Check out Open Door Concept, DC’s newest (un)coworking space

52. 17. 52. 17. 20. 15. If you’re participating in a coworking session at DC’s Open Door Concept, that would be the pattern of your day. 

Open Door Concept is a collaborative workspace for remote workers, founders and creatives alike. It officially opened in September 2022, and cofounder Jasmine Smith has been heading up a relaunch with a nontraditional, sprint model for remote workers that consists of 52-minute work sessions followed by short breaks. 

Located at 1803 Monroe St. NE, Open Door Concept is not a coworking space, in Smith’s words, but a collaborative workspace, since there’s no monthly fee to attend events or use the space. Instead, users pay to rent the 1,050-square-foot, 45-person space by the hour or by the day. This means companies can do anything from shooting video B-roll to headshots or hosting book tours or wellness events (Open Door already hosted a sound bath workshop).

Smith also runs twice-a-month coworking sessions for remote employees and founders. Workers come in and introduce themselves in the morning and discuss what they want to work on before jumping into a 52-minute “sprint” of working followed by a 17-minute break. This cycle repeats before a final, 20-minute sprint and a 15-minute break where everyone discusses whether they met their goals for the day. During these working sprints, Smith said, cell phones aren’t allowed; she also encourages everyone to close out all the open tabs in their browsers and just focus on one thing at a time.

Smith said she encourages these workday participants to bring whatever kind of work needs to be done, especially if it’s something sitting on the back burner (one person brought in their taxes during the last session). She wants these days to help folks complete the work that’s hard to do alone in a home office, talk about what’s been completed, do a group toast and go home feeling accomplished.

“You’re no longer sitting at home behind your computer, on your standing desk, but you are actually in a space where you may be required to actually commune and have to connect with people when they ask you what you’re working on,” Smith told Technical.ly.

Smith originally opened Open Door Concept with co-founder Chloe Louvouezo, but Louvouezo left at the end of 2022. She said she wanted to create this new kind of workspace because the future of work has changed. And while plenty are heading back to the office at least a few days a week, workers across the city and beyond still spend a lot of time alone in home offices. So, she wanted to offer a space for people to work hard and get out of the house without the rigid obligation of a coworking space. 

When setting up the space, she also wanted to inspire collaboration; so, everything in the space can be moved around to meet users’ needs. 

“I believe that people do desire to be around other people and have some sense of social, even when it comes to work,” Smith said. “I think that there’s also something to be said about leaving your normal work environment and stepping into somewhere new and being super, hyper-focused on one or two things.”

Laura Moore, the founder of pre and postnatal personal training company PG Strength Club, took part in one of the coworking days in March. She found she was able to complete her work faster and without distraction, and she even found a new client to attend her fitness classes.

“In the grand scheme of things, [that work] would have taken me longer without having that extra motivation of staying focused and then taking intentional breaks,” she said. “I probably would have been doing laundry and 15 other things if I had been at home on Saturday morning trying to work.”

Moore thinks she would benefit from structure time once a month, even if it’s just to organize what the rest of the month would look like, so she plans to continue going to coworking sessions.

For companies, on the other hand, Smith’s found that many still need a place to bring their teams together on occasion, which is why she rents out the space as needed. Currently, she said, the space gets about five to seven bookings per month —not including the coworking days, and bookings can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days. 

Going forward, she wants to see this model adopted in other spaces to allow DC workers to tackle different types of work. She also loves to see all the different groups and subcultures using the space: So far, she’s had an improv group reach out about acting classes and a recording artist who shot her album cover and hosted a music workshop at Open Door Concept. 

“I would just love seeing different groups of communities come to the space and use it for the benefit of their community,” Smith said. “That would bring me joy.”