To Alexandra Cuber, director of interior design for Fogarty Finger, designing for hospitality and workplace projects requires the same approach. “Workplace can’t live without hospitality,” she tells Workplace Design in an exclusive Q&A discussing how synthesizing both typologies yields more humanized environments, through amenities and beyond.
How are workplace and hospitality dependent on one another?
The lines have blurred and I’m actually really enjoying that because it’s nice how it melded. Now you see amenities popping up in all of our workplaces, be it within the office or in those big buildings with landlords providing amenity spaces as an extension of your workplace. People who work in big buildings can go and have more informal meetings or breakout meetings or actual team bonding and it’s all within your workplace environment. I see more and more clients want to offer that to their employees.
When did that start?
It got really enhanced after COVID for many reasons because we had to bring the office to the home. Now we had to bring the home back into the office.
How has that impacted office design?
This experience has made us understand maybe how we do our best work. It’s not always at this white desk with a screen eight hours a day. It’s great because the focus has shifted more on the employees and how we can support them to do their best work. In the end, they’re the biggest asset.
How does Fogarty Finger’s approach differ between hospitality or workplace projects?
I think they’re actually the same. I’m really tuning in a bit more on what we as employees need. We are not meant to sit alone at home, but we also sometimes seek privacy. Looking at these needs and implementing the spaces for that—phone rooms, wellness rooms for the individual moments where you can go have a call or maybe just have a moment to reboot.
What about designing for communal space?
We only had conference rooms and meeting rooms before, but I now we are tending to provide a bit more casual breakout spaces or meeting spaces to address different needs at different times of day. That is very influenced by residential. Hotel interiors are very inspired by residential because it’s where you relax. Everything is much more calming on the nervous system. We are now implementing more and more of these items because we can create an environment which is more soothing and actually enhances our production. Being stressed constantly can be affected by your environment, so if you create an environment which is calming and soothing, it can also affect your work output. We bring this hospitality layer into these offices and there is much more value on those items—areas which are not just stock offices. They’re inviting and you want to come to work.
What does this tend to look like? Are there distinctive materials, colors, layouts?
We don’t copy paste. We don’t have certain things which we try to overlay everywhere. What we are trying to do is implement democratization of natural light. We are trying to give everybody access to natural light. Then, looking at natural finishes to bring hospitality in there and not having everything black and white. Some natural earthy colors or jewel colors to give it a little bit of an elevated feel. We have implemented planting to give natural biophilic elements.
Why?
Trying to implement these textures and imperfect layers into the architecture makes it more human, makes it a bit more approachable. There have been clients who like to create neighborhoods—not departments, neighborhoods. A creative department would probably have more high-tops where you can come and collaborate. Sales would probably have more little phone rooms for calls. HR would be much more discreet. It really creates a much more organic workplace environment.
What questions help guide early client conversations?
We really strive to understand our clients and the brand and the values. When we get a new client, we have those interviews at the beginning with the C-level. What do they see? Who are they now? What do they want to be in five years? What are their values? We ask about what they envision in terms of aesthetics. We give them options in terms of inspo, and then we also talk to some employees. We want to have a broadstroke of where they are at that time and also a vision of where they want to go.
What should more workplace clients prioritize?
I still keep hearing that from some clients, “Everybody has to go back to work five days a week. We have to go back to normal.” I don’t want to go back. We have gone through this whole process to come out better for it. Learning what we have learned in this traumatic event, now our workplaces are getting better. I don’t want to go back to normal. That phrase is just making me angry at this point. That is in the past. We want to do better.
How can you nudge a client out of these old habits?
We do try to push them where we can and try to show them the options and talk to them about the plus sides with understanding where their values are. Eighty percent have embraced the new and the better. Everybody wants amenities, everybody wants the phone rooms. Everybody wants this nice balance. We are definitely going towards better workplaces. We are already there.
Everybody’s looking for purpose, right? Purpose in their work life. Seeing that the workspace is actually turning into a much more human-oriented environment is really giving me a purpose.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.