Reimagining the workplace: Serendipity Labs brings new coworking approach to Westport

John Arenas was not able to make it to his 2 p.m. appointment at Serendipity Labs in Westport on Jan. 3 because a massive snowstorm had hit the mid-Atlantic and motorists all along I-95 were trapped in their cars for up to 20 hours. Arenas, who is Serendipity Labs’ CEO, was forced to delay his trip back north, but luckily, he could still make it to a Serendipity Labs location in South Carolina.

Through his connection to the 14-state Serendipity Labs network — which includes cloud access, enterprise grade Wi-Fi compliant with all SOX, HIPAA, DoD and FINRA standards, as well as ample space for conducting a call with complete privacy — Arenas may well have been calling into his meeting from another floor of the Westport building instead of another state.

The Westport location opened at the start of the pandemic, which Arenas called the “just about the absolute worst possible time” to open a coworking location. Yet the Westport location has maintained both profitability and an occupancy close to 90% since it opened.

“We want to offer flexible solutions and not just try and lease space,” Arenas explained.

Instead of subletting office space or trying to own facilities, landlords can partner with Serendipity as a turnkey solution to transform empty office space.

“We do the design, construction, opening, technologies, operations, management, financial,” Arenas continued. “We do it all. It’s like a very highly specialized property management and leasing for just one piece of the building. We bring the brand with us and that works. It’s actually very straight forward for the landlord.”

For those seeking to make use of office space, Arenas emphasized that beyond providing expertly designed, comfortable modern facilities full of natural light and the works of local artists, Serendipity is focused on service.

“As a paradigm this is different from real estate, much more akin to hotels where you arrive and are treated as a valued guest,” Arenas said. “Everything that happens is to make you feel a certain way and remember it. We do that with the branded behaviors and our staffing and how we serve people. All of those things make an employee or worker feel valued, like they can say “Hey I’m valued, I can be productive here, I know I can just ask someone and get whatever I need.'”

Ken Hom, director of business development and project management for Imagine-IT, became one of the business professionals who appreciated Serendipity’s services at the start of pandemic. When Covid shut down the coworking space he used to frequent, Hom was forced to work from home, a situation he found less than ideal owing to the distracting presence of his family.

“I discovered Serendipity by just driving around,” Hom stated, with a laugh. “They had really good signage and it caught my eye.”

Hom signed up along with some others who had relied on the defunct coworking space and said he would not go back. “This environment is exactly what we were looking for. It’s a complete departure, the other space was not laid out like this and didn’t have the energy here.”

Hom praised the collegiate atmosphere that the mix of industries and professions the people he considers colleagues represent.

“Even though the offices are laid out in such a way where you have personal private space, I find the engagement with other members here really refreshing,” Hom noted, adding that he has made connections which improved not just his business but also his life, ranging from advice in fields outside his expertise to trying out “life changing” experiences he never would have considered before.

Since moving to Serendipity Labs, Homs has seen Imagine-IT expand beyond IT services and building websites to providing drone services and “matterports” which use 360-degree cameras to enable remote viewings of real estate listings. The resulting fieldwork has also made him thankful that membership at Serendipity Labs confers access to other locations, like the White Plains and Stamford labs.

“It felt like it’s the same facility,” he said, praising the included cloud access that let him tap into his files with equal ease from every location.

Arenas said that level of flexibility is key to what Serendipity hopes to offer members by providing “distributed workplace strategies” that shorten commutes by making suburban offices and the urban core equally productive places for knowledge workers to do their work. Locations like the Westport facility, he observed, offer an option of being “not at headquarters but not at home. It’s working someplace where you choose to.”

“We’re looking to continue developing Fairfield County,” Arenas said about other places where Serendipity might provide an option somewhere between a long commute and being surrounded by the distractions of home. Norwalk, Darien, and Greenwich are all being explored as a next step, while Bridgeport and Fairfield are also on the horizon. The latest reports from CBRE indicate that Fairfield County has a 26% vacancy rate for office space, which means those expansion plans may have found a serendipitous moment.