- We were given the chance to review the new Jamestown Suite at Colony Co-working Space, currently the most expensive office in Malaysia.
- Specially for Vulcan Post readers, you can get a 30% discount to try working at the Jamestown Suite for a day and this promotion will run for the rest of August 2018. Just send us an e-mail at team@vulcanpost.com and we’ll put you in touch with the Colony team for further details.
When Colony Co-working Space came into the industry last year, they stepped out of the crowd with their premium branding of turning your office life into a 5-star hotel experience.
And after getting the chance to review the KLCC outlet ourselves, I can concur that the team is definitely putting major efforts into making sure they impress with their hospitality and location.
Now they’re taking it one step further with the introduction of the most expensive office you can rent on the market in Malaysia. With the launch of their second outlet in KL Eco City, Colony also adds a new high-end addition to their range called the Jamestown Suite.
Timothy Tiah, CEO of Colony says many coworking spaces and serviced offices have one thing in common: they invest heavily in the common areas but the private offices themselves are very plain and simple. It’s usually just tables and chairs.
After discussing with his team on how they can bring the 5-star experience over to offices, they decided to take it to the next level by going even more expensive.
“Jamestown was the first colony in America, which was at the time a new promised land. So we chose this name because we believe this new concept opens us up to a new market since nobody has ever done this before,” said Timothy.
The space is built across 215 square feet, specially designed to accommodate one person. The rent goes up to RM10,000 a month, costing at RM46.5 per square foot which is over 3 times the highest rentals in KL.
The company is also looking to pioneer the concept of “workcation” in renting the room for RM300 a day.
With such a hefty price tag attached to it, I was intrigued to experience the suite for myself. Luckily, I was given the opportunity to do so last week after the official launch of the outlet.
Nowadays, it’s common for offices to easily assume that decking out a space to the brim is the best way to entice people. I’m more of a minimalist, so the entire overview on a quick glance was instantly appealing. It’s simple because it isn’t overwhelming filled with unnecessary glamourous clutter; it’s classy because it exudes a premium feel with the furnishings that’s there.
The large mahogany desk was the primary area to work at. There were a few items prepared, such as a mug and pens for personal use, along with a display monitor.
An improvement that Colony invested in were the chairs placed in all the offices. Priced at over RM1,800 each, the chair can be adjusted according to the best fit for your seating pleasure.
Across from the desk was a plush sofa which faced the television—I admit, I made a lot of use of it.
Sitting at the bar area, there was a nice basket of treats ready to welcome guests filled with goodies from chocolates (the community managers had to refill the Hershey kisses bowl once I left the office), assortment of nuts, and fine alcohol choices. Unlike most hotels who’d charge them to your bill, these are free.
It was also the perfect place to take phone calls, what with the natural daylight pouring in from the large windows, giving a relaxing warm ambiance around the bar area.
You don’t have to walk out of the office when you need a beverage, because there’s a personal mini fridge right at the side of the bar table.
Google Home, Your Own Personal Assistant
If I were a CEO, the only thing missing in that room was a personal assistant to tell me my schedule for the day.
Which actually came true thanks to Google Home.
I’ve never had the chance to play with the AI system before this, so I was pretty enthused by the whole concept.
Even though it’s a straightforward system where you call out to Google Home to help with something and it responds, it still made me feel like a proper VIP whenever my orders were received.
With the Google Home, you can open and close the curtains or turn the lights on and off on-demand.
I also made sure to test out whether it could find more obscure music (some pretentious-sounding French song) on Spotify and to my surprise, it successfully did.
Whilst working at the desk, I called out for Google Home to play something on TV and without even needing to look up, a Netflix show came on.
Colony shared that it was possible to save multiple profiles on Google Home according to the desired settings you want. So if you want music to play at a certain level, sync your schedule for Google Home to read out loud, and more, this is a pretty handy feature.
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This suite comes as a preview of what Colony has planned for their 3rd location in Q Sentral, which aims to have more of these suites offered but bigger and better.
Timothy shared that as they will have more room to play in Q Sentral, he’s looking to take feedback from how to improve the Jamestown Suite to give an overall better experience to their tenants.
“At Colony we care a lot about our guest experience and that includes the experience they have in their own offices. So we’re pioneering this new concept which we believe will eventually become the standard of the industry.”
So Is It Worth It?
It’s definitely a different experience than what most of us are used to.
One thing I will applaud Jamestown Suite over is that it accomplishes its goal of making you feel exclusive, like you’re a very important and prestigious executive ready to get work done in a premium-designed office.
If you’re looking to indulge in working at the Four Seasons equivalent of coworking spaces, I’d say it’s worth a try.
Timothy added “There’s good demand for hospitality at the workplace. When you talk about community and collaboration, it generally only resonates with a small segment of the market where people want to meet other people.”
“The wider workforce though don’t put a lot of value in community or about meeting people. What they do care about is the work environment and being able to attract and retain the best people in their teams. That’s the market we want to operate at, where people are taken care of at the workspace. ”
Currently despite the fact that we have our own homes, we still pay for rooms in 5-Star hotels with great hospitality because we want the experience of an escape, to be pampered.
So the idea of paying for a temporary experience that is more luxurious isn’t new to us, and it’s something that most urban Malaysians wouldn’t mind forking money out for either. So why not apply that concept to work so that we can enjoy it better?
Perhaps then we may be less dependent on short getaways to escape work.
This article was written in collaboration with Colony.
