The race for ever cooler workplaces is leaving employees the winners

• Startups and small organizations are seeking unusual locations that go beyond coworking spaces.
• Established companies like Google and JPMorgan have also been investing in luxe offices.

Kat Hunt never wanted to work from home. But she's fine working from someone else's.

Hunt, whose job is in finance in Portland, Oregon, needed a place for some team members to gather in New York City. So she contacted Radious, a Portland company that lets people rent their homes to businesses as meeting spaces for the day.

Hunt wanted a spot that wasn't your typical WeWork. Her team needed to spread out for some of the day and still come together for a meal. The answer: a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn with a full kitchen, meeting areas, and a smart TV.

"It was definitely a different environment than you'd get in a coworking space," Hunt, the senior director of climatetech and private equity at Earth Finance, a net-zero strategy and financial advisory firm, told Business Insider.

The quest for something different to help bring workers back together has employers spiffing up their offices and startups trying to lure those who can work from wherever — at least some of the time. The result: Fortunate staff members can settle in with their laptops in fancy spots.

Call it work from cool.

That's what Hunt was after when she went looking for something unusual. She was seeking private rooms, a spot with comfy seating for informal meetings, and a big TV for drilling down through Excel files so everyone could see.

"I really wanted that variability," she said. "And I kind of wanted it to be a cooler vibe than some of the coworking spaces I find."

It was also her first in-person meeting with a new team. When Hunt was planning the gathering, she thought about how the pandemic kept many young people from enjoying the types of fun experiences she had when she was starting her career in San Francisco.

"I was allowed to work from home, but I never wanted to," Hunt said. That was a big part of "why I really wanted this first kickoff to be a meaningful day for us as a team," she added. "And I think with us being a semi-remote company, it's important for us to have these touch points."

Radious has a network of rentable homes in Portland, Milwaukee, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The startup now offers a service to help businesses secure meeting spaces outside its primary markets. So it was able to arrange the brownstone in New York for Hunt.

Amina Moreau, the CEO and cofounder of Radious, told BI the new national service helped the company cater to existing customers and understand which new markets might want its services.

"We've gotten to the point where, if there's demand for space, it's fairly efficient for us to go and find homeowners, former Airbnb hosts, and those who have properties that are generally underutilized," she said.

Many properties that are rented out overnight for personal use tend to be busy on weekends but have lulls during the week, Moreau said. She added that the company's business of renting for daytime use only — and for businesses — can help pick up some of the slack.

"Weekdays are our bread and butter, being that we are a work platform," Moreau said.

'It can't just be a white box'

It's not just startups that are trying to appeal to workers. There are former industrial spaces like Y Combinator's new "college town" on a historic pier in San Francisco, Google's office in a former train station in New York, luxe coworking spaces with killer views, and even private homes.

Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup accelerator, moved its headquarters from Mountain View, California, to San Francisco's Pier 70 shipyard to make it more appealing to work in person. In one building, there's a large, well-lit room with wood tables where founders can eat. Earlier this year, Y Combinator expanded into a neighboring building.

Ryan Masiello, the cofounder and chief strategy officer at VTS, a commercial real-estate technology firm, previously told BI that he saw an amenities arms race kick off three years ago when employers realized that calling workers back to the office would prove challenging.

That's led to splashy features like full-sized indoor basketball courts. In New York, Googlers moved into the company's new office in February. The space features terraces and 1.5 acres of plants at the street level of the building, which was built as a rail terminal in the 1930s.

JPMorgan is building a 60-story tower on New York's Park Avenue on the site of the bank's prior headquarters. The structure will feature spaces for yoga, cycling, physical therapy, and other medical treatments. It will also have terraces and a food hall. The company is among the big banks calling workers back to the office.

Clelia Warburg Peters, a managing partner at Era Ventures, a venture-capital firm focused on property technology, previously told BI that many offices would try to morph into something akin to an Apple store to become more enticing to workers.

Trying to find interesting spots for workers to do their thing is why Radious has offered up quirky homes and even a yurt, Moreau said. The company continues to look for new spaces to offer as rentals for businesses — but the spot has to be easy to get to, and it has to have character, she added.

"It's got to be an inspiring space," Moreau said. "It can't just be a white box."