The French start-up is opening its first co-meeting building in the heart of Brussels: 2,800 sq m over 8 floors in the Louise district, designed with architect Lionel Jadot.
Comet Meetings, the French start-up reinventing the urban meeting experience, is setting up in Belgium. A major player in the Future of Work, Comet Meetings is officially opening the doors of its first co-meeting building in Brussels: a venue dedicated to corporate meetings and off-sites in the Louise district. After a 2020-2021 that upended the codes of work and brought the importance of social ties between colleagues back into the spotlight, the start-up is pursuing its ambition to restore the standing of those moments of collaboration that company meetings are.
To mark the return to work and its arrival on the Belgian market, Comet Meetings looked into how Belgians hold meetings. According to its recent study conducted through iVOX, nine out of ten Belgians (88%) prefer physical meetings to virtual ones. Indeed, 74% of respondents place the opportunity to interact with colleagues in the top 3 positive aspects of meetings, along with the chance to exchange ideas and to take decisions collectively.
An exceptional building designed with renowned Belgian architect Lionel Jadot
After the success of its seven Paris venues, which have already welcomed more than 220,000 guests, Comet Meetings is opening its first building outside France. Named “The Great Escape”, this first co-meeting concept in Brussels offers participants a series of travel-inspired worlds across its 8 floors: 2,800 sq m of bright meeting rooms, shared spaces, dining areas and a rooftop with views over the whole city.
For this new project, the start-up teamed up with Lionel Jadot, a Belgian architect known for his extraordinary work. Working with the design and delivery teams at Comet Meetings, Lionel Jadot conceived the building as an invitation to travel and immersion.
“I am proud to have supported Comet Meetings in its first Belgian location. Our visions of living and working spaces matched perfectly, and together we imagined an event venue off the beaten track. Each floor was designed as a leap into a distant destination and we made a point of using as many recycled materials as possible for the furniture,” says Lionel Jadot.
With its Green Key label, the start-up is also committed to sustainability. Equally concerned with ensuring optimum safety for its visitors, Comet Meetings is opening its doors in line with the health measures in force, thanks to the Brussels Health Safety label.
The Comet experience, designed to combine productivity and wellbeing in meetings
Still according to the study, six respondents out of ten (57%) highlight that holding a meeting somewhere other than their office makes them more creative (49%), more productive (48%) and more motivated (52%), provided the venue is suited to a meeting.
The Comet experience promises to take participants into a setting so far removed from their working routine that they step outside their usual frame of reference and can unlock their full potential. Support from the team of Meeting Scientists is tailored to the meeting objective set by clients: advice on how the day unfolds and on the layout in which to place the group for better productivity, and introductions to facilitators and content experts. Wellness sessions are also offered to the various groups to ensure their wellbeing and sharpen their focus throughout their off-sites.
“At Comet Meetings, we are convinced that a meeting can be a defining, value-creating moment for our companies, all the more so after the year we have just spent largely apart. With that in mind, we offer teams not only an exceptional working setting, but also our expertise in organising and running these meetings, along with a range of services worthy of the hospitality industry. The entire Comet experience is designed to stimulate collaboration and the collective intelligence of teams,” explains Victor Carreau, co-founder of Comet Meetings.
Comet Meetings’ ambition: to become a benchmark player in the Future of Work in Europe
Since the start of the health crisis in March 2020, the organisation of work has been going through an unprecedented revolution. It has become essential for companies to rethink the “office of tomorrow” as a moment of meeting and encounter. The challenge is to nurture their employees’ sense of belonging and to attract young talent and high potentials.
In Brussels, for example, 45% of workers occasionally swapped their usual workplace for an alternative (remote work, coworking, third places) before the crisis. There has now been a striking increase: a recent SD Worx study shows that 62% of Brussels workers will indeed work from home after the crisis. Yet, worn down by weeks of social distancing, two thirds of employees say they have become aware of the importance of physical interaction with their colleagues, according to a Tempo Team study, both for their motivation and for their enjoyment of work.
By working at once on the spaces, the services and the content of these moments of collaboration, Comet Meetings is positioning itself as one of the pioneering players in the Future of Work.
