Chiang Mai is where digital nomads go to be photographed working
The city has more coworking spaces per capita than almost anywhere in the world. If you’ve spent any time in startup or remote work circles, you’ve seen Chiang Mai on someone’s Instagram: Edison bulbs, wooden tables, a cold brew, and a laptop open to something that looks important. The aesthetic is extremely well established.
Draper Startup House operates in that environment, and they understood the problem clearly. When every coworking space in the city has the same warm lighting and the same reclaimed wood furniture, the interior itself stops being a differentiator. What they needed was something on the wall that made their space be the one that visitors connected to. This coworking space mural needed to be aesthetically appealing and connect on a deeper level with the people sitting there for hours every day.
The brief was to paint their founding values: Connect. Inspire. Empower. But to make it unique to the Chiang Mai location by bringing in something that felt uniquely thai. We tried a few concepts in the design process, and in the end we decided to go with beautiful, lush, unique, thai jungle foliage.
Designing a brand mural for an international entrepreneurial audience
The Draper Startup House network draws founders, investors, and remote workers from across the world. The aesthetic needed to travel well, read clearly in photographs, and feel native to Southeast Asia without being a caricature of it.
The composition puts the brand values at the center, contained in a bold navy circle with high-contrast yellow lettering (Draper Startup House brand colors). The botanical elements radiate outward from it. On a phone screen the lettering reads immediately. Up close the illustration rewards attention. Both things matter in a space where guests spend hours at a time and where every visitor photographs the same wall from the same angle.
Why coworking space murals perform differently than in other commercial environments
A restaurant mural gets photographed by customers who visit once or twice. A coworking space mural gets photographed by people who sit in front of it for six hours a day, every working day they spend in the city. The cumulative social reach of a mural in a coworking space used by transient international workers is significantly higher than in almost any other commercial context.
The people working at Draper Startup House in Chiang Mai are, by definition, people with online audiences. Founders documenting their journeys. Designers sharing their workspace setups. Marketers and creators whose entire professional presence lives on the internet. A mural that ends up in the background of their content is reaching their specific followers continuously, at no cost to the space.
79% of consumers say user-generated content influences their buying decisions, according to multiple consumer research studies. In a coworking context, that UGC is generated not by customers photographing the space intentionally but by residents photographing their work and their lives, with the mural in the background. The distinction matters because background content carries more authenticity than promotional content. Nobody thinks a founder is paid to have that wall behind their desk.
What a coworking space mural signals to prospective members
The decision to commission a hand-painted mural rather than print a vinyl decal or hang a framed poster communicates something specific about how a space is run. It says the people behind it care about the details. It says they invested in something permanent and considered rather than something convenient and disposable.
Founders and operators who build things care about the environments they work in. A hand-painted mural is the most visible possible evidence that a space was designed with intention.
The University of Exeter’s research found workers in art-enriched environments are 32% more productive and report 45% higher wellbeing than those in undecorated spaces. In a coworking context where members are choosing between multiple options and paying daily or monthly rates, the quality of the environment is a direct factor in retention. A mural that makes the space feel distinctive and considered is doing commercial work every single day.
