L’Atelier Vancouver: Changing How We Cowork
L’Atelier Vancouver Coworking not only provides a space for the city’s freelancers and entrepreneurs to get stuff done, but also welcomes them to a community of creative people: you may be working solo, but you don’t have to be alone. And wow, how time flies: L’Atelier is already celebrating its first anniversary.
Around five years ago, Atelier founder and director Sabrina Chammas made use of a co-working space in Venice, California while helping to produce The Square, an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary. “It was my first exposure to coworking,” says Sabrina. “At the time it was still pretty new. Most people were in tech, and I was the only one working in film. I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a space like this for creatives?’ When I moved to Vancouver, I thought about this idea more and more. I wanted a nice-looking space.”
That place in Venice wasn’t much to look at, and indeed many coworking spaces that she’s seen since have paid no real attention to design or vibe — they were bare-bones tables-and-internet operations. L’Atelier, on the other hand, is all about exposed brick, white and blonde-wood furniture… and, of course, beautiful plants.
The space itself is only one part of the puzzle, though. Sabrina wanted to bring together creatives without leaving the techies out in the rain. “I wanted people working in different areas to feel like they fit in. ‘Entrepreneurial freelancer’ is a very broad term.”
Some people come in just to do work and don’t care about interactions, but some people do need that social aspect. “Even being around people feels better than being alone at home, even if you don’t talk to others,” says Sabrina. “It is still a workplace, so the best way to socialize is in those little moments in the kitchen, or at the events we organize. We provide the space, we provide the events, but at the end of the day it’s up to each person how much they want to be involved in the community,” she adds. “It cannot be forced!”
This is the spirit behind L’Atelier’s hot-desking partnership with Startup604, Vancouver’s premier network for tech professionals at different stages in their careers to trade knowledge and pool resources. It’s actually the perfect fit.
L’Atelier is becoming more of a family affair, figuratively and literally: “We have members who have become roommates, members who always get lunch together,” says Sabrina. “There are four guys at Atelier who are expecting their first babies within the same few months, so I connected them as an informal support group.”
New Ways of Doing Business
Freelancers and entrepreneurs have schedules best described as… kinetic. It’s not unusual to find yourself at three or four different locations in a given day. L’Atelier’s hourly plan and Gastown location make it easier for freelancers to pop in for a few hours during the course of a multi-client or multi-meeting day without spending a whole co-working day.
L’Atelier is also launching The Focus Journal, a productivity tool that Sabrina and her colleagues originally designed for their own use, but which has been tested among the L’Atelier community for a much wider release. By getting into the product game, Atelier is diversifying the income so that the coworking rates can stay low.
As L’Atelier Coworking cements its presence in the Vancouver creative scene, Sabrina and her team continue exploring new ways to help us work better, alone or together.
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Jordan is a Vancouver-based writer, photographer, and artist. When not committing acts of copywriting, tech and travel-industry journalism, and portraiture, he is the channel manager for Startup604.
