There’s new office space in downtown North Adams, an area some describe as not exactly booming with business. The new initiative is trying to break the mold of the traditional cubicle.While that cheering and clapping celebrated the ribbon cutting at Cloud85 in North Adams, the hope is the second floor office will continue to be ringing with chatter and business ideas. Located at 85 Main Street in the heart of the city’s downtown, the space resembles a mash-up of a lobby, campus library and art studio. Manager Jeffrey Thomas has been working on the project for the past eight months.
“As an entrepreneur myself, I really do believe that the most important ideas and the most exciting work comes through collaboration,” Thomas said. “Very few of us are so smart that we can figure everything out by ourselves. So I’m very excited about this as a collaborative spac in addition to being a space for productivity.”
Opening the door, the first thing you see is a shuffleboard court — not exactly standard for the office. Continuing on: comfortable armchairs surround coffee tables, red terra cotta half-walls divide work areas, high-rise artist chairs line the wall and two private offices fill out the space. The desktops are reused oak pews from a renovated city church and curly electrical wires bring power throughout the room. Architect Ann McCallum says she wanted to create a welcoming, funky vibe, by mixing new with the old.
“In a shop you see these curly wires coming down – they power pneumatic tools often and are usually for air pressure, but we use them for electricity here,” McCallum explained. “We made them into a feature by extending them over to the light fixtures as well. So it creates this sort of workshop environment that feels good I think.”
The operation runs sort of like a gym membership or Delta Sonic carwash. For between $150 and $230 a month, you can rent space for a year, month or just the day. The more service you want, the more you pay. Amenities include wifi, copy, fax and printer and of course coffee. Mayor Richard Alcombright says the meeting space can help generate businesses that could energize the city’s downtown.
“I look at this as more of a think tank, a place where people can rent space quite cheap to develop ideas and/or run an existing business,” Alcombright said. “Then also be able to bounce ideas off of one another. Like the Lever project, I hope it connects our younger entrepreneurial types who will come in here and develop ideas, particularly our young folks from MCLA and Williams.”
Thomas is the executive director of the Lever project that Alcombright mentioned. The economic development incubator launched in June and with the help of six summer interns, Cloud85 has floated into being.
“The grand plan is that Lever is going to be in the adjacent space to Cloud85,” Thomas said. “There are two doors there that are blocked right now, but those will get opened once the space is finished. So we can have our entrepreneurs coming from Williams, MCLA and Bennington College and other colleges in the region working over there. But, ambling over here and interacting with members of Cloud85.”
The idea for a collaborative and free-flowing work space came from the Partnership for North Adams, a public-private initiative thatin January 2014 unveiled a plan aimed at revitalizing the city’s downtown. Kate Collignon was project manager.
“We spoke with business owners, students, faculty and residents and a lot of different indicated that whether they decided to stay in North Adams or had decided to move on, what they really had missed was the opportunity for interaction with like minded entrepreneurs,” said Collignon.
The North Adams Chamber of Commerce is the first renter and Thomas says there’s interest from other economic development groups, believing writers, software developers and consultants will also find a home at Cloud85, a name he’s a big fan of.
“I think of this as a place where you can in your mind tell everyone who is bugging ‘Get off of my cloud, I’m going to get some work done,’” said Thomas.
