A swimming pool, climbing wall and pickleball court may grab the attention, but the most interesting part of Dojo’s new Barcelona workplace has little to do with leisure facilities.
The British payments company has moved its Spanish team into Aticco Diagrame, the large coworking campus in Barcelona’s 22@ innovation district. Aticco describes the building as the largest coworking space in southern Europe, with around 20,000 square metres of space and capacity for more than 2,200 professionals.
For the flexible office market, the move is another example of an important shift. Coworking is no longer simply an alternative workplace for freelancers and small startups. Increasingly, it can function as ready-made infrastructure for established companies entering a market, growing a regional team or avoiding the commitments that come with a conventional office.
From coworking desk to corporate base
Dojo is not a two-person startup looking for its first desks. The payments provider operates across several European markets, including the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy and France. Its Barcelona team covers functions including sales, regional management, account management, business development and talent acquisition.
That makes its choice of workplace significant.
Traditionally, a company building a substantial local operation might have searched for a conventional lease, negotiated terms, commissioned a fit-out and assembled the services required to run an office. That process can make sense for a mature, highly predictable operation, but it also requires time, capital and a relatively firm view of future headcount.
A managed or coworking environment changes that equation.
Instead of building the workplace infrastructure first and then growing into it, companies can plug into an existing ecosystem. Meeting rooms, reception, connectivity, communal areas, maintenance and employee amenities are already operational. Depending on the agreement, businesses can also have dedicated or customised space while benefiting from the wider shared environment.
For a company expanding in another country, that flexibility can be particularly valuable. Hiring rarely follows a perfectly predictable curve. A sales team may grow faster than expected, a new product line may require additional staff, or market conditions may change.
Flexible workspace effectively reduces the number of long-term real estate decisions a company has to make before it knows exactly what its local organisation will look like.
Large coworking campuses are changing the proposition
Scale is an important part of the Dojo story.
Aticco Diagrame opened in Barcelona’s 22@ district earlier this year and was already reported to be 75% occupied around its official opening in May. The campus combines private and customised offices with traditional coworking options and extensive shared facilities.
This type of property is quite different from the image many people still associate with coworking: a relatively small floor filled with hot desks, freelancers and early-stage companies.
A 20,000-square-metre flexible workspace can accommodate a much broader mix of users. Independent professionals and startups can work alongside larger corporate teams, while the operator can offer companies enough space to create a meaningful local office without requiring them to take responsibility for an entire building.
That matters because the competition in flexible workspace is increasingly about more than flexibility alone.
If several providers can offer shorter commitments and furnished offices, companies will begin comparing the quality of the overall workplace: location, transport links, food, wellness, meeting infrastructure, sustainability and the employee experience.
Diagrame takes that approach particularly far. Alongside its offices and meeting facilities, the campus includes a gym, restaurant, terraces, swimming pool, climbing wall, gaming areas and pickleball facilities. The building also holds LEED Platinum certification.
These amenities are not automatically the reason a company chooses flexible space. But they demonstrate how operators are trying to package services that would be expensive or impractical for many individual occupiers to provide themselves.
Flex can make international growth less real-estate intensive
The broader lesson for office operators and landlords is that corporate demand does not necessarily mean corporate tenants want traditional leases.
Businesses still need physical workplaces. They need somewhere to meet clients, onboard employees, collaborate, train teams and build a local culture. What is changing is the assumption that satisfying those needs always requires controlling a conventional office for many years.
Flexible workspace can separate business growth from real estate commitment.
Imagine a company entering Barcelona with 30 employees and plans to reach 80. Under the traditional model, management has to decide how much future growth to accommodate before signing the lease. Take too little space and the company may need to move quickly. Take too much and it pays for empty desks while waiting for the team to grow.
A flexible operator can absorb part of that uncertainty.
For corporate real estate teams, this creates another tool between remote work and a traditional headquarters. Companies can maintain major long-term offices in core locations while using managed and coworking space for regional teams, project groups, new markets or periods of rapid growth.
That makes flexible workspace part of portfolio strategy rather than an exception to it.
What this means for coworking operators
Corporate occupiers also change what operators need to deliver.
An attractive lounge and good coffee are not enough when clients are running important business functions from the space. Larger organisations expect reliable connectivity, security, professional meeting facilities, operational consistency and the ability to protect their own culture and identity inside a shared building.
Operators therefore face a balancing act. They need enough standardisation to operate efficiently, but enough customisation to make a corporate client feel that its office genuinely belongs to the company.
The most successful large coworking campuses may increasingly resemble business platforms: part office, part hospitality environment and part managed infrastructure.
That is a more demanding proposition than selling desks by the month. It is also potentially a much larger market.
The office is becoming something companies can access, not just lease
Dojo’s Barcelona move is only one transaction, and it would be too early to treat it as evidence that conventional leases are disappearing. They are not.
But the decision illustrates how much the flexible workspace proposition has matured.
For a growing company, the question is increasingly less about whether coworking is suitable for “real” businesses. The more practical questions are whether the location, privacy, service level, scalability and economics fit the organisation.
As flexible operators build larger and more sophisticated campuses, they can answer those questions for a wider range of occupiers.
For landlords, operators and employers, that is worth watching. The next phase of coworking growth may not come primarily from convincing more freelancers to rent desks. It may come from giving established companies a faster and less capital-intensive way to enter cities, build teams and grow.
