COMOL CHIFUNEMACHI

The second floor of the client's own building in central Matsuyama had been left empty when a tenant moved out. The project began when the client asked whether they could turn the floor into a shared and coworking office and run it themselves. It was a time when the pandemic was rapidly spreading remote work and shared offices were springing up like mushrooms in cities all over Japan.

This was a new line of business for the client, who had no experience developing commercial spaces. So we worked alongside them from the planning stage onward, including research into competing and similar facilities. When the project began, several competitors were already operating near the site, and the central challenge was how to set COMOL clearly apart, both in its hardware (design and facilities) and its software (operations and branding), and how to tap into new demand.

Our early research showed that most competitors, for better or worse, sold themselves on conventional office-like design and on functions and services tailored to business use. With that in mind, COMOL put less emphasis on short-term drop-in visitors and more on serving local sole proprietors and entrepreneurs as a main or satellite office. At the same time, we set out to move away from the typical office atmosphere and create a playful space where relaxed conversation and free thinking could flourish.

We aimed for a layout in which many different users could share the floor while keeping a comfortable distance from one another and working or meeting at ease. We provided a generous number of private booths for monthly rent, where users can hole up on their own when they want to focus on work or thought. The booths are not uniform: they vary in size and fittings, and come at several price points, so that they can flexibly meet each user's different needs. The name COMOL comes from komoru, the Japanese word for "holing up," evoking a private space tucked away in the middle of town.

In the common areas, the face of the facility, we carried over the playful spirit of D1 SHARE FACTORY, an earlier project of the same kind. Industrial materials such as OSB, raw black steel, unfinished fiber-cement board, and two-by-four lumber are combined, and together with the color scheme, they keep the space from becoming a white, sterile office.

For this project, we were also entrusted with the logo and website design in addition to planning and interior design. Walking alongside a client launching a new business from the planning stage, and supporting them consistently not only through our core work of architectural and interior design but also through business research, branding, and outputs beyond architecture, it is one of the projects that shows most clearly what CHIASMA FACTORY is about.

In Matsuyama, ordinary office rents are low compared with major metropolitan areas, and remote work spread more slowly, so demand for shared offices was limited from the outset. Partly for these reasons, COMOL reportedly struggled to attract users when it first opened. Five years on, however, every private booth is fully leased, and drop-in use is going strong as well.

As the phrase "social distancing" suggests, the pandemic prompted a rethinking of the appropriate distance between people in buildings of every kind. COMOL became the occasion for us to think consciously about how to give that distance concrete form in architecture. What we learned here has since been carried into several other shared and coworking projects we have worked on.