The hotelification of offices, with signature scents and saltwater spas

Visitors to the Springline complex in Menlo Park, California, are surrounded by a sense of comfort and luxury often found at high-end hotels: off-white walls with a Roman clay finish, a gray-and-white marble coffee table and a white leather bench beneath an 8-by-4 resin canvas etched with the words “Hello, tomorrow.” Springline’s signature scent — hints of salty sea air, white water lily, dry musk and honeydew melon — linger in the air.

But Springline isn’t a hotel. It’s a “work resort,” meaning that its office space designs have taken a page from boutique hotels.

The complex is a 6.4-acre town square steps from the Menlo Park Caltrain station in San Francisco’s Bay Area. It includes two premium office buildings, nine restaurants, outdoor workspaces and terraces where people can mingle and connect, gym facilities, a high-end golf simulator, an upscale Italian grocery store and a 183-unit residential building. And like any good resort, it has a calendar of community events from craft cocktail fairs to silent discos.

With an office vacancy rate at about 20% in the United States, according to Cushman & Wakefield, downtown business districts are trying whatever they can to get workers back — including resortlike workspaces that match or surpass the comfort of their homes.

The concept comes from “the image of a resort, of a beautiful location or a beautiful building, something that makes you say, ‘I want to see this experience; I want to be there,’” said Matthias Hollwich, founding principal of global design firm HWKN who is designing a work resort complex, Sky Island at Canada Water, in London. “It’s not like home. It’s not like the other office buildings. It’s novel.

“So many people go into the office and say, ‘Why am I here? I could do exactly the same thing at home,’” he added. “So you have to offer something that is better, but it’s not about making it entertaining like a club. People still want to go to work to be efficient.”

Transforming traditional offices into workspaces with hotellike amenities is referred to as “hotelification.” In this new iteration, there is the additional layer of the “hospitality experience,” which Amy Campbell, an architect and senior associate at Gensler in San Francisco, describes as “anticipating the needs of others and then creating accommodations for that.” Campbell said she was seeing hotelification in all sectors, including residences and airports — and called it “a niche market that we’re going to see grow.”

The concept exists in Campbell’s office, she said, an experience she describes as “like walking into a spa.”

“There’s music playing, you can get a drink, you can sit on a lounge seat and work a little bit, or you can tuck into a room and take a quick call,” Campbell said. “The space anticipates all the different needs that someone might have.”

Having those needs met is exactly what makes a workplace go from good to great, according to a recent Gensler workplace survey, which found that simply being a functional and effective place to work is no longer enough. Instead, the survey said the most important factors were “feeling that the space is beautiful, welcoming and inspires new thinking.”

One of Springline’s tenants since 2022 is Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, a law firm. The firm’s old office had no restaurants nearby, and the company was spread out on several floors, said Joe Petersen, the firm’s office managing partner. “I could be in the office and not encounter any other colleagues,” he said. At Springline, where the firm occupies 10,100 square feet on a single floor, the company could “reimagine our office for the postpandemic world,” Petersen said. “We wanted space for interaction and collaboration and flex space.”

The firm has about 22 lawyers, and “on any given day about half are on-site,” Petersen said. He added that the firm’s in-office attendance was “materially better than our peer firms,” which he attributes to the space, saying it had “a buzz” and “draws people out.”

But to make a space feel special and create a sense of exclusivity, “you have to actively manage the space as if you are managing a hotel,” said Cyrus Sanandaji, managing principal and founder of Presidio Bay Ventures, which developed Springline. “That’s a whole new business that developers, institutional owners or incumbent property managers don’t know how to do.”

Last summer, Presidio Bay purchased 88 Spear, a mostly vacant 60-year-old office tower in downtown San Francisco. Sanandaji said the company “will be implementing all the same functions as Springline in more of a vertical setting.”

Other work resort concepts around the country include Habitat in Los Angeles, which calls itself a “live-work-thrive” campus, and the Mart in Chicago, which has 2.4 million square feet of office space that includes tenant lounges, a speakeasy, an upgraded fitness center with private spin classes, meditation pods, an on-site registered dietitian, Normatec compression boots and an infrared sauna, Campbell said.

In London, the 62-story 22 Bishopsgate is home to 25 companies as well as high-end restaurants; a commuter area with lockers, space for 1,000 bicycles and a cycle repair shop; food stalls and restaurants; and fitness facilities.

And Hollwich’s Sky Island at Canada Water is a 350,000-square-foot complex that is expected to break ground next spring and will be between downtown and Canary Wharf.

Sky Island will include two office buildings as well as an open market square with stalls offering food, drinks, music and entertainment. There will be a “laptop bar,” and other communal and individual workspaces, according to Hollwich, who said he coined the term work resort.

Terraces on its upper floors are meant to encourage outdoor meetings, as will the boat the firm plans to keep near Canada Water Dock. The top floor will be dedicated to “relaxation and socializing,” Hollwich said, and feature a saltwater therapy spa. For the commute home, kayaks and bicycles can be rented.

Companies have over the years improved their spaces in the hopes of getting more out of employees. In the 1870s, Larkin Soap Co. in Buffalo, New York, featured airy, light-filled interior lunchrooms, a bathhouse, hospital clinics and a gym. The Connecticut General Insurance Co. building in Bloomfield, Connecticut, completed in 1957, had a small-format Lord & Taylor department store, bowling alley and hair salon. And Silicon Valley tech companies have campuses with video game lounges and volleyball courts.

All are striving to create happier, healthier employees — which will ultimately bump productivity, said Nikil Saval, author of “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.” “There was a kind of perceived discontent among the workforce that drove design changes,” Saval said. There was an idea that “if you made environments better it would address a basic discontent over work.”

Rich amenities are appealing, but will it get people to leave their comfortable homes, endure a long commute and return to offices? Saval, now a Pennsylvania state senator, said he “would not argue against investing in environments conducive to work and people’s well-being,” but he cautioned companies that the concept might not completely fix resistance to returning to the office.

But for Mary Miller, head of business development for investment firm Norwest Venture Partners, the office space at Springline makes what can be a two- to three-hour round-trip commute worth it.

“You get to Springline, and there’s the fountain, and you feel relaxed and refreshed even though you’ve just battled the 101,” Miller said. “There’s so much negativity around office life. I feel like we’re an exception to that kind of talk. I feel lucky.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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