At Switchyards, a workspace chain expanding to Durham next month, the coffee machines have touch screens that play a motivational video montage while your drink brews.
The montage is reminiscent of those infotainment clips that loop when you’re pumping gas, but instead of Maria Menounos reminding you to check your wiper fluid, there’s footage of dancers and rocket ships, overlaid with quotes like “You got out of your house for this.”
Got out of your house for what, you ask?
In the language of Switchyards: the world’s first “neighborhood work club.” Not coworking space. The business is particular about this.
“We invented this damn thing,” the “about” section of the Switchyards website reads. “There was something we wanted that didn’t exist in the world. Essentially, we like working and meeting in coffee shops, libraries, and hotel lobbies. But we wanted all the things we love best about each to be under one roof. So, we made it.”
Switchyards doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of what distinguishes a work club from a traditional coworking space. It touts walkability from surrounding neighborhoods, 24-hour access, and partnerships with local coffee roasters as key amenities, though these features don’t necessarily set it apart from downtown Durham’s other shared workspaces.
But the distinction is telegraphed in how the company defines itself and in how hard a line it draws in the sand. If neighborhood work clubs like Switchyards—“the first of its kind, built for the way work is changing now”—are walkable hubs for people seeking single-origin caffeine and vampire hours, then coworking spaces are just old school offices by a different name: places you drive to and count the hours until you leave.
The Durham Switchyards opens in early August at 733 Foster Street. A dry cleaning plant built in 1948, and a designated Brownfields site, the space is dominated by one main room—a soaring industrial expanse with at least ten different kinds of seating, a skylight, exposed brick, and fake foliage out the wazoo. There’s also a conference room, a quiet study room, eight phone booths, a coffee and tea area, and “insanely fast Wi-Fi” (password: madewithsoul).
Memberships, capped at 250, will go live at 10 a.m. on July 31. Switchyards’ creative director Brandon Hinman refers to this as “drop day.” The last dozen clubs to open across the country have sold out in minutes, he says.
Coworking emerged in the early aughts as an antidote to the isolation of home offices and the drudgery of cubicle farms. Over the next decades, it grew into a multi-billion-dollar industry, with WeWork as its energetic public face.
WeWork’s very public implosion in 2019, when the company’s failed attempt to go public exposed its financial woes, dampened the mood. But the coworking sector saw a boost as companies that went remote during the pandemic allowed employees to stay remote, and everyone got a little stir crazy. In 2019, the United States had around 6,200 coworking spaces; by 2024, that number had jumped to 7,695.
While WeWork (which filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and has since restructured) remains one of the five largest coworking companies in the country, it’s no longer the aspirational model for the industry, and it increasingly serves companies looking to house office spaces rather than individuals seeking places to do remote work.
Here’s where Switchyards comes in. Work clubs, Switchyards suggests, are what coworking was supposed to be, before it became the thing it was meant to replace.
What most definitively sets Switchyards apart from the pack is its price point. At $100 a month for 24/7 access, the company undercuts all nearby competitors.
American Underground charges twice that much for a round-the-clock monthly membership. Provident1898’s rates range from $99 for ten days a month to $249 for unlimited access. The WeWork inside One City Center starts at $160 for 9 to 5 access. Orenge Durham comes closest at $70 for ten days of monthly hot desk access, though only ten hot desks are available; “dedicated desks” start at $225.
At Switchyards, “there’s only one tier” of membership, Hinman says. “Whether you’re a billionaire or you’re between jobs, it’s the same.”
Soon after our interview starts, Hinman, who calls in from a padded phone booth inside one of Atlanta’s 12 Switchyards, delivers a version of a line that I’ve seen in every piece of Switchyards press: “We’re trying to take the best parts of a coffee shop, a college library, and a boutique hotel lobby, and smash them all together into one.” I ask him to elaborate.
“My favorite boutique hotel lobbies are generous,” Hinman says. “They have nicer furniture than I have in my house. They have a very thoughtful playlist going. The hand soap in the bathroom smells really good. I feel really sexy when I have a meeting there with a client or someone who I’m wanting to work with. And it’s open all the time.”
Switchyards launched in Atlanta in 2019. Michael Tavani, the company’s founder, went on to weather a 14-month pandemic closure and emerged to find his concept in explosive demand. In light of a $5 million investment from venture capital firm Bullpen last year, the company is aiming to grow to 200 clubs by 2029. It currently has 27 locations in eight states, 15 of which opened in the past year. Membership gets you access to all locations.
In mid-July, a “VIP First Look” event draws about 50 people—freelance writers and photographers, social media interns, small business owners and managers, developers building AI tools—who grab plastic cups of wine and wander.
Some test out the seating in the central space, which includes black vinyl banquettes, couches, solo workstations, two-top and four-top tables, and a tall communal wooden bench. Down the hall, others experiment with the phone booths (“It does feel like you’re in a fridge,” one person, exiting a booth, says to a friend), poke their heads in the conference room (“You think this jacket is a prop?” someone asks me, pointing to a tweed jacket on a coat rack), and tip-toe through the no-talking room, which is marked with a sign that says “HEADS DOWN.”
The 20-odd attendees I talk to say they like the “schoolhouse vibe,” the natural light, the spaciousness. They like that it’s a way to meet people. (I run into someone from the event at a Superman showing, three days later.) They like the potential for “body doubling”—working alongside other people to help maintain focus.
“When you see other people doing their clicky clacky, it helps you get in your game,” one attendee tells me.
And they like the price. Many exclaim at the affordability. A few say it’s too pricey for themselves but still acknowledge that it’s a good deal, relative to other offerings. Everyone agrees on the coffee math: if you regularly do your work at coffee shops, you’re already spending $100 a month.
After a glass of Grüner Veltliner, I need to use the restroom, so I try opening a door that says “NOPE.” Turns out it is not a rejection of the gender binary, it’s just a locked door. (The real bathrooms, marked W.C., are gender neutral, just not so cheekily so.)
Back in the main space, I’m checking out the giant shelf of coffee table books known colloquially as “the newsstand,” when Hinman gets the room’s attention and begins a speech about the building’s bones. Its past life as a laundry facility inspired the green banner overhead that reads “Foremost,” he tells us.
“We dug into some old ads in newspapers, and there was one that said about the company, ‘Durham’s foremost cleaner,’” Hinman says. “I just thought, damn, I love that line—and I sort of don’t know what the word foremost means. So it turns out, we looked it up and it’s a great word, and we made a custom banner there above the newsstand.”
Below “Foremost,” the banner also says “Dettagli e Pulizia,” which is Italian for “details and cleaning.” This is partly a reference to the fact that Tavani, the Switchyards founder, is half-Italian, and partly a reference to the importance of attention to detail at Switchyards.
Indeed, there are lots of touches, so to speak. Affixed to the wall behind the coffee bar, you’ll find local authenticity markers: a receipt from Everything Bagels, a business card from Little Bull, a toothpick from Little Bull, two signed Durham Bulls tickets, a photo of the sign outside Cameron Indoor Stadium. The same wall hosts depictions of noncontroversial political figures: a sketch of Abraham Lincoln, a painting of JFK, a photo of Princess Diana that’s been doctored so that her sweatshirt is emblazoned with the word “Switchyards.”
Scattered about are aesthetic anachronisms—VHS tapes, dictionaries, an old projector—and game items missing essential components: a rack of basketballs with no hoop, a plate of Boggle letters with no grid. More than anything else, there are world-building materials: Switchyards flags, Switchyards golf pencils, stacks of the quarterly Switchyards newspaper, Club Paper.
Club Paper perhaps best encapsulates what’s both appealing and grating about the company.
The paper’s layout and design are beautiful. Inside, the member-generated content is engaging, with haikus (“Charger on the ground / Somebody’s laptop is dead / Hope they remember”), personal essays (“How Switchyards Became An Unexpected Refuge Post-Hurricane”), and get-to-know-you blurbs (“I’m finally taking the time to learn about mushrooms”).
Some of the material doesn’t make sense for a newspaper that, per its own telling, is “read all over the world”: pages of classified ads, which Switchyards members can place for free, are mostly relevant for residents of Atlanta or Nashville. An article about a new wine bar in Poncey-Highland assumes the reader knows where Poncey-Highland is.
But that stuff is still charming. Where things start to break down is the company’s tendency to self-mythologize.
Page one of Club Paper’s second edition explains to readers that they’re witnessing the rebirth of the print news industry: “Newspapers are dying. But not this one. It’s just been born. And you’re holding it now in your arms… Welcome back to paper. You’re gonna love this new baby.”
Later, a page devoted to stroopwafels, the main food item that Switchyards stocks for members—and, for the record, a snack sold at every Target—defines the treat as a “Dutch wonder from the 18th century” before stating, in text wrapped around an image of a stroopwafel imprinted with the Switchyards “S,” “Fast forward to 2025. Switchyards buys them by the pallet.”
Another page shows two Switchyard-branded foam fingers with the caption “54 YEARS LATER, WE MADE ONE TOO”—a reference to the invention of the foam finger in 1971.
During his speech, even Hinman seems a bit fatigued by the creation trope. “We did invent this thing,” he says, of work clubs, “even though it pulls from some of the best parts of, like I said…” He trails off, refraining from repeating the boutique hotel lobby line a second time in the span of a minute. “And that’s exciting,” he says.
Hinman mentions there’s another reason for the Italian phrase on the banner overhead. Switchyards drew inspiration for its concept from “Italians’ healthy notion of third spaces,” he says—“places you go when you’re not at home or work, you’re just sort of coming through.”
Then, of Switchyards, he says: “This is a third space for work.”
A third space for work. As Hinman himself acknowledges, the point of a third place is that it’s neither home nor work. It’s the skate park, the bar, the barbershop, the dry cleaner’s, the library, the cafe, the hotel lobby. Third places can accommodate work, but they don’t exist for it.
Americans have always been bad at work-life balance, a partition that becomes more porous by the day. The U.S. stands out among the 21 richest countries in the world as the only to not guarantee paid vacation time or holidays. A 2025 survey assessing work-life balance in 60 countries—many of which, apparently, call it “life-work balance”—ranked the U.S. second-worst, at 59, down several notches from last year.
Perhaps Switchyards has invented something: a monument to the collapse of the boundaries between work and leisure. The third place is dead. Long live the third place for work. Here’s your coffee. You got out of your house for this.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Bluesky or email [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].