Andrew Woodman, Centretown News
Carleton student Shannon Kitley enjoys reading in the Ottawa Holistic Wellness Centre’s Breather room. The room is available to rent by the hour and comes with chairs, desks, lights and a couch. Three rentable “chill-out” spaces have been created in Ottawa as part of a new app-powered business offering individuals or groups the opportunity to rent a professionally designed home-office space for $20 an hour.
The service, called Breather, aims to provide easily accessible spaces for clients to use however they like. “Famous actors use it to rehearse, famous musicians use it to collaborate . . . there are women who use it to breastfeed in private,” says Julien Smith, CEO and co-founder of Breather. All rooms feature relaxation-focused design features, including uncluttered spaces and various creativity-inspiring amenities.
One location – a tiny room above the Ottawa Holistic Wellness Centre on MacLaren Street, contains a couch, a workspace with basic office supplies, a yoga mat, books, a full length mirror, plenty of outlets, four different types of phone chargers, and tootsie rolls and mints.
“I like all the natural light and it’s very cozy,” says Shannon Kitley, a new Breather user who visited the space to find a relaxing place to sketch. “It’s very small though and I wouldn’t be able to afford it on a regular basis,” Kitley says.
There are three locations in Ottawa, the fourth and smallest city to receive the Montreal-based service. These spaces are used exclusively by Breather and like a hotel, each room is cleaned between visits.
Users are able to book the spaces online through the website, but the service is unique in offering a mobile app in which users can browse spaces and book them immediately. All doors to the rooms are controlled with “mobile locks” so that after reserving a space, users just need to enter a PIN code provided by the app in order to access the space.
The “on-demand service” is drawing comparisons to Uber and Smith says that the mobile interfaces of services such as Uber and Zipcar were part of the inspiration for the app. More and more businesses are choosing to create apps before websites; they are just the first in the real estate industry, Smith says.
“They all look pretty similar because consumers generally want the same thing,” he says.
There are close to 100 Breather users in Ottawa, estimates Smith. He says the number of users has grown every month since the service came to the city in October 2013.
Smith’s own experiences as a travelling writer, constantly looking for work spaces in foreign cities and always ending up at a crowded Starbucks, inspired the idea for Breather.
Although travelling business professionals were the original inspiration, very few of the current users fit this profile. This is because of the limited number of cities in which the service is currently available, says Smith.
Today, only four cities have Breather spaces – Ottawa, Montreal, New York, and San Francisco, with plans to expand to Toronto and Boston within the month. “The higher number of cities we have, the more users like that we can get,” Smith says.
For now, Breather spaces are most often used as meeting rooms for local freelancers and consultants and as a shoot space for photographers. Smith attributes the success of Breather to the price gap between Breather spaces and more traditional meeting rooms. While hotel meeting rooms are generally booked by the day for at least $100, Breather spaces can be booked for as little time as half an hour for a fraction of the cost.
So far, the service hasn’t gained much recognition as a possible competitor for hotels in Ottawa.
“I wouldn’t think of them as an active player,” says Ross Meredith, general manager of the Westin Hotel. “I think there’s enough hotels in the city that have full service meeting rooms that I don’t think it would be in demand.”
Breather is currently working on expanding all over Ottawa with a focus in the downtown core. “As time goes on and we expand to more and more locations, we’ll just be available everywhere, the same way that Starbucks is,” says Smith.