An Office Environment That Feels Like Home
Spaces to live in and enjoy as if at home. This was the idea behind realty company Cushman & Wakefield’s re-design of its Milan office. The revamped headquarters are today a flexible, hybrid, smart, hi-tech, efficient and sustainable space in step with the times and open to the trends revealed by the Covid pandemic. While responding to current needs, the new design is also a model office of the future, the architecture displaying an in-built flexibility that will allow adjustment to possible future requirements.
The primary concern was occupant well-being and comfort throughout – in the open office spaces as well as in the reserved areas, conference rooms and relaxation environments. The architects followed WELL protocol indications, interspersing dedicated and informal areas to ensure overall livability, along with good air, water and sound quality, comfort-zone temperatures, and natural daylighting. When it came to guaranteeing optimal solar and natural light control, Omnitex – sun-shading and blind manufacturers for interiors and exteriors since 1985 – was called in. The collaboration led to the installation of 55 large, manually-operated pulley-mounted blinds. The product chosen – GreenGuard Gold certified Omnitex-tes-fil-SCR3003 – is made of a light-filtering and scattering fabric with a 3% aperture factor ensuring air quality and protection against volatile organic substances. Certification is based on analysis of the chemical emissions of thousands of organic volatile compounds as well as of the product manufacturing process itself.
The well-being, i.e., physical and psychological equilibrium that the new Cushman & Wakefield office aimed to achieve by adopting the WELL protocol also involved ensuring an articulated spatial configuration that allowed a series of different activities, just as happens in the domestic setting. In fact, the company’s Business Social Hub, the heart of the headquarters where employees, professionals and clients meet to do business, is adjacent to an open space with 148 flexible workstations that can be adapted to individual or collective working requirements. Nearby are soundproof alcoves for small group meetings, closed and silent spaces for individual phone calls, and a quiet, no-phone room with 16 workstations for undisturbed concentration. There is also a training room for 25 people with modular furniture that can be reconfigured in different ways, and a chill-out area for employees.
The underlying aim was to make the workplace a productive, social and collaborative environment that people are happy to come to.
OMNITEX
Via Francesco Ferrucci, 6 – I – 20145 Milano
Tel. +39 02 3492666
E-mail: [email protected] – www.omnitex.it