creating dayhouse: the origin story
On March 11, 2021 Dayhouse Coworking will celebrate its second anniversary. We are so excited to reach this milestone, especially given the unexpected hurdles of 2020. To celebrate and share with our community, we created this blog series, Creating Dayhouse, featuring our favorite behind-the-scenes Dayhouse stories. The first blog post in this series was all about Dayhouse’s perfectly imperfect space, and now we’ll share our origin story.
Our story begins in March of 2017. Dayhouse Coworking founder Jen Luby was in her Highland Park home working -- nay, struggling to work -- from home as a writer and event producer. With a high-energy kid and two dogs by her side during the workday, working from home wasn’t easy or productive. In fact, it was isolating and distracting.
A friend and fellow WFH mom shared on social media that she was experiencing the exact same challenges, and Jen had a goosebumps and thunderbolt moment. She realized two things: 1) she wasn’t alone in this struggle and 2) there needed to be a solution for parents working from home.
Jen started researching coworking spaces. She had recently moved from the city and knew of many spaces there, but didn’t find many in the suburbs. And there weren’t any in the Chicago area that were parent-friendly. So Jen reached out to people in the industry. One call led to another, which led to another, which led to lots of listening sessions with local parents. As she listened and researched, Dayhouse began taking shape.
A few fun facts about the early days of Dayhouse’s conceptualization:
The original name, “Balance Coworking” was scrapped because it sounded too much like a gym. As an aside, Jen now finds the word “balance” somewhat triggering. Life is about finding rhythm, not trying to balance everything at once (look for a blog post about this in the future).
Our original colors were pastel pink, aqua, and tan. The current brand colors are teal and gold, inspired by the green and yellow colors of our symbol, the pineapple.
The name Dayhouse sprang from several comments to the effect of, ”I want a place that’s comfortable like home, but more professional. And looks nice, all the time. And is a place that I don’t have to clean.” Roger that.
We thought about being a women-only space, but quickly decided that a) men are parents too, b) women have male colleagues, partners, and clients and c) we want to be inclusive of non-binary people. Instead, Dayhouse is “woman positive” but open and accepting of all gender identities.
Several people (admittedly, they tended to be older and male) didn’t get the “parent-friendly” concept at first. Would there be kids running around, screaming? (There aren’t.) Would people quit once their kids grew up? (No, we’re parent-friendly, not parent-only.)
After a two year incubation period, Dayhouse opened in March 2019 as a coworking space for working parents, founded by a working parent. We were the first coworking space in the Chicagoland area to offer children’s programming. While that programming is on pause during the pandemic, we remain committed to serving working parents in other ways, with household share membership plans, kid-friendly spaces for times when a little one is in tow, free private room hours for mental health sessions, and a quiet, focus-friendly space that’s supportive and nurturing, so that parents can be supportive and nurturing for their children.
