Is your office seductive?

Nobody needs to be told to go to Soho House.

The light is right. The noise level is calibrated. Every surface has been chosen with intention. You order another drink not because you need it, but because you do not want to leave.

That is not an accident. It is the result of deliberate design thinking applied to a single objective: make this place impossible to resist.

Now consider your office. When did you last walk in and feel anything at all?

The brief has changed

For decades, workspace design followed a logic rooted in efficiency. Desks per square metre. Meeting room ratios. Utilisation rates. The office was a machine for processing work.

That brief is obsolete.

AI is taking over the thinking that used to fill the day. What’s left is the work only humans can do, the calls, the connections, the culture.

That work doesn’t happen at a screen. It happens in a room.

So, the office has a new competitor. Not the commute. Not the kitchen table. Everywhere. And the only way to win is to build a space worth choosing.

The answer is atmosphere.

What hospitality understands that offices do not

The question for every business reviewing their workspace is not how many desks do we need? It is: what does this place say about us?

Soho House sells access, yes. But what it really sells is the story its members get to tell…about their taste, their network, their world. The photo from that corner table. The client dinner in that room. The unspoken signal that you’re the kind of person who’s here.

Commercial workspace operates the same logic, whether businesses acknowledge it or not. Your office is a statement that runs before every meeting, every hire, every pitch. Location and price are always in the calculation. But image, what your space communicates about who you are and how seriously you take your people, is the variable that moves the people who matter most.

Pull, not mandate

The most successful workplaces being designed right now share something with the best members clubs: they create pull. And that pull extends far beyond the main floor.

A place to be seen.

Think about the bathroom at a great hotel. The quality of the materials, the lighting designed to flatter rather than flatten, the sense that someone thought carefully about how it would feel to use it. Now think about the bathroom in most offices. The gap between those two experiences tells you everything about how seriously a business takes the people inside it.

The same logic applies to every amenity space. A gym that actually has what you need: proper equipment, good showers, somewhere to get ready that does not feel like an afterthought. A changing room where you would genuinely want to freshen up, do your makeup, start your day feeling like a person rather than a commuter. These are not perks. They are signals. They tell your people, your clients and your recruits exactly how much you value the experience of being here.

Nobody lingers in a space that makes them feel invisible. Nobody goes out of their way to return to one either.

Leeds as a city actually has some brilliant local examples of this done right, across hospitality, hotels and everyday spaces.

Dakota Hotel on Greek Street is tucked away in a pedestrianised square, its dark and intimate interiors providing a calming influence the moment you step inside. A reviewer described the transition from street to lobby in seconds, broad daylight to a dark, scented, music-filled cocoon. That is a considered arrival experience, and it is no accident. The Ivy Asia in the Victoria Quarter designed everything to dazzle from the floor up… literally, with a Sakura-pink entrance lobby, an emerald, green dining room, illuminated agate underfoot, and cherry blossom installations overhead. It is unapologetically theatrical, and people book it months in advance because of it. Sonder in the Grand Arcade is the quieter counterpoint, a retro-influenced café and lifestyle store that its venue manager describes as a sanctuary from the relentlessness of day-to-day life, a place where visiting becomes a key part of the day rather than a transaction. Three entirely different experiences. Three spaces that understood their brief was emotional, not functional.

The better news is that some Leeds workspaces are starting to get this right too. No1 Aire Street, in a restored Art Deco building and put a rooftop terrace on top of it. Clockwise on Greek Street is described by tentants as the kind of design that makes recruitment slightly easier. Department at New Dock, described as a work, wellness and social destination. And finally humanSpaces at 10 South Parade (Chameleon’s proud home in Leeds) understands something most offices completely miss: that the experience starts before you sit down. A warm welcome at the door. A scent that hits you right. A speciality coffee shop at the heart of the building. None of it is accidental, and all of it makes people glad they came in.

None of these places are asking people to show up. They are making it unreasonable to stay away.

Now ask the question again. Does your office do any of that?

The spaces that create loyalty

The workplaces winning right now are not mandating attendance. They are making the office too good to stay away from. Not through grand gestures but through the accumulation of considered details: the kind that make someone think, consciously or not, this place was designed for me.

A place to be seen. A place to recover. A place to arrive at feeling one way and leave feeling another. That is what the best hospitality experiences deliver, and it is exactly what the best workplaces are now being asked to do.

Every touchpoint matters. The coffee. The lighting in the bathroom mirror. The quality of the gym equipment. The moment of unexpected beauty in a corridor that makes someone pause. Individually they seem small. Collectively they create an environment that people choose, repeatedly, over every alternative available to them.

If you are planning a workspace project this year, start with a different question. Not what do we need, but what do we want people to feel from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave.