Spring Fever

With Spring Place in New York—and now L.A.—Francesco Costa is deftly mixing business withpleasure. Jenny Comita reports.

- Mark Hartman

To hear Francesco Costa tell it, even a good day in the office is its own kind of tragedy. “You’re in this white box with your laptop for hours and hours,” says the dapper 45-year-old Italian, who splits his time between London and New York. “You eat a bad sandwich, you sit on random furniture; the lighting is all wrong. It’s very sad, really.” And so he’s set out to remedy that situation. At Spring Place—the Manhattan coworking space cum private club of which he’s CEO—the furniture is an impeccable mélange of midcentury and bespoke; the food is meticulously prepared by an Italian chef poached from Giorgio Armani; and the light, whether it’s emanating from the custom-made, industrial-chic fixtures or streaming in through the oversize steel framed windows, is always just right. “It is a place for work, but you can stop and have a glass of wine,” Costa says over lunch in one of the private dining rooms off Spring’s loftlike, all-day private restaurant, which has recently hosted pop-ups by Caviar Kaspia and Noma.