by Sandra Tripp, IIDA LEED AP and Bill Puetz, CID LEED AP

​In 1986, three Harvard undergraduates—John Chuang, Steve Kapner, and Mia Wenjen—started a desktop publishing business based out of John and Steve’s dorm room. That business grew into Aquent, a marketing, creative, and digital staffing agency with offices across the globe.

Eventually, all that growth meant Aquent’s headquarters in Boston were getting tight. We’d been planning and designing a number of regional offices in North America for the company, so they turned to us. They were spread out on four floors, which was hardly ideal. But they were reluctant to relocate to a new building, because their culture was so bound up in their existing space. We looked into options for refreshing the space. Eventually they decided not to renew their lease, forcing the issue.

So Aquent leased a single 30,000-square-foot floor in 501 Boylston Street, an Art Deco building originally constructed in 1940 and known for generations as the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company building. We held a visioning session with Aquent to identify goals to guide the relocation. We came up with six:
 

1. The new headquarters should give Aquent all the tools they needed to work with similar-minded people and have fun.
2. The current space was homogenous. The new headquarters should be tailored to individual work zones, providing lots of choice.
3. The new headquarters should reinforce Aquent’s values of sharing space and resources.
4. It should be modern, liberated from “stuff.”
5. The materials should blend the modern and the natural.
6. The space should be alive and energizing and make people happy every day.

​Our charge was to preserve the culture that existed in the old space, in terms of the way the space felt, while transforming the way they worked by enhancing collaboration and connection.
 
The headquarters we designed reflects the egalitarianism of the company by switching to 100 percent hoteling—there are no assigned desks here, not even for the executives. We did provide one-to-one desking—120 workstations for 120 people—with the idea that the hoteling concept would allow the space to comfortably accommodate a growing workforce.
 
Much of the building’s historic interior had been stripped in previous remodels. So we had to give the space a sense of character that would reflect the culture—not just for the people working here, but for local clients and for visiting workers from Aquent’s offices around the world. 

​To organize the large floor plate, we created a variety of destinations for working, drawing on popular building forms, each with their own feel and personality: terrace, pergola, back porch, library, general store, hut, and start-up garage.

To welcome visitors from the start, the reception desk flows into the café, creating a big public space. The café has a 20-foot-long table—Aquent has one of these in each office. They call it the harvest table. At 900 square feet, the café is big, and can be zoned into multiple areas. It’s meant to be a sort of coffee shop, where people can work at the harvest table, at movable café tables, or in four-person booths. A large meeting room can be closed off with large wooden doors as needed.
 
We detailed the space using natural materials such as timber beams, lattice panels, and oversized wood sliding doors. For example, we used real exterior grade wooden shingles to clad the huts, which contain meeting rooms that can be reserved. Phone booths are drop-in spaces for one to two people. Whiteboards are everywhere—including tabletops. Because the headquarters is 100 percent open plan, acoustic clouds all over the work areas absorb sound, and white noise provides additional sound masking. 

​For those times when people really need to concentrate, they can head to the library. Although it’s also open plan, cell phone use isn’t allowed, and all talking is to be kept to a minimum. It’s sort of like the “quiet car” on Amtrak. At the back of the library, movable bleacher seating can be reconfigured for all-hands meetings. In a tongue-in-cheek touch, we put film on the glass windows that looks like shelves of books.
 
The pergola meeting areas are accessed through a corridor with a wood slat ceiling designed to resemble a trellis. The glass walls of each room are covered with a film that looks like switchgrass.
 
The back porch is a series of semiprivate rooms where people can get away from their desk and either have an impromptu meeting or just work at their laptop in a sunny space. 

​The garage came about because they wanted a place that felt completely different from all the other spaces, but that would still function as everyday workspace. The sliding garage doors enable it to be separated from the rest of the office as needed. The standing height desks inside have butcher block tops. Just like in a real garage, people can hang things on pegboards on the walls.
 
When we went on our initial walkthrough of the space, we were told there was a room we couldn’t go into, and that it wasn’t part of the leasable space. Of course, we went into it anyway. Turned out it had a stairway that the landlords had walled off in the middle for building code reasons. It was a stairway to nowhere.
 
We asked the landlords if we could have it, if we made it code compliant, because we’d like to use it for a little hidden room, and they said yes. So we added a few sprinklers and painted the risers multiple colors. At the top of the steps, we placed off-the-shelf lockers for people to keep their belongings—especially important for a place where people don’t have assigned desks.
 
Our clients tell us the space has completely changed how they interact, and they love it: people are talking to each other, and it’s served as a great recruiting tool. It was an unusual job for us—keeping the essence of the culture, while completely changing the way everyone worked.

​Before Photos Below

Q: What aspect of interior design do you enjoy the most and why?

EN: I have always enjoyed the power behind solving problems. Growing up, I loved puzzles, watching how each piece had a certain place and purpose, all working together to create a bigger picture. This is why I appreciate the technical side of interior design and see it as a spring board towards a successful project. Similarly, programming shares this sense of challenge, incorporating the client’s needs and providing the best solution possible. Programming was also my favorite subject in school. 

Q: Growing up, your grandfather was an architect. What did you learn from him that you are able to utilize in your work today?

EN: My grandfather exposed me to architecture at a young age. I grew up looking at his drawings, going to his office and watching how projects progressed, from start to finish. I remember one project in particular that has stuck with me. He was designing a local church. I recall looking at all the drawings and being so enthralled with the vast scale of the building. Every time I visited him I would love to see the new sketches and how the design of the church changed. When the project was completed, he took me to the site, and I was able to see all of the sketches come to life. It was my first exposure to the design process. Through this, he taught me appreciation for architectural design and the importance of patience and precision. 

Q: What similarities do you see between designing for a major fitness brand and designing for corporate interiors?  How are you able to apply this experience to workplace interiors?

EN: I see similarities in understanding the market and the client. While at Equinox, I was working in teams that designed health clubs that responded to factors such as location, client, market and current trends. We worked to craft a tailored fit for each club. This is comparable to the work I have done with Huntsman thus far. We cater towards the client’s needs, where they are located or moving to, and provide an understanding of the market. This comes back to being a part of a great company that works hard to produce quality projects for their clients.

Q: Based on your experience at Equinox, what are some ways the office environment can benefit from incorporating more fitness and well-being initiatives that are not yet present?

EN: In my opinion, treadmill workstations reflect the evolution/merge of a new lifestyle and professional environment, and it’s becoming more common in the workplace. It’s not limited to tech companies anymore. Healthy initiatives are becoming a part of the overall office environment. By incorporating more wellbeing initiatives, companies promote a healthier work environment and in turn healthier/happier employees. Studies have even shown that morale and employee performance increases as the office offers a better balance between work and personal life.

Q: As they join the workforce, millennials are bringing new trends, technologies and lifestyles to the workplace. How do you think the office will evolve to accommodate this new generation?  

EN:  The workplace is deviating from the idea of working at a permanent desk from 9-5. As millennials are joining the workforce, expectations about the workplace are changing. So are perceptions about office culture and environment. Flexibility is a huge factor, the need to have flexible hours and areas to work. The office is feeling the impact of these desires and making changes to accommodate them. Office layouts are integrating new strategies for flexibility and variety to enhance creativity and more importantly the productivity of their new workforce. This in turn is driving the innovation of office design. 

Q:  What do you want to learn or accomplish here at Huntsman?

EN:  Having only recently begun my career within corporate planning and design, I would like to learn about every aspect and develop my skills as a designer. I am at that stage where I want to soak in as much information as possible, and I look forward to opportunities that will allow me to weave in my unique perspective. I find it fascinating to learn about the composition of a product and the testing it has to go through. I want to better understand the relationship between products and their impact on the designed environment. 


Contact Nicole: 
negan@huntsmanag.com
212.693.2700

by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
(featured in Contract magazine, May 2015)

Today’s cutting-edge office interiors for technology companies—open, creative, and amenity-rich—seem to be universally envied. This new paradigm perhaps even signals the future for traditional fields, like banking or law. Before accepting the tech office trends as the de facto basis for every future workplace, it is worth pursuing which features provide meaningful enhancements to well-being, culture, and productivity and which are just passing fads.

How tech companies really work
To understand the way tech spaces work at both a functional and cultural level, we first need to look at the drivers that have gotten us to this point in office design. Everything changed with the smartphone. Having a pocket-size supercomputer liberated the workforce from desks and office buildings. For tech-enabled workers, and indeed for most of the first-world population, the problem is no longer getting access to information or connectivity; it is filtering massive amounts of interactions.

Other drivers for tech workspaces are new collaborative and information-sharing models, including open-source product development, coworking, virtual or augmented reality, and rapid prototyping—all of which are influencing the pace of innovation and the way teams need to work now: fast, smart, connected, and collaborative. 

The design of built spaces has already been influenced by Millennials’ preference for democratic team structures, so it’s not surprising that the individual workspace is less of a status symbol. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the open among Facebook engineers, and many other tech CEOs don’t have assigned desks. Tech companies also use different ways to measure performance. Netflix, for example, empowers employees to largely manage their own time, provided they meet their job responsibilities. It’s what you produce, 
not where you are, that matters.


• Focus on wellness and sustainability. Providing bike storage supports a healthier commute. A place to exercise or meditate, height-adjustable desks, good ventilation, access to daylight and outdoor spaces, and toxin-free construction materials are all essentials of a healthy workplace. Operable windows can reduce both heating and cooling costs. 

Food also plays a key role. At the office of Kaiser Permanente’s Thrive group, healthful food and snack options are supplemented with regular cooking and nutrition classes to help staff make better lifestyle choices. When employee wellness is a driver for office design, increased productivity usually follows.

While these concepts may seem like obvious positives, industries outside of tech have been slower to follow suit. Implementing collaborative design principles in traditional organizations often involves concerns about maintaining information privacy, navigating and managing regulatory requirements, and breaking down reporting structures. Since shifts in demographics and mobility will eventually affect every industry, it’s time to adapt or be left behind. Creating a more progressive workspace means asking hard questions and challenging the entrenched hierarchies and models of corporate workflow and space utilization.

Clients expect creativity, competitive pricing, speed, technical proficiency, and competent project delivery, so designers are positioned to have the most strategic impact at the front end of the project. When a client hires a designer, one key consideration should be the designer’s ability to listen and then synthesize what they learned. Understanding an organization’s culture is a designer’s most valuable contribution.

Design is too frequently perceived as a commodity, and built space as a mere operational expense. To demonstrate tangible value, successful designers shift the conversation toward the role interiors play at a strategic level. This means emphasizing not only how a space will look or function but how people connect to it emotionally. Beyond merely looking cool, the best tech workspaces truly engage employees and amplify the organization’s culture, ultimately impacting the bottom line—and that should be the goal for every office interior as well.

by Dan Huntsman
dhuntsman@huntsmanag.com

As the holiday season draws to a close, we are reminded of how the spirit of giving extends beyond our family and friends to the communities in which we work and live. Within the design profession, there are a host of opportunities to use our creativity to collaborate with community organizations whose missions are to serve those in need. For many of these groups, financial support to sustain the quality of their services has become increasingly more difficult to raise. They often have to develop innovative programs to gain visibility for their causes and attract both donors and volunteers. The contributions made by our employees have helped these organizations with fundraising and outreach efforts, and through their talents and skills, have been able to share the gift of design.

For the past 12 years, Huntsman has participated in We Care, an annual holiday event sponsored by Herman Miller. For this event, architecture and design firms in 27 cities around the country join together to volunteer their time and skills in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of America. Teams comprised of designers host craft stations, where kids make personalized gifts. At the start of the holiday season, Huntsman staff in both New York and San Francisco joined leading design firms to bring their expertise and passion for design to work with over 450 school kids in creating unique gifts – everything from jewelry, holiday themed tee shirts, photo frames, to wall clocks. At the end of the day, the children who participated in the event brought home armloads of handmade gifts.

“We strive to create smiles and stories that will be well remembered,” says Erin Wendt, who supports the coordination efforts on behalf of the Herman Miller A+D team, “We aim to incorporate the arts and culture as part of the day. In addition to the craft-making, we host photos with Santa, a face-painting table and offer temporary tattoos as part of the fun. The best response that we could hear at the end of the day is for the children to ask if we would return next year!”

Among the many challenges of putting together this event is coordinating craft designs that could be created by children ranging in age from 5 to 12 years old. “While planning, we have to consider several aspects: creativity of the craft, originality, cost, and ease of assembly,” shares Andrea Hurtado from Huntsman. “Kids have only 45 minutes to go from table to table, so creativity and efficiency were in high supply.”

Where the kids find delight in creating handmade gifts, designers get the opportunity to access their inner child, play with their creativity, and make time for our community. It also gives them a chance to encourage kids to use their imagination and to access their creativity for a thoughtful gift. It stresses the adage that gift giving is about meaning more than commercial value. “It is such an exciting event for the children, and they are so appreciative for the opportunity to make these gifts,” adds Huntsman’s Brandye Johnson, “not only for their loved ones, but for themselves as well.”

For CANstruction, a national fundraising event whose proceeds benefit local food banks, building creative sculptures out of food cans is leveraged as a marketing tool to draw the public in and create awareness for the organization. CANstruction holds annual design and build competitions to construct giant sized structures made entirely out of canned food. In more than 100 cities in North America, the structures are on display to the general public the week before Thanksgiving.

San Francisco CANstruction proposed the theme of the Cannes Film Festival for 2012, which required entries to tie back to the international film festival. Paying homage to its client Pixar Animation Studios, Huntsman teamed with GCI General Contractors and Rutherford & Chekene Engineers to construct a sculpture inspired by the film “Up,” the first animated feature film to premier at Cannes. Comprised of more than 5,300 cans of chicken, tuna, beef stew, crab meat, and assorted vegetables, the “Up” structure represents a whole greater than the sum of its many parts – an idea that is reflected in the event itself with 13 other structures in the competition. The event raised more than 70,000 cans of food which were donated to the San Francisco and Marin Food Banks.

“CANstruction is an ideal way for our industry to give back to the community in which we build,” shares Lauren Sherman, Chairperson for SF CANstruction. “Food and shelter are the basics that many are struggling with right now. CANstruction raises a tremendous amount of food while having fun and raising awareness about issues of hunger.” Only in its second year in the Bay Area, CANstruction 2012 represents the largest, single canned food donation in the food banks’ history, driving home the point that creative ideas can be made of the most common product like a can of food. And that design can help tell a much more compelling and visual story.

While the holidays are a time when we are more conscious about the thought of giving, we can all pool our individual talents and creative ideas any time of year. The collective good is designed by our ability to come together and support each other.

From all of us at Huntsman Architectural Group, we wish you the best in the new year.

by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
@swagnr

The Bay Area’s economic recovery is again being linked to investment in startup companies. Focusing on improving or creating entirely new technologies or services, these startups are not all large-scale endeavors. The federal government’s Small Business Administration states that small businesses start up at a rate of over 500,000 a year and account for 75% of all new jobs in our current economy. Recent commercial leasing reports for Silicon Valley and San Francisco show continued activity by startup companies in web technology, apps and gaming, and life-science sectors. While this activity seems to be stabilizing as this year draws to a close, the overall outlook continues to be positive. But let’s not confuse this with the tech gold rush of the late 1990’s – it is different this time.

As a result of the game-changing economic downturns of the dot-com bust, the 2008 stock market adjustment and the resulting “great recession”, the approach to seed funding, operational oversight, and cost control of startup companies now definitely (and thankfully) has a more sensible and conservative note. While the process of designing space for startups is a different game today, some fundamental keys to success have remained unchanged. Let’s look at some of the best practices:

– Create Learning Opportunity for Everyone –

Today’s startup leaders are often younger and/or first-time entrepreneurs and thus relatively new to the process of selecting and designing office space that reflects their company culture. This is a good thing. By nature, startups are just beginning to define their culture, so early planning with the real estate and design team offers the opportunity to identify and realize a company’s values through the evaluation of work styles and work settings.  Statistics show that second only to salary, the physical work environment is the largest contributor to employee satisfaction and retention. It’s simple – great space equals happy and productive employees.

Explaining the often complex design and construction process to a client is an important first step.  Projects are most successful when this dialogue is collaborative and continues for the duration. This builds critical trust between all involved parties and facilitates continuous learning.  So while clients learn about how space impacts their business, design consultants learn as much as possible about the client’s business model in order to support their vision with creative design solutions.

-   Choose the Best Setting -

How a startup actually intends to use their space greatly impacts the type of real estate to consider in the first place.  For example, wider column spacing or more room between the building core and window line may allow users to sit in larger groups and to reconfigure workstations more easily.  On the other hand, several segmented “neighborhoods” can allow for privacy between certain critical functions (e.g. a high energy sales area vs. a heads-down engineering area).  Knowing which model best supports a user’s needs informs the space selection from day one.

Touring existing spaces with a design professional is a helpful tool envisioning a variety of work environments, and gives clients a better sense of what to expect in their own project. It also provides an opportunity to understand a range of costs associated with certain levels of construction. Test-fit planning in multiple buildings gives clients the opportunity to confirm their program well before starting lease negotiations in earnest. When architects are part of the team up front they can add significant value to this process. Creating a good design in a space wrought with challenges is par for the course for talented designers, but why not select a space that is aligned with the client’s intended work style in the first place?

 – Return of the Spec Suite –

One current market trend is the proliferation of pre-built spaces complete with partitions, ceilings, lighting, and finishes, offering the ability to bring space online quickly. Especially for startups, this race to occupancy is often the primary determining factor in a real estate decision. Through creative design, these environments can often be re-purposed in exciting, non-traditional ways without much added cost.  For a tech startup, private offices become huddle rooms, conference rooms become engineering bullpens, and training rooms can become all-hands meeting or demonstration rooms.

In most cases, startups are developing and testing disruptive or innovative technology as it goes to market.  As a result, spaces frequently need to support quickly changing work styles.  While pre-built spaces can be limiting in some ways, creatively adapting them can save costs and time, which is critical to emerging companies.

– Get Real on Schedule, Budget, and Program –

Clients who have never built out office space can be shocked at how long the process takes. Early schedule feedback from architects and contractors can help align a client’s expectations with the realities of construction. Too often, aggressive timeframes sound good from a leasing perspective but can only be accommodated by incurring some financial or functional penalties.

Similarly, developing a realistic project budget from the onset helps the design team formulate better solutions to client objectives. Knowing “what you get for the money” helps to prioritize needs versus wants, and even prior to that, enables the real estate broker to negotiate better lease terms based on those priorities. A budget should also take into consideration possible future modifications to the space. Most startups grow exponentially, so accommodating flexibility is paramount.  This is particularly true for electrical and HVAC infrastructure which can typically make up 30-35% or more of a construction budget. Cloud computing and off-site data storage services have liberated many office spaces from large IT infrastructure requirements. However, adding two or three times the amount of people into a space over time must also be considered in planning for cooling and electrical plug loads. Retrofitting a space later on is usually far more costly than planning for future needs up front.

Startup clients are likely to have fluctuating program needs. Through a visioning session, the design team learns how the users anticipate working in both the short term and in the future. Anticipated changes in work styles may inform what level of build-out actually needs to be done initially, and what should be phased in later.  An early determination of the number of offices, conference rooms, collaborative areas and open office space is often based on staff headcounts and growth projections which have not been fleshed out. Designing these spaces for multiple future uses builds in immediate flexibility.

– Be Innovative and Open to New Ideas –

The best companies recruit the most talented employees, and these are often people who seek out the most innovative work environments.  Therefore, the workplace should foster creativity and knowledge sharing.  Startup employees often hold multiple roles and are not fixed to traditional office workspaces, such as private offices or individual desks. As a result, space needs to perform multiple functions, which presents the chance to introduce flexible and often mobile design elements in architectural and furniture products that allow for easy reconfiguration. But with mobility comes a new set of challenges.

One of our recent startup “incubator” clients desired a highly-flexible open office with fully moveable workstations.  The challenge was bringing power and data cabling to desks that would be relocated on a weekly basis. Through our collaborative process with the client and the contractor’s pricing input on several options, the design team developed a solution incorporating laboratory-style pull-down power/data drops. Being open to all ideas and exploring them rapidly as a team is a success strategy that is akin to the business model of many startup clients themselves, and is often expected by this type of client. Successful consultants integrate this approach into their process.

– Set the Stage for Success –

Today’s startups have less money to spend on real estate, so it must be spent more intelligently. Experienced design and real estate professionals can help emerging business succeed by harnessing the power of their work environment and maximizing available capital.  The key is collaboratively sharing goals, expectations, and experiences, clearly defining roles and responsibilities, yet staying flexible and lean.  With this approach, the team lays the foundation for a successful project and an enduring client relationship that hopefully leads to more opportunities as today’s startups evolve to become the next industry leaders.

Sascha Wagner is a Principal at Huntsman Architectural Group. He is an advocate for highly collaborative, client driven, interdisciplinary design with sustainability at its core.  He is also President of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA)’s Northern California Chapter. Steven Gerten also contributed to this article.