This is an ongoing mini-series about the cool tech companies we’ve visited. To read about other tech workplaces we’ve visited, click here.
Photography by Angela Guo and Airbnb.
Every frame matters: deconstructing the Airbnb office
The Bangkok meeting room, which takes after a popular Airbnb listing in Bangkok.
Community, hospitality, and fun are not easy to translate into a thriving workplace mantra, but Airbnb does that brilliantly. It’s not just limited to pretty lights and rooms in their Cecil Street office space – the former local base camp of Facebook in Singapore.
What’s cool about this office?
The local Airbnb compound isn’t a tiny service office filled with customer service experts – it actually compromises of three generous levels that are connected via a central staircase. Every level houses different departments that keep the app fully operational in a local context, but its employees enjoy flex space; your average Airbnb staff is not expected to be strictly housed within their department’s seating space. Each employee gets a personal locker to store their valuables, and they are free to pick any seat within the office.
All three levels also have their own sprawling pantries stocked with food and drinks. The main cafeteria is incorporated into its reception area, and it greets visitors and employees alike. The outdoor patio hosts community BBQ nights with Singapore-based Airbnb hosts, as well as company-bonding karaoke nights where the employees would break out their karaoke machine to croon until the stars are out.
These booths isolate conversations, making it a great private space for employees without needing to step out of the office.
The office décor was done by FARM, and the interior designers adopted a series of local flavors that helped to blend into the firm’s core values. Like Twitter’s enclave, you can find HDB-styled elements that make up most of the office’s mood – the central staircase blends with its stylized ventilation blocks, and the flights of stairs uses a bright Ebisu (an Airbnb-made neon orange shade) with railings you would see in older HDB estates and public spaces.
By and large, the Airbnb office expounds their beliefs which drive the accommodations booking app’s work ethos. "Every frame matters" to them, and this is seen from how they value each employee, as well as the local Airbnb host community who lists their stylish apartments on their app (hence the BBQ nights).
The secretive Library is hidden behind a revolving cabinet that doubles as an entrance.
You’ll find many subtle displays of Airbnb’s habits within their walls, such as the photo frame storyboard that depicts the journey of an Airbnb guest juxtaposed against the progression of a host’s. Every other wall has a portrait of notable Airbnb hosts from various countries. Each portrait tells a story, and it features a wide range of people – elderly parents with an empty yet hospitable room left behind by their adult children, a single mother, and even a father that makes all guests spend an hour with his toddler daughter to broaden her horizons.
More about what's cool in this office
The spirit animals of Airbnb.
For the employees of Airbnb, they get a mixture of shared and personal spaces with different table layouts and plenty of private booths for conversations or work, on top of 15 meeting rooms available for booking. Each department is assigned a spirit animal that best showcases the values they want to exude. For example, the customer experience team gets a giraffe, which pays homage to the tale of the Ritz-Carlton giraffe where the hotel’s staff pampers a guest’s misplaced toy giraffe, before returning to its rightful owner.
Colombo meeting room.
The local Airbnb team had full creative control on how their meeting rooms should look like, and its employees opted for them to emulate the most popular Airbnb listings around the world. For instance, the Bangkok meeting room is a spiritual clone of a modern listing that featured a colorful bookshelf with an Astro Boy figurine, while the Colombo meeting room uses the same Sri Lankan furniture found in the listing it took after. On that note, Auckland meeting room has a fire place peppered with fairy lights, and Cappadocia features rock walls and wooden floors. Not only is every meeting room different, each of them is very personal, and very carefully done by the hands of the Airbnb staff themselves. There are another two non-bookable meeting rooms for brainstorming (aptly called the Left Brain and Right Brain), and a secret library that hides itself using a revolving bookshelf entrance.
This place is best for…
The Left Brain meeting room.
Chances are, you’ll also find other like-minded people working here, as Airbnb accommodates folks with shared interests. In their Social Corner, workers can align themselves to the interest clubs they have. To promote bonding between fellow workers, one of the three pantries is fully equipped to encourage people to have their breakfast together too – the breakfast food is supplied by local businesses, so they don’t need to agonize over what to eat while socializing.
The Right Brain meeting room. Like the Left Brain room, both are non-bookable and free for Airbnb employees to pop in for a brainstorm.
Like their office and app culture, Airbnb hires passionate collaborators who love meeting new people. Their interviews are no stranger to personality typecasting, since Airbnb believes that a balanced mix of personalities is what helps the app cater to an equally wide gamut of guests and hosts. Also, it takes large doses of passion to layout and decorate your office’s meeting rooms while getting your duties done – something that the average white-collar wouldn’t get to do.
This is an ongoing mini-series about the cool tech companies we’ve visited. To read about other tech workplaces we’ve visited, click here.
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