Designing a Clubhouse for Makers

Studio 45 is a coworking and fabrication space designed for hardware founders, artists, and independent makers in San Francisco. As one of three cofounders of the business, I've been intimately involved in the space since its inception.

One of the major projects that I led was design and layout. The goal was creating something that felt less like an office and more like a clubhouse for adults: a place that supported focus, creation, and curiosity.

While this included FF&E and the interior design of the studio, the more challenging aspect was designing around the limitations of the size of the space while considering the machines people would need in order to be able to create effectively and safely.

After months of looking for spaces, we decided on a family-owned former auto shop in the Mission. I designed around three separate uses of space: Focus, Creation, & Recovery.

Focus areas are intentionally calm and visually restrained, with a range of environments supporting different cognitive states and working styles, including private phone booths, communal worktables, conference rooms, and individual stations.

Creation spaces are designed to be safe, easy to clean, and acoustically isolated from the other spaces.

The lounge spaces act as recovery, or transition zones between heads-down focus work and hands-on creation. Lounge spaces also encourage community building among members.

As the space matured, we put on events that fostered this creative community, for example: hardware meetups, presentations, pitches, classes/lectures, dinners, tours… afterparties for open source hardware

Five years since the opening party, the space has become exactly what we had intended, a well - loved hub for the local community of makers.