Coworking Club For The Super-Rich Opening On Fifth Avenue
A new coworking firm is coming to New York City, targeting high-end customers willing to pay six figures to join and $36K in annual fees.
The private club, called Colette, will be installed on the 37th floor of the GM building at 767 Fifth Ave., Bloomberg reports. It is a collaboration between restaurateur Juan Santa Cruz and Edmond Safra, who is a member of the billionaire Safra family and has an ownership stake in the building.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” Santa Cruz told Bloomberg. “The world has been evolving for quite some time, and the pandemic has made it more evident that people do not use their offices as much as they think they do, or wish they did.”
Colette is aimed at the über-wealthy who have pieds-à-terre in Manhattan or who come to New York for business and want a high-touch, private office space. The operation will open next year, and it will feature a private entrance on 59th Street. There will be a members lounge and 23 private offices, each spanning 400 SF, per the publication.
Buying a share in the club will cost $125K, plus the annual fee. Only 300 members will be admitted initially, and members will be able to sell their shares if they no longer want to use the facility. Colette members will have access to all the amenities in the GM Building, which still holds the record for highest price tag for a single office building in U.S. history when it was sold for $2.9B to Boston Properties in 2008.
Coworking was hit hard by the pandemic as several operators fell into bankruptcy, but others have made it through the other side and are looking to grow, in some cases offering private offices in a similar vein to Colette.
The club looks to push against the work-from-home trend, which has persisted in New York City. Building occupancy remains at 40% in the city, per Kastle Systems data, below the average of the 10 biggest U.S. cities. Older executives have been found to care more about in-office work than their younger peers.
