Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Street-level offices

One of the things that I have noticed while walking around Lyon is that there seems to be a lot of office space right at street level.

And most of it does not seem to have a consumer-facing element where people just walk in off the street.

There’s something nice about seeing beautiful spaces and people sitting at their desks (I walked past people sitting on exercise balls). It’s another way of animating the street.

Personally, I’d love to have an office right at ground level, similar to the above. But it’s not usually where our minds immediately go. We usually default to retail. Or at least I do.

So I’m going to work to remove this blind spot from my mental models. Office right on the street can clearly work really work.

4 responses to “Street-level offices”

  1. jfrochecfea76c825 Avatar
    jfrochecfea76c825

    Also very common in UK and Ireland.

  2. AM Avatar
    AM

    These are usually old retail shop conversions to office, you can tell by the storefront ornament that would have had a sign painted above the door. They’re typically on quieter streets where there isn’t too much foot traffic.

    In other words they’re a form of adaptive reuse of a typology that no longer works. Not sure if it would make sense to create from scratch in a different context, since the historical component is missing. I have a sense that in North America people expect offices to be more private. But I can also think of two architecture firms in Toronto that did exactly that and it seems to work for them.

  3. wright1000 Avatar

    The issue is if they don’t have a form of public interaction they take away street life and turn our cities into picture window architecture.

    1. Brandon Graham Donnelly Avatar

      This can be true. But retail also doesn’t work everywhere. And an office is still eyes on the street.

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