Ciarán McGuigan, a former professional soccer player turned furniture designer, now creates offices that offer more than shared desks. His firm, The Malin, may sound more akin to a hotel group, and that's part of the strategy.
With its midcentury modern oak desks and warm-hued velvet upholstered chairs, the high-end coworking brand is the latest aimed at workers — and bosses — who seek to elevate “the experience of work,” as the Malin’s website puts it.
The New York-based “communal workspace” brand — McGuigan hates the term “coworking” — is on track to open three new locations in western markets by the end of 2026, in Orange County, California; Park City, Utah; and San Francisco.
At 36, McGuigan is taking the company bi-coastal five years after he launched his first workspace in a Soho loft in downtown Manhattan during the depths of the pandemic. The Malin now has nine locations with six more in the works. Since opening in 2021, the brand has expanded to Nashville; Savannah, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Washington, D.C.
McGuigan is aware that the Malin’s upscale model combining flexible office space with features of an urban boutique hotel is not exactly reinventing the wheel. There’s a lot of competition as high-end coworking models, members-only clubs and lavish “amenity spaces” in formerly cubicled office buildings blossom across the country, as workers and employers alike have reconsidered the basics of what a workspace should be.
“The market is incredibly oversaturated,” McGuigan acknowledged. “Every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a hospitality brand or is doing something in that realm.”
Even so, McGuigan is bullish on his business that's rooted on a simple idea: that people work better in lovely surroundings.
“Most importantly, when you walk into our spaces, you feel a certain way,” McGuigan told CoStar News.
Storytelling through real estate
The Malin's expansion comes as more employers are bringing their workers back to the office, and as those workers crave spaces that mimic something more exciting than a traditional cubicle and cafeteria.
The chain signed a 15-year lease last month in San Francisco for about 13,500 square feet on the ground floor of the turn-of-the-20th-century Adam Grant building, a beaux arts brick building from 1908 with working windows and flourishes like a carved garland above the entrance. The space will include eleven private offices, twelve dedicated desks, five meeting rooms, nine phone booths, a library and a kitchen.
The Malin is opening a slightly smaller space in Southern California this summer that will function as a club-within-a-club inside the high-end Equinox Sports Club at 1980 Main St. in Irvine. Its new venue in the upscale resort enclave of Park City, developed in partnership with local real estate and hospitality developer Mark Shrayber of WorkPCU, aims to convey what McGuigan described as a touch of “mountain chic.”
Whether the client is a tech entrepreneur launching an AI startup or a financial services executive in town on a business trip, the idea is to provide workers with hotel-style service in a beautiful setting, what McGuigan likes to call “storytelling.”
In 2024, the company brought in $10 million in revenue, and it expects to double that this year.
The Malin isn't the only firm of its kind making a similar bet on creative workspaces. To name several: Projects like Arc Beverly in Beverly Hills and Venice’s The Lighthouse pair desks with hospitality-style amenities, signaling a broader shift toward experiential office models as traditional coworking recalibrates.
Industrious, the global coworking operator acquired by brokerage CBRE last year, has signed numerous deals for new outposts across the country, including in Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In San Francisco, coworking operator Pacific Workplaces is opening a venue this month on two floors of a downtown San Francisco office tower.
Nor has every concept panned out. NeueHouse, the members-only coworking venue and social club that once welcomed celebrities such as Meg Ryan and Diane von Furstenberg, filed for bankruptcy protection last fall. Coworking giant WeWork infamously filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 after suffering heavy losses tied to its core business model, though it managed to restructure and keep operating in a much leaner form.
Back to basics
Despite steady growth, coworking still accounts for only around 2% of total U.S. office inventory, according to Coworking Cafe, an industry group.
The Malin, like many new entrants into the coworking business, strikes management and revenue-sharing agreements with landlords, rather than committing to the sort of long-term leases that proved unsustainable for WeWork. Perhaps in part because the coworking sector is still struggling to rid itself of WeWork’s reputation for overhyping and lavish real estate spending, McGuigan stresses the Malin is focused on what he calls “the fundamentals.”
“There’s so much talk about ‘the flight to quality’ and ‘the flight to experience,’ but just because you say something doesn’t make it true,” he said. “What differentiates the Malin is we try to take care of the basics. We try to do one thing really well.”
For McGuigan, that means tables adorned with fresh flowers, geometric-print rugs, abstract paintings, recycled crystal fixtures and exposed brick walls. There are staff members to provide services ranging from refilling snacks and whisking away dirty coffee cups to notarizing documents and collecting mail for Malin “members.”
All this doesn’t run cheap. Memberships in New York and California range from around $400 a month for hot-desk-style access to $850 for a dedicated desk.
The Malin’s mid-century-Scandinavian aesthetic echoes in the designs of Orior, the furniture company McGuigan’s parents founded in the family’s native Northern Ireland in the late 1970s, after his parents, Brian and Rosie McGuigan, spent time in Denmark studying furniture and design.
In addition to running the Malin, the younger McGuigan now serves as the company’s creative director. The family has manufactured furniture for high-end hotels and nightclubs such as Annabel’s in London and the Grand Hotel in Stockholm.
Renaissance man
McGuigan played four seasons of top-level soccer in the mid-2010s in Ireland, with the Dundlak and Drogheda teams. When he’s not on the road for work, he still plays near his home in Brooklyn with “a few lads” for fun.
He attended the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, where he later opened a Malin coworking outlet.
He prides himself on the diversity of the Malin’s clientele, which ranges from “small sole proprietors” to “large corporates” and spans sectors from beauty and wellness to artificial intelligence and finance, he said.
Last summer, The Malin’s flagship SoHo location made an appearance in the movie "Materialists," as the office where Dakota Johnson’s character worked as a matchmaker for wealthy Manhattanites.
The key to his success so far, he believes, is the details of service and ambiance that people have begun to realize are key to success at work.
“It’s all these small psychological details that end up really having an impact," McGuigan said. "It might be a member of the staff asking if you want a cup of coffee, or 'how can I help?' Just simple human dialogue that can go such a long way."