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.