Design Collaborative LLC, a newly launched business in downtown Spokane, is leasing shared work space to solo-practicing professionals in the design and building industries.

The company opened its doors Sept. 1 and is located on the first and second floors of the historic three-story Globe Hotel building, at 204 N. Division.

The intent, says owner Sarah McGovern, is to foster collaboration and the free flow of ideas. Rather than following a typical executive suite model and leasing private offices, McGovern says Design Collaborative is set up so that users who rent space there are situated in an open and shared workspace.

"I wanted to reduce the barriers—line of sight and access to light and views—and be able to encourage people to look up and talk to someone across the room," McGovern says.

She says she made the decision to open the business last year while she was working toward a master's degree in interior design at Washington State University's Riverpoint Campus.

"It helps create a better overall design or product when you have the availability of other people, resources, and professions to draw from," she says.

McGovern also owns a seven-year-old residential interior design business called Milieu, which she now operates out of Design Collaborative.

Late last month, four other design-industry professionals were renting in Design Collaborative's 2,000-square-foot leased space, she says. Those users include two architects, another interior designer, and a custom home builder. She says an accountant and a freelance documentary filmmaker also pay to use space there, and several other people recently have voiced interest in it.

Don Trail is a solo architect who uses Design Collaborative's space but also has another office elsewhere in Spokane. Trail is McGovern's father and has worked in the field of architecture here for more than 45 years.

"What is fundamental to this is that in the design profession, we tend to be inclined to solo practice," he says. "By putting together an organization as (McGovern) is doing, it allows people more flexibility and allows them to use their individual creativity but still access the infrastructure of an office."

While there are several other models of shared office spaces in the Spokane area catering to one-person businesses, McGovern contends that Design Collaborative is the first such space here that's marketed specifically toward professionals in the design, architecture, engineering, and construction industries.

She says she hasn't turned anyone away who works in a field unrelated to any of those, but that because the space is configured in an open layout, it might create a poor working environment for professionals who need quiet or privacy.

Costs to rent space at Design Collaborative are based on four levels of membership that vary in price—from $15 a day to $500 a month—and in the resources there that are available to users.

The level of membership a user pays for determines whether or not they have a designated space in Design Collaborative's cooperative work environment, McGovern says.

Someone who might not want to commit to paying for a full month of use could opt to purchase $15 day passes that would allow him or her to use the space during regular business hours between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. only for the day their pass is valid, she says.

The next three levels of membership are offered on a month-to-month basis, and fees range between $100 and $500 a month. At the highest end of membership—a user at this level is considered a 'collaborator' and pays $375 a month—McGovern says a member gets full access at any time of the day to use the facility, as well as a permanent workspace and signage for their business on the outside of the building.

Two private offices on the second floor also are available for an additional $125 a month on top of the monthly collaborator membership-level fee of $375.

Users in the collaborator membership category also have access to a number of subscriptions to specialty publications that are geared toward people in the design industry, she says.

Design Collaborative's second-floor studio space only is open to users in the top two levels of membership, and along with the use of desk space there, members also have the option to use mail and reception services, McGovern says.

That studio has available space for 13 more people to work there, she adds.

The accountant who operates out of Design Collaborative, Kristy Dale, whose business is called Green Books, is contracted by McGovern to provide bookkeeping and reception services for the business and its members.

Users who pay to use the space on a day-to-day or casual basis—the first two levels of membership—have access to most of the resources on the business's first floor. Those resources include a conference room and a dual-purpose room that serves as a kitchen and a library with movable furniture to accommodate large groups.

Other services that are included in higher levels of membership can be paid for on an as-needed basis for users at those two levels, McGovern adds.

McGovern says that she and some other investors who funded the business's startup costs invested about $35,000 to make changes to the space to fit the purposes of the business's co-working model. Mark Hamlin, one of Design Collaborative's members and the owner of Sustainable Structures, a custom home building and remodeling business based here, did most of the remodeling work.

That work included building a kitchen on the first floor and turning what mostly had been used as storage on the second floor into a design studio. That area now has an open floor plan with large desks lining each wall with the capacity for 16 people to work simultaneously.

While she says she made the decision during graduate school to open a business here based on the model of a cooperative workspace, she credits her father, Trail, for the original idea.

"It was his idea to get a bunch of architects to pitch in and pay for a central receptionist—he called it a kibbutz—and he talked about it and envisioned it working because that was one of the difficulties with a bunch of people working out of different firms on the same project," she says.

McGovern says that while she was working on her master's thesis project, which involved designing multifamily living spaces, she met the Globe building's owners, Owen Clarke Jr. and Julia Clarke, and discussed using its currently vacant two upper floors as a theoretical site for her project.

Upon seeing her design, the Clarkes became interested in implementing McGovern's design into that space. McGovern says they offered to let her use the space in which Design Collaborative now is located on a rent-free basis for several months if they could use her design.

She says that rent-free agreement since has ended and that she uses the fees collected from the business's members to pay the space's monthly lease, as well as the other overhead costs to operate the business.