The Great Room Brand Guidelines: Singapore 2016, Drawing Rooms and Industrious

A hospitality-inspired operator in Singapore’s business district.

The Great Room is a Singapore flexible workspace brand that, according to EdgeProp, was established in 2016. The co-founders named in EdgeProp’s reporting are Jaelle Ang, co-founder and chief executive in 2018 and 2019, Yian Huang, and Su Anne Mi, who by 2026 was managing director for Industrious in Asia Pacific. EdgeProp described the business in March 2018 as a “hospitality-inspired co-working operator”, and that phrase sums up how the company presented itself: closer to a hotel lobby than to an office floor.

Its first location took the whole 25,000 sq ft tenth floor of One George Street in Singapore’s central business district, EdgeProp reported in 2018. The second, at Centennial Tower, opened in February 2018 across the 17th and 18th floors, with room for more than 600 members; the 18th floor held the reception and a drawing room for about 120 people, facing the Singapore Flyer, Gardens by the Bay and the sea. At the end of February 2018 the company had more than 1,000 individual members, Jaelle Ang told EdgeProp. “We grow with more intention,” she said of the pace of expansion.

Growth stayed within the region. In 2018 EdgeProp described the Gaysorn Tower space in Bangkok, near Ratchaprasong, as the company’s first venture outside Singapore. By October 2019, EdgeProp listed four Singapore locations — Centennial Tower, Ngee Ann City, One George Street and Raffles Hotel — plus Gaysorn Tower in Bangkok and One Taikoo Place in Hong Kong. That year The Great Room received the Co-working Space Excellence award at the EdgeProp Singapore Excellence Awards 2019.

Drawing rooms, ateliers and a verandah.

The clearest record of The Great Room’s design approach is its space inside Raffles Hotel. When the hotel reopened on 1 August 2019 after a refurbishment, The Great Room took 15,000 sq ft in one wing of Raffles Arcade, its fourth Singapore location; EdgeProp described it at the time as the first co-working space in a six-star hotel. Jaelle Ang told EdgeProp that the design set out to work with the hotel’s history rather than start from a blank slate.

The centrepiece was a glass atrium the company calls the Drawing Room, where members meet, drink and dine. EdgeProp described the company’s signature shell chair alongside custom cane and wicker furniture that echoes Raffles Hotel, a floor laid with small pieces of stone, marble and granite that would usually be discarded, art by the Singapore artist Tay Bak Chiang, and portraits by co-founder Yian Huang. Smaller rooms called ateliers, each for a group of eight, came from member data showing a preference for small meeting rooms, Ang said; hot desks and offices sit in a “workhall”.

That vocabulary — drawing room, verandah, atelier, workhall, studio — works as part of the identity. At Centennial Tower, EdgeProp reported in 2018, a space called The Verandah was set aside for members of The Business Club membership programme and for speakers before events. In 2019 the company told EdgeProp that it chose Grade-A buildings that were central and close to transport, hotels and places to eat, and that it wanted technology to be “transparent and seamless” for members. It described its spaces as for people who “aren’t willing to sacrifice their standards of performance, comfort and aesthetics”.

The offer itself was hotel-like in its range. EdgeProp listed dedicated offices, hot desks, virtual offices and day passes, with pantry snacks and drinks and a member relations team that organised fitness classes, lunch-and-learns and fireside chats. At Centennial Tower an event space seated about 80, with a view over the first three corners of the Formula One Singapore Grand Prix circuit, EdgeProp reported in 2018.

Workspace as a branded room.

Flexible workspace operators sell something hard to photograph: the chance to rent a desk, a room or a whole floor for as long as a business needs it. Their websites lean on interior and lounge photography, usually wide shots of shared kitchens, meeting rooms and breakout areas published by the companies themselves, so a brand is often read through its furniture, lighting and materials rather than by its logo.

Naming does much of the work. Some operators keep the history of their buildings in view: Workspace Group, the London landlord, lets space in places it calls the Metal Box Factory, The Biscuit Factory and The Old Dairy. Others name tiers rather than buildings: JustCo, in Singapore, runs a premium main brand, a luxury line called The Collective and an essentials-focused concept written in lower case as the boring office, according to EdgeProp.

Membership is also handled through software. Operators list apps for booking rooms and desks, passes for using several centres, and virtual-office services, and their sites present these as part of the brand alongside the physical spaces. The words they choose for customers vary: members, tenants, teams or simply businesses.

Behind the lounges sit corporate pages on owners, buildings and cities. Some operators are listed companies or real estate investment trusts that publish their histories, portfolios and board changes; others are private or owned by property groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it operates — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Singapore brand to a CBRE subsidiary’s name.

In May 2022 The Great Room was acquired by Industrious, the US flexible workspace company, EdgeProp reported in 2026. Industrious says it was founded in 2012, opened its first workspace in Chicago, and moved into Asia and Europe through the acquisitions of The Great Room and Welkin & Meraki. The property group CBRE took full control of Industrious in January 2025, according to EdgeProp. For four years the Asian locations traded as “The Great Room by Industrious”; in early 2026 the brand announced a tenth Singapore site, at Keppel South Central in Tanjong Pagar, with a Drawing Room and a Coffee Bar, Singapore Business Review reported.

Then the name went. EdgeProp reported on 17 June 2026 that all properties under The Great Room, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Sydney, would operate under the Industrious brand with effect from 1 July 2026. At that point The Great Room ran seven locations in Singapore, including One George Street, Ngee Ann City and Raffles Arcade, two in Sydney, two in Bangkok and one in Hong Kong. Su Anne Mi told EdgeProp that the two brands shared “the same belief that work should feel human”. By November 2026 the address thegreatroom.co redirected to the Industrious website, and The Great Room no longer traded as a separate brand.

For a design guide, The Great Room shows how a workspace brand can borrow the language of a hotel — drawing rooms, ateliers, a verandah — and make the rooms themselves the identity. Compare Industrious, which absorbed it, and JustCo, another Singapore workspace operator. For this guide we use a deep green, a warm cane tone, ivory and brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Great Room’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.