How Should Good Office Design Reflect a Company's Culture and Values? | Our Offices ⑤

Offices built around rank and efficiency are out of date. Office design now goes after something deeper — what a company actually is — and care for employees follows naturally from that.

When Takeshi Okui joined the company, he found that the grade of his chair depended on his rank. When he was promoted to manager, the facilities manager turned up with an armchair for him.

But that was 27 years ago. Offices built around rank and efficiency are out of date, and companies keep chipping away at that kind of class barrier.

Okui is chairman of the China business of Kokuyo, the Japanese office-furniture brand. As he remembers it, a company used to hand its employees a working environment, and if they didn't like it, too bad — nothing would change on that account. Staff in those days were traditional too: once they joined a company they stayed a long time, usually right through to retirement.

The new generation is different, Okui says. "They aren't very patient, and they have demands about the working environment. If we can't give them a comfortable one, they'll leave for another job."

Young people today generally have no notion of loyalty to a company; they are all looking for more room to develop themselves.

Many companies, especially the biggest ones, are changing — they have to, to keep the quality of the people they hire. Yahoo and Uniqlo give employees three days off a week; more companies are starting with the office itself.

This is not simply a ploy to please the young.

Office design is also becoming a way to read a company's culture. Its values and vision are no longer a few big red slogans pasted up behind the front desk or at the gate of the campus; they seep into every part of the space, including the coffee room and the gym — places that were never standard office equipment.

Of course, an office isn't good just because it's showy, and beauty doesn't come from piling on decoration. What business owners attend to is the value of the space: how to build an environment employees can really settle into, one that draws better ideas out of them, so that they in turn ask more of their own work.

Good office design goes after something deeper in a company, and care for employees follows naturally from it.

We looked at offices across different industries, sizes and formats to work out what today's workplaces have in common. Five trends came up often enough to cover most of what office design is now doing:

• Tailoring the workplace to how the company actually collaborates, with an eye on efficiency;
• Balancing collaborative work against privacy;
• Smart offices that improve how employees experience work;
• Attention to physical and mental health, and to sustainability;
• Using design to spell out the company's culture.

This is the last piece in the series. Through three cases, we ask how good office design reflects a company's culture and values.

Build an Environment That Pushes People to Ask More of Themselves

Last year Opple Lighting finished its industrial park in the Fenhu High-Tech Industrial Development Zone in Wujiang, which doubles as its R&D headquarters.

When work on the new campus began, Wang Yudong, director of application design at Opple's commercial business unit, put the problem this way: "Everyone thinks private companies are crude." How do you break that habit of mind and overturn a stereotype private enterprise has carried for years? They brought in the Taiwanese design firm iDA Workplace+Strategy to handle the office design.

An office is one of the places where a company's values show most plainly. Opple wanted a collaborative office that coaxes people out of enclosed rooms and puts the exchange of ideas first, with hard thinking about light and layout.

Because Opple is a lighting company, light became the iDA team's thread: how to show the value of light through space. Not fixtures and ornament, but light and illumination themselves — and through them, a way of thinking about layout.

The detail work with light starts at the reception area of the headquarters building. Shaped out of light, the desk forms the focal point of the wide lobby, a box glowing from end to end and answering the whole office beyond.

The designer Simon Wu argues that even a company in the business of light has to respect daylight. Artificial lighting in the lobby is used sparingly so that daylight can pour through, which makes the space feel open and leaves little need for decoration. The purity of the light produces the effect of "seeing the light but not the lamp."

"Through planning the space, we shape collaborative interaction between people. In balancing the light, I chose to respect natural light and combine it with artificial light so that each sets off the other," Simon said.

Behind the lobby, a run of screens forms standing glass rooms that serve as meeting rooms — plain and bright, visually open, running into one another until it is hard to say where one space ends and the next begins. They divide the floor and at the same time bring people closer, meant to "express the company's principles of transparency and equality."

Private offices are gone; the floors are transparent to one another; the open-plan areas are used flexibly; the walkways are wide; the atrium lounges open between floors. All of it balances what people do against what the space can give.

See-through screens join the ground-floor lobby to the working areas on the second floor. In the open office, diffused lighting spreads the light and softens the mood of the whole floor.

Every office area has a walkway like an urban light gallery, an extension of the workspace and a common resource where people can take in daylight. The lighting along it underlines the way the whole building throws light from the inside out.

Work areas and rest areas share one open, transparent plan that ties the zones together, so people come out of their seats and talk, which turns into ideas and keeps their energy up for the next project.

Wang Yudong thinks this has helped people talk to each other. "At first, for some managers and department heads, it was strange, and for some of them it may even have been a matter of face. But once it was built, what it brought was more efficiency and more communication."

That goes double for the R&D team that moved in. A good, inventive office, Wang says, holds them to something. "The old attitude of 'that'll do' gets squeezed out in a place like this. People do a bit better, and they ask more of the product."

Kinfolk's New Headquarters Is the Magazine's Spatial Aesthetic, Made Solid

When people talk about the magazine Kinfolk, the line you hear is that "it founded an aesthetic school of its own," on the page and on Instagram alike. That almost liturgical "aesthetics of living" has taken over today's social networks, and our lives with them.

It tells stories about food, the home and travel, and everything about it — the wide white space, the uncluttered compositions, the reporting itself — reads as a blend of Scandinavian and Japanese taste.

Last year they went ahead and moved from the Portland office where the magazine was founded to a new headquarters in Copenhagen.

The new space is, like the projects Kinfolk likes to feature, a specimen of the slow living it preaches — even though it has to work as an office.

Put plainly, it is the magazine's imagined space made solid. The work area, the gallery, the shared lounges and every object in them were picked to match Kinfolk's slow-living idea, which leaves the headquarters as handsome and quiet as a gallery.

Even in picking a design partner, Kinfolk went to Norm Architects, the Danish studio that has always worked in a minimalist line. Kinfolk's founder, Nathan Williams, and its communications director, Jessica Gray, took part in decorating the interior as well.

Norm Architects describes the headquarters on its website like this: "The Kinfolk Gallery and its offices are a shared space where ideas can be shared with friends. It is also a window for showing work — warm, elegant, true to Kinfolk's slow-living philosophy, and like a home."

Every shade of color and every inch of material was chosen the way the magazine chooses a story, to share Kinfolk's way of living. If anyone asks what sort of magazine Kinfolk really is, no description, however apt, is likely to beat the values this space carries.

A Sørensen bench in high-grade nubuck aniline leather runs along one side of the glass, a place to sit for informal work, a meeting or a stretch of meditation.

Small corners and niches opposite absorb the irregularities the building already had, and make for some pleasant architectural detail along the way. A niche works as a room in miniature: somewhere to curl up with a book or a laptop.

The gallery and the offices join into a single open space, light and harmonious. But as a series of narrow doors leads further into the building, the tones darken and turn private.

The custom desks are set out in orderly rows, an idea borrowed from Japanese architecture. All the custom wood furniture is Dinesen oak, which warms the room. The walls, finished in Kabe-toned plaster, take their texture and color from the medieval facades around central Copenhagen.

To break the orthodox look of an office, the reception area was made to feel more like a dining room or a living room, with a big round table in the middle of the space and shelves on the walls. It doubles as a place for small meetings and discussions.

Strip a space back to the minimal and the restrained and it can hold far more kinds of activity: art exhibitions, brand pop-up shops open to the public, talks on food, the home and travel, plus forums, fashion shows, workshops, dinner parties and studio photo shoots.

How Should the Feel of a Space Fit What the Company Believes?

Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai is a communications agency built on creative work. One of its best pieces of the past two years is the Just Do It 2016 film it made for the sportswear brand Nike.

Last year W+K Shanghai redid its office. It hired Thomas Dariel, founder of Dariel Studio — a firm we have written about several times — to design the space, and W+K Shanghai's art director, Yang Yeo, took part in customizing the interior as a whole. If creative work is the company's core value, how is a designer supposed to put that into a room?

The Frenchman Thomas Dariel chose the tree as the theme of the space, to stand for creativity that never stops renewing itself and a brand culture chasing fast growth.

He put some thought into digging out the beauty and character the space already had. The existing open staircase, for instance, is used to string the floors together, with horizontal and vertical boards jointed and interleaved in an orderly way and carried on naturally into the areas between floors, like branches growing off a trunk. It is also a figure for ideas and inspiration spreading outward without stopping, and it gives the place a modern, elegant grain.

Metaphor of this kind is what Thomas Dariel does best. In the work he is known for — the Er Qianjin restaurant on the Bund, the Blossom Hill boutique hotel in Zhouzhuang — he used plenty of symbolic detail, some of it bound to read as too literal or too abrupt, but it is a strategy he returns to.

In the W+K Shanghai office the tree sits much more naturally. Details answer to it — a half-open wooden box, a desk lamp that looks caught in flight — and all of them push the same line about imagination and invention.

The main entrance is in the ground-floor courtyard, where black lacquered steel plate is set neatly against wood. The materials and graphics are rich, and the detail stays lively inside an overall balance. A wide board splits the facade in two: the upper half keeps the original white tile, the lower half is black lacquered steel, and the contrast between them is sharp. The floor throughout is a pale gray granite with an emphatic texture, which keeps the whole thing low-key.

The second-floor reception area is built as a single half-open wooden box, meant to give the staff room for wild ideas. Two small windows, in the side and the top of the box, connect inside and out. Snowflake-white marble and pale wood-grain finishes keep the mood soft and easy, and beside the reception desk a cloud-shaped flying lamp makes it feel as if gravity had let go and the imagination could run with no limit on it.

The second floor, the team's main work area, takes full account of the fact that the client's work is creative. It is entirely open-plan, which makes talking and working together easy. The storage cubbies on the right can be moved around as people need them. The walkways on both sides are raised to separate public circulation from the work area.

The main meeting room is to the right of the entrance. A large green carpet of pieced geometric shapes works with the wood floor and carries on up the wall, lighting the plain, elegant pale-blue paint and breaking the stuffy, tense feeling of a conventional meeting room. A long wooden table matches the office's main look and answers the storage cabinets hung in mid-air.

The office bar sits at the end of the corridor, where a large stretch of floor-to-ceiling glass brings in light and a view outside. The designer also built a "wood-brick wall" out of small blocks laid on the diagonal; light thrown across it comes back dappled and clearly layered.

At the end of the corridor is the gym, where big floor-to-ceiling windows keep the room clean and bright. To push the client's people to actually exercise, strong geometric lines run through the whole space and sharpen the sense of movement and force in the overall design.

The roof terrace is another of the office's distinctive spaces: a half-round bar in naturally veined marble, and a wood floor that takes the chill off the marble, for a quiet, comfortable mood.

Set beside Thomas's earlier signature projects, heavy with symbolism and the mixing of Chinese and Western culture, this office renovation comes off reasonably well. At the very least it shows an idea in office design worth borrowing: the logic of a space should be settled by how the people inside it behave.

Images: Norm Architects, Dariel Studio, iDA Workplace+Strategy