Around Lounges

Around Lounges started with a question about the city that I was already thinking about myself: what happens between home, work, a hotel lobby, and the places where people usually meet? The idea was not to make another co-working product or a private club that used an app as decoration. It was to create a place where members could work, meet, rest, shower, attend something, or simply spend time without having to choose one of those roles in advance.

I joined as a product consultant when the physical concept was clear but the member experience still needed a shape. The founder came from hospitality rather than software, which made the conversation more useful. The app was never meant to be the centre of the project. It had to support a physical place: membership, reservations, access to rooms, programming, and the small signals that make a club feel familiar rather than procedural.

Designing for a place, not just a screen

The project resonated with me because I was interested in how cities were changing the use of the home. People were working in more places, travelling through the city differently, and looking for somewhere that was neither the office nor their living room. Around was an attempt to give that in-between time a real setting.

My work moved between product definition, product design, frontend implementation, and a base design system. I had to make the digital service clear without turning it into a generic booking flow. A member should be able to understand what was happening at the club, reserve a room when needed, and feel that the digital layer belonged to the same place they had walked into.

That distinction changed the decisions. A hotel app can optimise a stay; a work tool can optimise tasks. Around had to support an evolving social space. Its value depended on the atmosphere, the people, and what a member could do there on a given day. The interface could make those things easier to access, but it could not substitute for them.

What I took from it

Around taught me that product work is not always about making the screen more important. Sometimes the product is a physical environment, and the software has to be quiet enough to let that environment do its job. That requires the same care with journeys, systems, and edge cases, but the measure of success is different: the member should spend less time managing the service and more time using the place.

The club opened in Madrid in 2018 as a more accessible alternative to the private-club model. GQ’s profile from the time captures the original ambition better than a product roadmap could: a hospitality space built around community, work, and a different rhythm of city life.