By the end of this year, the first “Talent Garden Vilnius” international coworking space will open its doors in the Lithuanian capital. Located in the Old Town, in the former Communications Ministry building designed by renowned Lithuanian architect Justinas Šeibokas, Talent Garden Vilnius will offer companies, teams and freelance professionals from the digital and creative industries spaces of varied sizes and privacy for work and meetings, with a 150-seat modern conference hall at its heart.
The campus of over 2,000-sq. m. will be created by the real estate investment company INVL Baltic Real Estate, which has signed a franchise agreement to represent Talent Garden, one of Europe’s largest coworking platforms. INVL Baltic Real Estate will set up the new coworking space in the building at Vilnius Street 33 that is part of its property portfolio. The opening of Talent Garden Vilnius will conclude two years of renovation and other work on the building involving total investments by INVL Baltic Real Estate of roughly EUR 2 million.
“Vilnius is a vibrant city where new ideas are born, and modern spaces are needed for them to emerge and spread. That is what Talent Garden Vilnius will offer to all those who desire it, standing out in the way it creatively combines not only opportunities to work and learn, but also people coming together here,” says Vytautas Bakšinskas, the Real Estate Fund Manager at INVL Asset Management, which manages INVL Baltic Real Estate.
When it opens in late 2019, Talent Garden Vilnius will be one of the Old Towns’ biggest coworking spaces, attractive not only as a great place to work, but also for making business contacts and gaining new knowledge. The campus will have enough space both for those who want to settle longer and for those just looking for a place to work for a day. Plans are for the site to offer over 230 workplaces altogether, with more than half functioning as private offices.
One tenant of Talent Garden Vilnius that is already clear is the Lithuanian Business Angel Network (LitBAN), which together with partners plans a series of events for startups and investors to meet, interact and, most likely, arrange future investments.
Daiva Jankauskaitė, LitBAN’s Managing Director, says the most important reason for choosing to move into the Talent Garden Vilnius coworking space was the Talent Garden team’s desire to make it a high-quality space, bring the people that work there together in a community, and create valuable content. LitBAN and its partners will also contribute to that goal by organising not just closed events for their members or for companies that are resident at Talent Garden Vilnius, but also open events intended both for investors and startups.
Founded in Italy in 2011, the Talent Garden network operates in 19 European cities, where its 26 campuses host more than 3,500 creative and digital industry professionals. The first Talent Garden campus in Lithuania was opened in Kaunas, on Laisvės Avenue. According to Artūras Bulota, the head of marketing for Talent Garden in Lithuania, in four years of operations many successful projects have been done with business, public institutions and individual creatives. “That shows Talent Garden’s main goal – to create value by connecting people – really works. There’s a good reason that Talent Garden’s slogan is ‘work. learn. connect’,” Bulota notes.
The real estate consulting firm Real Game and the law firm Wint are advising INVL Baltic Real Estate on the implementation of the new coworking campus project.
INVL Baltic Real Estate manages real estate in Vilnius and Riga: office and commercial premises at the Vilnius Gates complex in the Lithuanian capital, the IBC Business Centre near Konstitucijos Avenue, office buildings in the Old Town on Vilniaus Street and in Šiaurės Miestelis, and the Dommo Business Park manufacturing, warehouse and office complex beside the Riga bypass.