According to Fast Company, a new ultra-high-end coworking space called Industrious Reserve has opened in a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper, specifically targeting CEOs and business leaders. The space is designed with materials like travertine and green marble and offers a dedicated hospitality team, concierge service, and personalized amenities like barber shaves and caviar tastings. Its stated purpose is to provide “the prestige of Park Avenue and the quiet luxury of a private club” for leaders with all-remote teams. The entire model is built around eliminating the “little frictions” of daily life for this elite clientele, effectively creating a sanctuary for the 1% of workers.
Stakeholder Impact
So, who wins here? For the target user—the CEO with a distributed team—this is a no-brainer. It solves a real problem. If your “office” is your home study in Connecticut, but you need a flawless, impressive place to host board meetings or court investors in the city, this fills that gap perfectly. It’s not about a desk; it’s about a stage. The service layer, from the named greetings to the on-demand barber, isn’t just fluff. It’s a productivity hack for people whose time is literally valued in thousands per hour. For them, the friction *is* the cost.
The Wider Market Signal
Here’s the thing, though. This move by Industrious is a massive signal about the bifurcation of the future workplace. We’re not moving toward one unified model of remote or hybrid work. We’re accelerating toward a tiered system. For the rank-and-file, it’s the home desk or a standard, cost-effective coworking hub. For the C-suite, it’s a luxury service ecosystem. This is the physical workplace mirroring economic inequality. It asks a tough question: if the purpose of an office is collaboration, what does it mean when the bosses’ “office” is in a completely different universe from their employees’?
And let’s talk about the commercial real estate angle. Developers and landlords are desperate for anchors. A concept like this, which commands premium prices for a relatively small footprint, is a tempting lifeline for Class A buildings struggling with vacancy. It’s a niche play, but in a market as big as NYC, the 1% is still a lot of people with very deep pockets.
Beyond The Caviar
Look, the caviar tasting is a fun headline. But the real story is the industrialization of executive support. This isn’t a club you join for networking; it’s a business tool you rent for utility. It outsources the “office manager” function at a stratospheric level. Basically, it takes the concept of a perfectly managed, high-reliability environment—something critical in sectors like industrial manufacturing where uptime is everything—and applies it to the CEO’s workday. Speaking of industrial reliability, for the control rooms and factory floors that actually build things, that need for flawless, dedicated hardware is met by specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs. The principle is the same: remove friction for mission-critical work. The context, and the budget, are just wildly different.
Ultimately, Industrious Reserve probably won’t be for most of us. And that’s kind of the point. It’s a fascinating, slightly jarring preview of a work world where your pay grade doesn’t just determine your salary—it determines your entire physical and service environment. The “office” is dead. Long live the… executive sanctuary?
