The Plan: WeWork Is Growing Up at 511 Fifth Avenue

The upcoming WeWork floors at 511 Fifth Avenue are designed to look less like a tech startup loft and more like a boutique hotel lobby.

The coworking giant earlier this year leased four floors encompassing roughly 37,000 square feet of the Beaux Arts building between East 42nd and East 43rd streets. Bold plans for the ninth, 10th, 11th and 15th floors signal a substantial shift in WeWork’s design philosophy, away from the open-concept, industrial office layout and toward a more intimate, club-like feel.

“It’s not so new to us, because these projects take a while to design, but certainly is a shift in creative direction for the company,” Ebbie Wisecarver, WeWork’s chief design officer, told Commercial Observer. 

The 18-story tower is two blocks west of Grand Central Terminal and steps from Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. A private entrance on East 43rd Street will ferry WeWork members up to intimate workspaces lined with burgundy carpeted corridors, warm color palettes, custom light fixtures and tile work. Patterned wallpaper will match custom pillows — a nod to the building’s highly ornamental, Beaux Arts origins, Wisecarver said.

The stylistic refresh comes on the heels of WeWork’s 2024 reorganization and New York City resurgence. Its growing New York City footprint is currently at 90 percent occupancy, according to the company.

Wisecarver and her design team crafted the space as a nod to NYC’s members-only clubs, like Casa Cipriani and Zero Bond, yet the concept is far from exclusionary. This WeWork location is among the first to offer an all-access amenity space on the 15th floor. The idea for the 9,000-square-foot space featuring a barista bar, private work areas and a bookable boardroom was developed in tandem with the building’s landlords, Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Properties and Robert Cayre’s Aurora Capital Partners.

“One thing landlords have consistently said is that when they go from floor to floor, and they hit a WeWork floor, it’s always vibrant and energized,” Wisecarver said. 

The boardroom will be a particular perk, Wisecarver said, allowing building tenants to avoid sacrificing their own floor space for an underutilized room. It doesn’t hurt that its line of windows is going to overlook a picturesque stretch of Fifth Avenue, with a sight line down to the lush green canopy of Central Park. 

The interior design plan for 511 Fifth Avenue offers a more mature aesthetic for WeWork’s Midtown clientele, Wisecarver added, a group largely made up of boutique hedge funds, financial services houses and accounting firms. The layout, she said, presents “the new mission statement for how we see the future of work.” 

The future of work, it turns out, puts a premium on peace. Wisecarver calls the layout “a gradient of privacy,” with a mix of shared tables, semi-private corridor space and single-occupancy offices. Stuffy phone booths will be replaced by high-end pods with adjustable air flow and lighting. Solid walls will supplant vinyl office partitions to promote privacy for high-stakes meetings. 

“That’s something that we’ve been playing a lot with,” Wisecarver said. “How do you take a floor plate and break it up in a relatively seamless, thoughtful way that allows people in different zones to work differently?”

The 511 Fifth location will begin interior construction this month, with an expected delivery date in October or November.

Emily Davis can be reached at edavis@commercialobserver.com.