Good news for the remote workers of Providence: There's a new coworking space in town.
Westwey Club, which opened this fall, offers a mix of flex desks and private offices on the 11th floor at 1 Turks Head Pl. For $200, you can get a four-day pass to the decidedly non-exclusive "club," while $600 a month will get you a full-time working pass. Shell out $800, and you can get your own dedicated desk.
"The reality is, markets like ours, markets like Providence, are way underserved," said Tom Nardacci, founder and CEO of Westwey Club's parent company, Aurelius Coworks, which is based in Troy, N.Y. "When you look at the commercial office market total, a market like Providence should probably have a million square feet of flexible space."
Nardacci recalls his own experience 15 years ago, when he launched the public relations firm Gramercy. He had just moved back to upstate New York after years of working in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Gramercy began in Nardacci's bedroom. Once he had the proper infrastructure for his business, Nardacci decided to level up: He signed a five-year lease on an office space. Then, two and a half years in, he had to break it — and ended up paying his landlord $50,000.
"What a huge distraction for a startup," Nardacci said. "If I had a place like Westwey Club when I started my business, I would've gotten that business off the ground five years sooner."
Westwey Club includes 23 private offices that could comfortably fit between two and five people, open space with flexible desks and couches and armchairs sprinkled throughout. The design incorporates most of the building's original layout. Nardacci's team preserved and retrofitted the private offices, including their materials; the design works around the original woodwork.
The furniture is sourced locally from Peabody Office Furniture in Boston and W.B. Mason in Brockton, Massachusetts. Pops of color stick to a blue-and-gold palette, not unlike other coworking spaces in the Aurelius portfolio.
A pandemic is an unlikely time to open a coworking space, to put it mildly. To keep its members healthy, the Westwey Club team has signed a contract with Cintas to provide hand sanitizer stations throughout the space. The team also conducts hourly wipedowns and extra cleanings, and Nardacci had the building's landlord install MERV 13 air filters, which can trap viruses.
Nardacci imagines Westwey Club serving a variety of clients: one-third early-stage founders, one-third small businesses and one-third remote workers. And those won't be confined to tech. In the design hub of Providence, Nardacci wants to welcome creative professionals — designers, marketers, web experts and more.
"Why Providence? First of all, Providence is dope. There's amazing things happening in downtown Providence," Nardacci said. "I chose Providence because of the commitment by the city and state to develop downtown, the restaurants, the arts scene, the cultural scene, the proximity to colleges and universities — and the fact that they're actually downtown — and the plans for apartment development to bring people downtown."
Want to take a look inside the Westwey Club? Click or swipe through the gallery below.
