A New York-based architecture firm is bringing drinking holes directly into the workplace in a bid to tempt workers back into the office.

Fogarty Finger, which has found itself turning more square footage inside office buildings into bars, said the trend is all about expanding the idea of what an office building can provide to workers – both in terms of leisure opportunities as well as new types of spaces where work, meetings, and team building can happen.

“I’ve been doing commercial interiors for a couple of decades now, and I can say with confidence that that’s quite new,” says co-founder Robert Finger told Fast Company. “Offices have been allocating more area to alternative workspaces. It might be a library, it might be a lounge area, sometimes expanded food service areas, sometimes gaming.”

In several projects that are finished or under construction around New York, Fogarty Finger has designed bar, lounge, and reception areas that look more like the cocktail bar of a posh hotel than a floor in an office building. Built primarily to serve office tenants, and also to host events, these spaces are a new type of amenity in offices where a gym or a foosball table may have once stood out.

One example is the Newport Tower in Jersey City, a 36-story, a mixed-use tower overlooking Midtown Manhattan. Originally built in the early 1990s, the building has just been renovated, and Fogarty Finger redesigned its second-floor amenity space, including the building’s lobby, coworking and meeting spaces, a billiards room, and a large bar. There are Art Deco-inspired furnishings and fixtures, and cushy, low-slung furniture more common in a lounge. This is still an office space, with glass-walled conference rooms and meeting areas, but they all look out on the bar itself, turning what could be a lifeless meeting space into something with a pulse.

Mr Finger said the bar was designed to break the silence of the typical office environment, with acoustic treatments that make the space louder and more lively–sort of like what one would expect walking into a bar. “A space with more of a buzz in it is already a different feeling, and you have a little bit more permission to be relaxed, to talk out loud, to laugh, to joke with each other,” Mr Finger said. “All of that is a really important part of building teams and community and just getting away from your desk, frankly.”

“We’ll go as far as we can without it feeling unprofessional,” he added. “Before COVID, people were already going out for lunch. What they couldn’t do was go out for a cup of coffee and see somebody else from their office. They couldn’t meet in a setting other than a conference room.”

“In New York, you can still go down the street, but what I like is there’s still a sense of neighbourhood,” Mr Finger said. “If I were at the Navy Yard and I run into somebody I know who works at a different company, or I just meet somebody in the bar area but I know they work in the same building, that’s a different sense of community than if I meet them down the street.”