It was enough to make even a Google employee jealous. Not that Google’s New York offices don’t have their own enviably cool visitors—Stephen Colbert, Lang Lang and Toni Morrison, to name just a few. Employees also get razor scooters. And pool tables. And arcade games. And subsidized massages. And free gourmet meals. And a full-service, full-size dessert truck permanently parked on the eighth floor.

These days, visitors to a New York office are as likely to stumble into a game of Ping-Pong as they are to find suited workers shuffling through a grim landscape of carpet tile and cubicles. Thrillist has a kegerator; building-mate Foursquare has shuffleboard and a beer of the week. Etsy’s Dumbo headquarters blends homemade coziness and high-end design so masterfully it could make an Urban Outfitters executive weep.

Until quite recently, such perks were considered the eccentric luxuries of 20-something tech prodigies, edgy advertising firms and cash-flush startups. Corporate America dismissed the cool office as a fleeting phenomenon. But the wild successes of companies like Google and Facebook have made even the stodgiest CEOs contemplate the potential benefits of video game consoles and French-press coffee. A Ping-Pong table in the middle of your office used to imply that you were run by a 24-year-old. Now a lot of companies want to imply that they’re run by a 24-year-old.

Indeed, the cool office has become a national fixation. And in the country’s collective imagination—an imagination fed by countless magazines, blogs and secondhand stories—it is a utopia of lofted ceilings and abundant natural light, where no one ever seems bored or blocked or fatigued (how could anyone be tired with both a nap room and an espresso machine?), where workers always appear to be seriously having fun, furiously exchanging ideas, or seriously having fun as they furiously exchange ideas. Even the after-work hours are better. Rather than rushing home to drown their sorrows in drink (like some mid-century suburban send-up), workers hang out in their hip, bar-like lounges, knocking back craft brews in celebration of yet another ridiculously productive day of creative cathexis.

In this way, the cool office goes so far as to suggest that the inherent tensions of the workplace—between labor and management, between our authentic selves and our professional selves, between working for love and working for money—can be overcome. It’s a paradise wrought by the Protestant work ethic, where creativity and massive profits can be merged painlessly, a delightful feedback loop in which greater happiness yields greater productivity yields greater happiness—salvation by way of Ping-Pong and Stumptown coffee.

Last October, French beverage conglomerate Pernod Ricard moved into an 82,000-square-foot space at 250 Park Avenue—a buttoned-up 20-story tower in Midtown that has traditionally been a great favorite of white-shoe law firms (Sullivan & Cromwell occupied the space before Pernod).

While the location and the building seemed an obvious choice for a huge international corporation, the distillery-chic space was not: exposed 14-foot ceilings, concrete floors, vast walls of brick and glass, plus a massive bar, a game room (foosball and pool) and huge terraces. If you overlooked the fact that it spanned the 16th through 18th floors of prime Manhattan real estate, Pernod’s office was more suggestive of a craft Brooklyn brewery or one of the many places where the company’s ubiquitous labels (Absolut, Malibu, Jameson, Beefeater, et al.) are consumed than a corporate headquarters.

“They all want some kind of cool vibe,” said Scott Spector, a principal at the Spector Group, the architectural firm that designed Pernod’s space, adding that even law firms and hedge funds are requesting the “factory-meets-art-gallery look.”
While the first cool offices started appearing more than a decade ago—Mr. Spector credited Deutsch advertising with pioneering the use of scooters for intraoffice transportation—there’s now been a fundamental shift in office design. What were once features found mostly at tech companies—open, collaborative areas, kitchens, game rooms—are becoming standard. Even traditional firms that grimace at the idea of clients catching them playing pool still want the hardwood floors and pendant lights.

“Cool has conquered all,” he said.

At the very least, it has helped fuel the growth of places like WeWork—a co-working company that started two years ago with the intention of catering to creative freelancers and startups with less than 50 people. The company now has five offices in Manhattan, with two more on the way at (Bryant Park and 222 Broadway), and three in California. And while some of that growth is connected to the thriving startup scene and the dissolution of the traditional economy—freelancers needing places to work—the company is increasingly being asked to accommodate larger companies in a range of industries, from modeling agencies to nonprofits.

“I definitely think that there is something that makes you feel more excited to come here in the morning and stay late at night,” WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey told The Observer when he took us on a tour of the company’s Varick Street offices in late February. Weak winter sunlight flooded through the 105,000-square-foot space. Decorative items were scattered about—a vintage bike here, a typewriter there—banishing the impersonal barrenness that is a hallmark of so many offices.

He pointed out a paper shredder that had been covered in a purplish-gray floral print.

“We thought, ‘We can’t put that super-ugly gray box in here,’” Mr. McKelvey said. “We would never stand for the ugliest, easiest solution. We always try to analyze things and say, ‘How can we make this look cooler?’”

A decade ago, workplace innovation revolved primarily around where people worked. Working remotely was all the rage, and “being able to work in your pajamas” was talked about as though it were one of the great hopes of humanity that could finally now, through the miracle of technology, be achieved. Companies contemplated the cost-
saving potential of vastly reduced work spaces, and workers welcomed the end of commuting and simpler child care arrangements.

But like other work-space panaceas before it, telecommuting proved less than revolutionary. (It’s worth noting that the cubicle, maligned though it is today, was seen as an innovative solution to the problems of the modern office when it first debuted in the 1960s.)

“Now innovation is all about what’s cool,” said Lenny Beaudoin, a senior managing director of CBRE’s global corporate services. Mr. Beaudoin, a workplace strategist who helps the real estate company’s clients revamp their workplaces to enhance productivity, is currently working with a number of traditional companies (a large bank, a San Francisco law firm) that want to create “cooler,” less traditional offices in happening neighborhoods.

“The new office is part hospitality, part retail. People work 24/7, and they want their workplaces to appeal to their lifestyles,” he said. “The idea of going into a high-rise and sitting in a cubicle all day, the tyranny of the traditional office, that’s going away. It’s about lifestyle integration.”

And why shouldn’t it be? Given that the BlackBerry has long since sullied the domestic sphere, aren’t we entitled to comfortable furniture and good lighting in the public sphere? Even the idea of the domestic versus the public sphere sounds quaint, a Victorian concept burnished in ’80s academic conferences more than something resembling the lived experience of professional workers in 2013.

Google has been criticized in the past for using its admittedly amazing amenities to lure workers into longer and longer days at the office. But its offices remain the envy of workers everywhere, because many Americans aren’t offered any trade-offs for their devotion to their desks, let alone a package of lavish, extravagant ones. The modern office is transforming into a worker’s everything—the place where she not only works, but eats, exercises, relaxes and socializes.

“A home away from home,” is how ZocDoc director of people Karsten Vagner describes the website’s Soho offices. Which struck us as slightly misleading—how many New Yorkers’ neglected apartments have two fridges and a freezer stocked daily with healthy snacks? Which is to say nothing of a game room and a hammock flanked by blow-up palm trees.

“More than once I’ve heard parents say, ‘Is this real?’ when they see the hammock,” said Mr. Vagner. “I brought my dad into the office last week. It was the first thing he wanted to do when he got off the train.”

Speaking with Mr. Vagner and company spokeswoman Jessica Aptman, it was striking how happy they sounded. When we grumbled about yet more snow in March, they told us how everyone at the office was Instagramming the snow from the office’s big windows.

“I think that people can change a company and a space can change a person,” said Mr. Vagner. “I know that if I’m sitting on my yoga ball and I can see other people, if I have plants or action figures on my desk, I’m going to be a lot happier and more productive than if I was isolated in a dark cubicle.”

Still, some of it seemed a little silly. When did workers really need a hammock?

“When don’t you need a hammock!” they exclaimed in unison.

Just the prospect of moving to a cool office is enough to make some workers giddy. Ryan Alovis, the CEO and founder of ArkNet Media, a midsize Long Island startup, was surprised at how psyched his 16 employees were when he told them they’d be ditching their traditional office in Valley Stream for a hip, college-campus-like complex in Garden City.

“They’re so hyped up, everyone’s freaking out,” he said. “I walked by my VP of operations and he showed me a pool table that they have at L.A.’s Hard Rock Cafe that he wanted us to get—every time you hit a ball, it either reveals a girl in a bikini or it looks like a ball of fire. The other day, someone showed me a robotic bar.”

There will not be the bikini/flame pool table or a robotic bar at the new office, but there will be a normal bar, a fitness center, a “coffee center, not just coffee,” a juicer and pizza parties. “You have to wow people,” said Mr. Alovis. “A juicer, a fitness center, a cafeteria—people expect this now. Tech workers are the new rock stars.”

And they have the Rock Band setups to prove it.

It should not come as a surprise that corporate America—its once-promised financial security and career stability having vanished—would be drawn to the cultural blueprint and anti-status ethos provided by tech. While tech’s DNA is fundamentally capitalist—create something new and make a lot of money selling it—the industry proved that it could not only make money and be cool at the same time, but that it could make money by being cool.

By following the path that tech forged, companies have an opportunity to remake their images along with their offices. Now companies talk endlessly of creating interactions, of CEOs getting right into the mix of things, of ideas circulating and flourishing in their open floor plans. As though we were all creative geniuses or industry trailblazers and office drudgery were a thing of the past. As though we could wipe out the thankless, unglamorous tasks that make up the entirety of some jobs right along with bad fluorescent lighting.

The cool office sells not only an image of a creative hotbed to clients, but perhaps more importantly, to employees. It invites them to see their job as a form of self-expression rather than rote labor, granting flexibility in exchange for loyalty and long hours. And worker bees have responded enthusiastically, taking to Instagram and Twitter to brag about their amazing workplaces. Some even pen boastful CNN iReports, like the recent one by an MKG employee that started “Our office is our playground” and described taking “goofy group shots” in the office photobooth.

There is something vaguely unsettling, though, something overwrought about the descriptions of all the fun being had: the Tuesday-night runs that “take off from the office and end at a local pub,” the spontaneous exercise breaks where employees can be found “shaking the sillies out in a no-judgement zone,” the craft nights with wine and cheese where everyone makes “holiday themed cards, or mugs, or whatever strikes our fancy!”

Is day-to-day office life really so thrilling that a photobooth is needed to capture all the precious moments? Since when is any workplace a no-judgement zone? (And why should it be?) Moreover, who really wants to sit around making mugs with their co-workers?

There is a cult-like undertone in this all-encompassing existence, in the blurring of lines between home and office, between personal time and work time, between employee and self. The cool office works to disguise the very basis of the relationship between company and employee: the exchange of money for work. Work is a lot of things, but this is its fundamental essence.

As architect Sam Jacob recently wrote in Dezeen, the rise of the fun office can be seen “as a denial of the very real power structures inherent in labour relations.” And “even more fundamentally sinister is the idea of work colonising the real spaces of intimacy and freedom: when your office resembles all the places that you go to escape work, maybe there is no escape from work itself.”

But for better or worse, Americans have always embraced that “you are what you do.” The idea that “you are where you work—literally” is new. For many of us, the cool office ministers not only to our immediate needs, but also to our fantasies: fantasies about the kind of people we would like to be, the jobs we wish we had, the lives we wish we were leading. We might not land that dream job, but the dream office could be within reach!

And yet, as much as the cool office can seem to matter, it can also matter very little. Of the many conversations that The Observer had with the haves and the have-nots of the office world—in the twinges and, okay, flashes of envy we sometimes felt—our thoughts returned frequently to what a Google engineer said to us, after describing a Vermont ski weekend the company had taken him on, Lang Lang’s visit, and a lunch of expertly prepared salmon and roasted Brussels sprouts: “At the end of the day, whether you enjoy your job or not is more important than getting roasted Brussels sprouts.”

But, he added, just so long as we were writing about cool offices, we should know that as good as New York’s Google headquarters are, “the truly awesome stuff is in Mountain View.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Adam Robb for Getty Images

Here’s one sign that Atlantic City may finally realize Paul Sevigny and Governor Chris Christie’s shared vision of an ironic-seedy Hamptons for cash dispensing hipsters: Men’s lifestyle newsletter Thrillist is launching an Atlantic City edition. It will be published once a week from May 17 until Labor Day, said parent company Thrillist Media Group, which is calling the seasonal food and entertainment curation—what else?—“a pop-up.”

“I went to school in Philadelphia and we would go to Atlantic City quite a bit,” Thrillist founder and editor-in-chief Adam Rich, a UPenn alumnus, told Off the Record. “The whole sort of operation has become much classier.”

With the launch of Atlantic City, Thrillist will reach 3 million subscribers in 22 cities. On Friday, Thrillist Media Group—which now includes e-commerce sites Jack Threads and Thrillist Rewards—celebrated the seventh anniversary of its first ever email blast, a tip for a good Cinco de Mayo margarita spot (El Rey del Sol, now closed), which went out to about 600 people.

According to Mr. Rich and new Thrillist Atlantic City editor Adam Robb, a critical mass of cultural events (Boardwalk Empire, the Food + Wine Festival, James Beard Award-winners in The Borgata hotel) means Atlantic City is now happening enough that the discriminating visitor needs a filter.

“That’s always my worry, just to make sure there’s enough going on that we can publish something that’s up to our standards,” said Mr. Rich.

It appears there's nothing to worry about. The Beatrice Inn-affiliated Chelsea hotel—which once had to bus in and board its New York hipster clientele gratis—is filling up for the weekend of June 23, when the first-ever Orion Festival will bring the incongruous fans of Metallica and Best Coast to the spiritual home of Snooki and The Situation.

Speaking of whom, Mr. Robb, who has written for Time Out New York and AC Weekly and was the author of Fake Restaurant Girl, told Off the Record that he has been moonlighting as a paparazzo since the cast of MTV’s Jersey Shore moved in down the block from him in Jersey City.

“In the course of a day, in a pack with 20 other guys competing with you, you really learn how to shoot and edit really quickly,” he said.

In addition to selling images to Getty, Mr. Robb used his photos to bust JWoww for parking illegally.

“It’s the community I live in and parking is really tight,” he said.

Asked if Jersey Shore had been good for the Jersey Shore, Mr. Robb was dubious.

“Snooki was pregnant so she didn’t drink that much," he replied. "Jersey City really lost out on some business.”

Thrillist Rewards launched last month as a weekly email offering the kind of "rewards" and discounts that might appeal to urban, affluent young men--think hand-crafted cigars, mixed martial arts or a day at the shooting range.

The most popular deal so far has been the "Endless Ribs and Beer" dinner at Hill Country Barbecue in Flatiron -- normally $55, just $29 on Thrillist Rewards.

Thrillist Rewards has already sold more than $25,000 worth of all-you-can-eat rib dinners, TechCrunch reported, and there are still eight days to go.

"We were expecting to start slow and see if there was any appetite for this but it turns out we're onto something big," Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer told TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, "Or so it seems. For now rewards will be once a week in NYC with multiple deals delivered at a time, some which we think will drive significant revenue and some which we think will be more about access to exclusive offerings that only Thrillist can secure (with our deep local relationships that have been built over the course of the last 5 years)."

Thrillist typically takes a 30-to-50 percent cut of each deal, according to TechCrunch.

By partnering with local merchants, Thrillist finds and curates unique deals that appeal to its members -- such as all-you-can-eat ribs plus all-can-drink Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Light, Miller High Life, or Tecate.

Lerer hopes to expand Thrillist Rewards to other cities. We bet it would play well in Texas!

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Paid Content reported today that Thrillist will be partnering with the Huffington Post and ESPN, taking its content beyond a newsletter and setting it live on the city-specific sites of these two major publishers.

The HuffPo partnership is kind of a no-brainer, since Thrillist founder Ben Lerer is the son of HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer. But it's interesting that Thrillist content will now appear, for example, on ESPN sites dedicated to Chicago, Dallas, L.A. and Boston.

Revenue at Thrillist comes from promotional partnerships instead of traditional advertising, so we'll have to see how they handle relationships with publishers who may have their own advertising or editorial commitments.

All in all, its a sign that Thrillist is going strong. The lone data point in the Paid Content piece was a doozy, but it's internal so lets take it with a grain of salt. "The number of subscribers across its 18 editions has nearly doubled to 2.2 million since last December, says, John Wiseman, Thrillist's VP, marketing and partnerships."

"These women are starved for information, but they don't need to be bothered with too much," Mr. Pittman told The Wall Street Journal. "The kiss of death is when you get an email or find something on the web and someone says, 'I'll read it later.'"

The brand will launch with a party at the R Lounge in Times Square this evening. Whoopi Goldberg and Candice Bergen will appear as representatives of the trendy, older woman PureWow hopes to connect with.

Those are two classy ladies, to be sure. But they are also kind of strange representatives for an email targeting women "over 35". Golberg is 54 and Bergen is 64. Basically PureWow is saying, once you pass 35, it's like you're already golden.

A few weeks ago, The Observer reported Ben Lerer's Wooster Street apartment purchase, which he and his bride, Emily, bought from Whoopi Goldberg for $2.985 million.

The Thrillister bought his recently swapped Soho loft for $1.575 in 2006 from a Ms. Elizabeth Williams. Considering the recent transfer was within family lines, no broker was needed. However, Halstead's Barbara Godson, who represented Ms. Williams in the 2006 sale, described the spacious one-bedroom to The Observer. "You know, it's a very attractive apartment because it has antique oak beams and large stretches of exposed brick walls. When I was there it was very simply done with large, west-facing windows. Just very attractive."

Hmm, thrilling indeed.

cmalle@observer.com

The "unique loft situated in the heart of SoHo" was originally listed last summer at $3.9 million through Sotheby’s International Realty. In October, The Journal reported that the apartment had gone into contract, but since then there hasn't been much news of the apartment or its exposed brick and extremely high ceilings.

Mr. Lerer, whose lovely daily email newsletter is mostly geared toward luxury-loving urban metrosexuals, is not too worried about renovations. "We are going to do a few small things," he told The Observer, "but we’ll move in in a few weeks. We’re really excited! We knew right away when we saw the apartment.”

With "divine custom details throughout the loft" and a "dramatic entertaining space with both opulence and integrity," to quote Sotheby's, it would be hard not to be thrilled. That's a pun.

But where will The View’s banterer go now that her Soho digs are sold? According to Cindy Adams she has a few homes to choose from—in upstate New York, Vermont, and the Hamptons.

cmalle@observer.com

Take for example Mediabistro's FishbowlNY: Co-editor Glynnis MacNicol posted that half their editorial team (we're guessing that just means her) is "about to board a plane, courtesy of Thrillist (the hotel is on them, too) and go to Las Vegas for thirty-six hours."

Ms. MacNicol isn't so sure what journalistic value the trip has, but, you know, it's hot in New York and it's totally fun in Las Vegas! "Yeah, we're not exactly sure why, either, or who's coming even. But you can be sure whatever happens in Vegas will find its way to this space. Also, twitter."

So, who else is going? According to the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar (who will be covering the junket for Radar), Verena Von Pfetten (also of HuffPo), Star editor-at-large TimeOut NY dating columnist Julia Allison, and Gawker Media's Richard Blakeley will be in attendance. (Ms. Allison arrived 16 hours ago and reports, "It's a beautiful day.") Sounds like a great time! Let's hope everyone remembers to wear sunblock.

The invitation from Thrillist's PR people went out on June 2. Since you probably didn't get it, here's the full text: