First Look Inside: Design Entrepreneur Yves Behar Re-Imagines The Future Of Work (Space)

One of the best things about being a writer is when you get to interview someone who you would have never thought to write about before—precisely because you simply had no idea who they were. Until you realize who they are.

In industrial and corporate design circles, Yves Behar has a kind of luminous Steve Jobs aura surrounding him. For the past decade and half his firm fuseproject has become synonymous with game-changing ideas that transform companies and reinvigorate brands. The firm’s shortlist includes Bluetooth, Herman Miller, and Birkenstock. But fuseproject’s client list is particularly conspicuous because of how quickly you realize that there’s likely something that you touch or use every day somehow with Behar’s fingerprints on it.

So it makes total sense that the whole concept for Canopy— a shared, curated incubating space that re-envisions where and how the mobile, modern professional works—would come from Behar. “It’s well known that basic things like good design, inspiring light, walking to work—they all create good work,” Behar tells me of his new building in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. “But the solutions so far in our opinion haven’t existed.”

As my parents still like to point out, I’ve never technically had a “real job”, so I’ve never had a real office. Over the past two decades largely thanks to laptops, cell phones, and wireless, I’ve worked from sailboats, helicopters, the bottom of a Mexican cave, and the top of a Redwood tree. I’m writing this story at my kitchen counter, which has been my current office for the past two years. The one floor commute is the best part.

As every mobile professional since the 1990s knows, however, the downsides of the home-based, Starbucks ’ “corporate headquarters” are numerous. Many days there’s little face-to-face contact with anyone other than the UPS driver, which is isolating to collective ideation. There are also tons of distractions—in my case the dishes needing to be washed, and my wife constantly vacuuming while she’s thinking up her next great Forbes’ article on women entrepreneurs from her office on the living room sofa. If your home office is in the basement, mental inertia and creative isolation are further exacerbated by lack of natural light, low ceilings, and poor ventilation.

Behar and his partners, Steve Mohebi and Amir Mortazavi, envisioned Canopy for “mature”, career professionals who can’t or don’t want to work from home yet who’s lives are perpetually mobile. Their concept is based on the premise that where you work has an immediate impact on what you do, the quality of productivity, and most specifically, how ideas amplify in a collective echo chamber filled with other entrepreneurial brains.

“Canopy was born to satisfy a need in the new urban ecosystem,” Behar explains. “Work independence is a huge part of the new sharing economy. Many people these days especially in San Francisco work everywhere because they have to. They also work anywhere because they can. But at the same time they want to be close to home. They want to work where they live.”

The operative word in Canopy’s new workplace concept is the “where”—because for the past five decades few Americans have worked where they live which has resulted in vacant downtowns at night and commuters spending 6.9 billion hours stuck in traffic a year.

“There’s a movement now to bring work back to where we live and to create ‘balanced’ neighborhoods,” Behar tells me. “This brings vibrancy back downtown. It brings neighborhoods alive 24 hours a day. Pacific Heights and specifically Fillmore Street was the perfect place to prototype the Canopy concept because the demand just wasn’t being met.”

The “where” in Canopy’s business model is also expressed through great design. Among many established, mobile professionals the idea of a “co-working” space conjures up images of the movie, The Internship, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson; not a legitimate, professional incubating space.

Which is why the first thing you notice from Canopy’s exclusive new renderings is the purposeful lack of foosball tables, bean bags, and juke boxes. From the ground up, Canopy is designed to stimulate incubation and the amplification of ideas by leveraging simple “natural assets”, like bright natural light, open flow, and a finely-tuned balance between transparent, collaborative workspaces and privacy. Mortazavi and Behar obsessively tested different furniture and spatial layouts, accentuated high-design, and stripped the trivial distractions.

Behar and his partners also strove to be contextual with their interiors so they used local materials like Heath Tiles and salvaged Bay Area wood, and incorporated historical furniture pieces from the likes of Joe Colombo, Don Chadwick, Charles Eames and Alexander Girard. To simultaneously push new notions of collaborative and ergonomic work, they also incorporated contemporary pieces such as Herman Miller’s Sayl chairs.

Once Canopy launches in September, Behar’s vision is that it evolves quickly into a kind of curated entrepreneurial hive built on a diverse mix of self-motivated brainiacs who already have a start-up or two under their belt, or are jumping ship from a successful corporate post to chart their own next big thing.

Says Behar, “Curation is more important today than ever before, and we also know that the right mix of people and types of businesses will be beneficial to our members. Over time, the Canopy concept is about great spaces in great neighborhoods, but also about the diverse membership that is curated.”

Members will have their pick of three workspace options including shared tables, a personal desk, or a private office for up to four people. Canopy memberships range from $650 monthly for a shared table up to $4,000 monthly for a private office. All members will have full use of the concierge-style amenities program, which include five and eight person conference rooms, private phone booths, private Wi-Fi, August Smart Locks for each private office, and a fully stocked kitchen incorporating—what else?—some of Behar’s most iconic product designs such as the Juicero Press and Sodastream sparkling tap water.

As with every idea Behar has, Canopy is designed for fast prototyping and scalability, so don’t be surprised to see the concept spread quickly to other cities.

“We are planning to open in similar neighborhoods across the US first,” says Behar, “And then expand internationally. The opportunity to re-invigorate walkable neighborhoods that lack good independent work spaces, and to give people the work and lifestyle they’ve been dreaming off, we see this opportunity as a universal one."