Williamson County has caught the eye of the city’s fastest-growing coworking concept.

E|Spaces is targeting two new locations in Brentwood and Franklin, totaling nearly 50,000 square feet and marking the concept’s 10th and 11th locations.

The local brand has signed a 25,244-square-foot lease in a Brentwood office building, located at 216 Centerview Drive, and is finalizing a 22,939-square-foot lease in a four-story office building in Cool Springs, located at 840 Crescent Centre Drive.

With the two new leases, that brings E|Spaces’ local square footage to nearly 250,000, with 150,000 square feet coming since August of last year. Kevin Ziomek of JLL represents E|Spaces in its transactions. The new Cool Springs and Brentwood offices are expected to open in mid-2025.

The local company is seemingly unaffected by the headwinds that have faced other coworking concepts like WeWork. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, the coworking giant terminated its downtown lease at One Nashville Place in May.

Jon Pirtle, CEO of E|Spaces, has seen a shift in the office market in recent years. “It’s not really about square footage anymore,” Pirtle told the Business Journal. “Many companies want to go back to work, but they also want to go back and be smart about where they’re going. I think a lot of companies have learned we don’t have to spend these huge amounts of our cash flow on rent that we don’t necessarily need.” When E|Spaces launched, the company primarily offered large open spaces for individual workers, but the company has changed its strategy to focus on more private offices. “We definitely got away from the, ‘Hey, everybody just pay a membership fee and come find somewhere to work and put your earbuds in.’ That doesn’t work for most businesspeople. They need a little more structure, a little more privacy,” Pirtle said.

E|Spaces currently has two locations each in Midtown, Green Hills and Franklin, as well as concepts in the Nations, Goodlettsville and Murfreesboro. You may have noticed that downtown isn’t on that list. Nashville has seen multiple downtown tenants leaving for neighboring submarkets in recent years, and Pirtle is seeing the same among E|Spaces’ clients.

“Our customer tends to be a little more outside of the downtown corridor. Music Row and Roundabout [Plaza] are a little bit outside of that,” Pirtle said. “It’s easy to get on the interstate and get home but still be down in the action. When you get downtown, it’s a little bit of a different animal every day.”

There has been a drought of sizable office deals in Nashville, and across the country, as hybrid and remote work flourishes and companies continue to reevaluate their office space post-pandemic, but E|Spaces has picked up a lot of the slack in an attempt to provide a longterm office solution for companies. “We might not be a longterm solution for Amazon, but there’s been companies that started with us with 20-25 employees,” Pirtle said. “They’ve now been with us for years, and their employees and their company have grown tremendously.”