Play At Work

Shanghai has an exuberant new co-work venue: a collaboration between Linehouse and the WeWork in house design team, WeWork Weihai Lu melds history with modernity, opulence with tactility, and fiction with function.

- Luo Jingmei

Along Shanghai’s Weihai Lu sits an industrial brick building, surrounded by ‘longtangs’ (traditional lane houses). Its aged demeanour belies an exciting, new function, as suggested by the words ‘Creatives Welcome’ scribbled in neon light on the historical Chinese stone arches above the entryway. This is the location of WeWork Weihai Lu, the China flagship of American co-work space and service provider WeWork.

Started in 2010 in New York City, WeWork has more than 100,000 members spread across 130 locations worldwide. Their success is reflective of the workspace sharing practice, now a common and necessary industry model for freelance workers, small creative industries, entrepreneurs and start-up companies fuelled by today’s mobile technology and culture.

WeWork is known for picking heritage spaces and transforming them into attractive collaborative work environments. “WeWork loves the charm and characteristics of older buildings. Our design approach is to find ways to bring the building to life, let it be what it is and show off the way it was constructed rather than hiding it behind finishes or with heavy handed interventions,” says Ashley Couch, Senior Associate, Director of Interior Design at WeWork.

Their Shanghai branch has an interesting past as a warehouse for the East India Company, artist studios and galleries, and an opium storage facility in the 1930s. In response, the design team took a page from the city’s 1920/1930s belle époque period when fashion and architecture embraced a mix of Eastern and Western influences.