Just a stone’s throw from the central train station, the Spaces Place de la Gare spans 6,400m2 across seven floors of the newly renovated Impulse building, site of the former KBL headquarters. 

In addition to 159 offices and 77 coworking spaces, the site has six meeting rooms. A fitness area (including showers) and screening room are also part of the layout. On the main level, there’s also a “Superfoods” café, which will also be open to non-residents. 

The site offers “ideal coworking”, according to William Willems, regional general manager for Luxembourg and Belgium, and there was emphasis on the design to make the space “feel like home”. Natural lighting and wood features contribute to that, and breakout and quiet rooms provide ample room for additional privacy. Businesses can also have larger, private office areas tailored to their needs, for example with special partitioning, or by bringing their own furniture. 

The coworking space spans 7 floors and includes six meeting rooms. Handout photo.

“A lot of people say coworking’s something trendy or fashionable that will disappear in a few years’ time. I think the way people work in the future will change totally,” Willems said. 

He says it’s getting even easier for work to be done remotely, particularly as 5G ramps up. 

But there’s also a growing appetite for flexibility as well--not just for millennials, or employees more generally, but also for employers. 

According to a 2019 EMEA Occupier Survey published by CBRE, flexible space use for retaining and attracting talent increased 10% from the year prior. 

“We’ve got plenty of large corporations--Google, Ebay—saying for anything under 200 or 300 square metres, they don’t want to use [their] own premises…they want to be flexible,” Willems says. “Financially it’s cheaper, easier to manage and flexible to move contract from one country to another.”

Of course, much of the appeal to the new space is its proximity to the central train station. Spaces’ business model means that most of their sites are “accessible by big transport--the car is not the future anymore,” said Willems. 

8 sites in Luxembourg by 2022

The Places de la Gare site is currently at 30% occupancy, although Willems anticipates this will grow to at least 80% by year-end. It should attract freelancers, entrepreneurs and larger companies alike, although Willems says the largest proportion of its customers at the location fall into the latter category.

At the time of writing, two other sites had been confirmed, including Spaces Boulevard Royal, scheduled to open by June 2020, which will offer 4,500m2 of space across four levels in the former BGL BNP Paribas building. 

Another location at the Cloche D’Or, scheduled for construction, should also be operational by early 2022. 

The overall plan, however, is to have all 8 sites open by end-2022.

The ambitious strategy hasn’t just been for Luxembourg, however: Spaces more than doubled its locations over the past year, opening some 160 locations to bring the new worldwide total to 388. 

Monthly subscriptions to the coworking space start at €226 for access to the basic coworking space, or starting at €386 for private office use, with add-ons for additional services. With a subscription, customers gain access as well to all 388 worldwide Spaces sites, plus access to the broader 3,500 working spaces in the network, mainly through Regus locations.