Need a quiet place to work? How about a phone box? A new British company is leasing fifteen phone boxes from BT in order to turn them into tiny co-working spaces with all the modern creature comforts you could imagine.
Bar Works, which already has more traditional subscription-based offices in New York, has selected phone boxes in London, Leeds and Edinburgh for a professional makeover. The phone boxes will be fitted with a tiny desk, Wi-Fi, a printer/scanner, a powerbank, a 25-inch HD monitor, a wireless mouse and even a coffee machine. It’s hard to imagine all that fitting inside a phone box and leaving room for a full-size human to work ergonomically, but a clever design could allow it.
For £20 a month, you can subscribe to the service and use any Pod at any time (assuming someone else isn’t in it already, of course).
The Bar Works service is aimed at entrepreneurs looking for somewhere a little different to get work done. The company’s CEO, Johnathan Black, says that “entrepreneurs constantly on the move need a convenient, affordable and private place to work. Why should they sit in Starbucks or any other coffee bar when using one of our Pods will allow them to truly focus on their job before an importanting meeting or presentation at less than the price of two cups of coffee a week?”
The Pods may be cheaper, but it remains to be seen how effective they’ll be as co-working spaces. Phone boxes are traditionally targets of vandalism and theft, so it’ll be a challenge for Bar Works to keep them in operation in the long term, let alone turn them into professional fortresses of solitude. Still, it’s an interesting idea and it will be fun to see how it goes. Presumably if all goes well — and this isn’t just a PR stunt — we’ll see many more phone-box-cum-office in the years to come.