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Last week in the office, the DNM team was looking through all of our listings and caught ourselves saying, “woah, I would definitely love to work from there!”
Jeremy, Sai, Harold and myself looked at each other and decided why not? We are, after all, a company that is providing office space listings for those that need a place to work. Just because we have an office, doesn’t mean we don’t get our own version of office cabin fever once in a while.
So, we made a plan. We’re going to book and work from one of our listings regularly. What better way to tell you about the spaces on our site and the people that work there than working from them ourselves?
(In 2013 we’re going to circle the globe to visit a bunch of other office spaces we list — Let us know if you’d like a visit, no matter where you are in the world!)
This week we decided to settle down at Chromium Works in SoMa for the day.
This space has so much potential. The owner, Tony Wessling, definitely loves his office building. “I’ve been here for 15 years and don’t want to leave,” he says.
Tony first had only his company, Chromium Brands, occupying the space. When the economy had a bit of a downturn a few years back, he decided to sublease parts of his office to other teams and businesses. Since Chromium Brands is a marketing and advertising agency, he wanted only other pr, marketing, advertising or design firms sharing the space with him. He saw the ways that tech companies were sharing space, and didn’t feel the creative juices flowing between people.
“You go into an office where it’s all tech guys and they like to be near each other, but don’t necessarily talk,” he says, imitating how they sit, leaned back in their chairs, arms outstretched, eyes fixated on the screen in front of them.
“They just sit at their computers and type away and code in silence all day.”
Tony did find, however, that a space with only marketing people did have a downside.
“It gets pretty intense, as you can imagine, with a room full of marketing people constantly talking,” he explains. “On the other side, when people needed to focus and get creative, they would move away from others and go sit on their own.”
The building at 440 Brannan in San Francisco used to be a slaughterhouse back in the day, with some of the original rails hidden underneath support beams throughout the building. After that it housed a printing company, whose printing lights still adorn hidden crevices within the walls. The dark room has since become a kitchen, the upstairs an open coworking space of sorts, and individual corner desks sit in a room downstairs across from a multimedia-conference room with bright red flooring and immense windows, flooding the space with natural lighting.
The team definitely loved working there – we didn’t want to leave!
If you’re ever in San Francisco and find yourself needing a place to work, definitely head over to the yellow door at 440 Brannan and introduce yourself to Tony. You’ll love what you find.