditures during trying times, but there are ways to do so without negatively impacting staff morale. Moving out from the Central Business District (CBD) to an industrial area in the suburbs might look like substantial savings on paper, however, the disruption it would bring to your team’s daily routine alone could become a push factor; a brain drain that might cost the company even more than it saves.
Transitioning from a leased unit to a coworking venue in a Grade A office with floor to ceiling windows boasting 360 city views, wide or column-free layouts located in a prime CBD spot would make staff feel differently about coming to work. Luxuriously furnished and designed to maximise productivity, our premium coworking destinations in Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok might be your best HR ally. It’s a space that your team will be proud to work in, and one that delivers an impeccable first impression for those all-important meetings, be it with a client or new talent you’ve got your antenna out for.
Monday Breakfast Club in The Great Room One Taikoo Place, Hong Kong
It’s All in the Detail
If a full HR team with the bandwidth to take care of staff welfare sounds like a luxury to you, it’s on the house at The Great Room. Grounded on the ethos of #itsallworkitsallplay, and with the driving force of hospitality fueling service excellence, every touchpoint is humancentric. Mondays start right with complimentary Monday Breakfast Club; a spread of power grub like scrambled eggs, everything bagels and local delights.
But more than that, it sets the stage for connections to be made and conversations to flow. The week closes on an effervescent note, with a Turndown Cart of refreshing nightcaps to ease everyone into the week. From convivial monthly networking nights, engaging team bonding activities to illuminating business learning sessions, The Great Room’s team has it all planned out to reward staff, help recharge, and inspire reimagination of greater things. Not merely a space to get work done, coworking offers employees a community, flexible work options and be at the core of activity and innovation; a purposeful space and mindset for peak levels of productivity.
There is more than meets the eye in the lighting design applied in The Great Room venues
Your hair is perfectly coiffured, your outfit making just the right statement, and the perfect background of your favourite The Great Room venue is set up. You are ready for that big presentation from home, yet somehow, you find yourself not looking quite as sharp on screen as you usually do. What you are missing: the finely calibrated lighting at The Great Room, purpose-designed by internationally acclaimed lighting designers DJCoalition.
Yet good lighting does a lot more than, well, make one look good. “There is a well-researched science behind light and its effect on productivity. In simple terms: light has to enable our visual tasks, encourage connectivity to the environment around us and reinforce our physiology. When it does this, we are more productive,” explains David Skelley, the Chairman of DJCoalition.
“The Great Room has the opportunity to be at the forefront of good office lighting design – which needs to be focused on people and offer personalised solutions,” opines David. “Conventional office space lighting design needs to catch up to co-working spaces where lighting solutions are more flexible and variable to suit the task and the user.”
Drawing Room – The Great Room One Taikoo Place, Hong Kong
Different lights for different tasks
“If you are relationship-building with a member of the co-working community over a drink or two, you want to get everybody relaxed – the lighting needs to be warm and inviting and at a low scale. This means using floor lamps, desk lights, wall lights, sconce lights… not just light beaming down from the seating,” details David.
The meeting rooms, on the other hand, feature three different light settings: brighter wall and ceiling up-lighting to create a more for formal atmosphere; dim ambient lighting with the light focused on the speaker for presentations; and even, neutral lighting throughout the room for video conferences to avoid stark contrasts between faces and the background. Colour correctness is also critical.
At The Great Room, David uses high quality LED lighting that mixes a wide spectrum of lights to recreate a “white” light: “Our physiology needs the whole spectrum of light in natural daylight to function at the right level. It is what allows us to see red as red, rather than a dirty brownish hue; and it gives everybody a healthier skintone for that video call,” shares David.
Stateroom – The Great Room Ngee Ann City, Singapore
In the work hall where members are popping in for a couple of hours to bang out something within short deadlines in between appointments, or someone who needs to turn-off all distractions down and hunker down for some deep work, white light – also known as daylight in the lighting industry – will help one to be more alert and focused. “Optimum light performance at work stations has many variables, such as surface colours, material reflections, type of task, length of time doing the task, time in the day, age and culture of the worker. Thus the best lighting solution is one that is flexible.
One general rule that does help concentration is to have the working surface brighter than the overall ambient light levels, this helps our brains to focus on the task.” He also recommends even lighting in the room so as to prevent the eyes from having to adjust to contrasting levels of brightness constantly, which can cause fatigue.
David cautions against prolonged exposure to white light, though: “Daylight helps you concentrate, but it is not good for long tasks because it creates serotonin and suppresses melatonin. If you sit under a 5000 Kelvin white downlight all day, your body will not get the chance to relax, and wind down at the end of the day, and you will end up feeling tired.”
Be well to work well
Indeed, David’s top consideration when it comes to lighting design is wellness. Wellness in lighting terms has three aspects: good colour quality – where colours are can be perceived accurately, flexibility in brightness settings, and overall room ambience. “People don’t realise how lighting affects our well-being, yet it is so obvious. We are sensitive to lighting – not just how it affects visibility, but also our mood and how we interact with people.”
The Circle – The Great Room Centennial Tower, Singapore
Natural daylight is the optimum light for working, as its natural rhythm of change in intensity and colour during the day fits to our in-built biorhythms, shares David. “Natural daylight also fills a room rendering its surfaces with light to give a comfortable ambience. This background room ambience is as critical as lighting a work surface.” While David feels that there is no such thing as too much natural daylight, he also works alongside interior designers to minimise the chance of glare caused by natural light source.
And while not everybody has the luxury of working in a room with lots of daylight, David prescribes this: get yourself a task lamp over your work desk. “Find something that is adjustable in terms of both brightness levels and angles, and preferably one with a solid metal shade that bounces the light down towards the work surface. Find a design that you love, and plug it in. It is a really simply thing to do for yourself.”
Corporates are increasingly gravitating to coworking, attracted by the simplified set-up process, increased flexibility, reduction of replicated or redundant resources, and bespoke solutions coworking can offer. Director of Enterprise Sales at The Great Room, Sarah Ingham, explains why.
Establishing a new, permanent office in a city requires significant capital expenditure and generally, locking into a lengthy lease. It’s a big financial commitment and highly time consuming — the company will need someone on the ground who is completely focused on finding the real estate and then project managing the office fit-out, handling the various tenders and so forth. Many companies don’t have that personnel in place, and if they do, they won’t necessarily be based in the city where the new office is being established.
One of the biggest advantages we can offer is to act as the client’s representative, a ‘one-stop shop’ providing a turnkey solution for that enterprise company, creating a bespoke fit-out coordinated by our experienced designers in consultation with the client, but where the furnishings, fittings and infrastructure are the property of The Great Room. This allows the company to turn what would normally be a capital expenditure into something that falls under the operational expenditure budget, meaning they can amortize the spend over the term of the contract.
This is another area where we can provide increased flexibility — even for a fully bespoke space, the contract term could be just 12 months; or less in a situation where the enterprise is moving into one of our beautifully designed, pre-existing spaces. That’s a real benefit to a company that may be growing or otherwise fluctuating in size, or one that is perhaps looking to establish a temporary outpost to fulfill the needs of a particular project or contract.
As The Great Room expands and builds new spaces across the region, we’re in the privileged position of being able to work in close collaboration with enterprise clients and construct spaces that are precisely matched to their needs. It’s very much like going to a bespoke tailor, as opposed to shopping for ready-to-wear. Rather than try to slot a client into the spaces we have, we set out to custom-build the perfect solution to fit the client.
Our skilled designers will ascertain the unique parameters and create various options — A, B or C — for clients to choose from. For instance, do they need an exclusive, permanent entrance and reception area of their own, or will sharing The Great Room’s signature hospitality-influenced lobby and common areas suffice? Does a CEO who spreads his time across various international facilities need a permanent office of his own, or can one be allocated as-and-when needed? Are there other transitory staff who’ll need hot-desking solutions? Is a board room, which may only in fact be used a couple of hours per day, really necessary, or would it make more sense to book a shared space whenever necessary?
As commercial real estate costs continue to rise, not least in Southeast Asia, companies are now becoming more conscious of the square footage they’re using and how efficiently it is being utilised. Some companies will insist on having their own reception area and meeting rooms, and we can most certainly accommodate that demand. But for those wishing to be a little more agile, we can help them increase efficiencies by integrating their front-of-house operations and meeting rooms within our coworking facilities, and provide various other anciliary services that will allow them to keep headcount a little leaner and decrease their overall office footprint.
In Singapore, we recently signed contracts with a leading IT security firm and major insurer, both occupying a bespoke space with several dozen desks. Clients like these say they appreciate The Great Room for our high standard of elegant, tasteful design, and that we really listen and come up with a unique solution. It’s not the ‘one size fits all’ situation, common to many other cowork providers. We are delivering a service, and we’re dedicated to providing our enterprise clients with workspaces that are utterly tailored to their needs — today, and in future.
Like a bespoke suit that can be altered as you change shape, The Great Room’s enterprise solutions are incredibly flexible, meaning your space can evolve along with your business and your people’s demands. For a forward-thinking CEO with a long term vision, that’s a very attractive prospect.
