Trees have a special status here at Vantage Spaces and we love incorporating them into indoor designs. We’ve installed some magnificent specimens in offices all over London and they really do add wow factor to an overall design.
An office is home to all sorts of activities. Greeting clients, meeting tight deadlines, making big decisions, team building, celebrating, and much more. And the modern office has to work hard to provide for all these moments — especially in the era of hybrid working, where employees often need a reason (or motivation) to commute to the office. A thoughtfully designed office can significantly impact employee wellbeing, productivity and creativity. And planting can play a powerful role in moulding different zones to the activities that need to take place.
Our showroom sits in the heart of Clerkenwell, a vibrant hub of creative design and home to an array of architects, and interior designers and suppliers. We share the showroom with Spacestor — creators of architectural, space-defining furniture. Their mission is to create great spaces that improve people’s lives. We share the very same ethos, so Spacestor and Vantage Spaces was therefore a natural partnership. We worked together to create an outstanding space for the Clerkenwell showroom.
It’s difficult to imagine a time when plants weren’t present in the office, but if we were to travel back in time, we’d find some pretty barren working landscapes! Similarly, the traditional office look with banks of uninspiring desks and bare walls feels like a relic of history, evolving instead towards more dynamic, multi-functional spaces that foster teamwork and collaboration. And this demand for flexible, reconfigurable space has become more acute since the advent of hybrid working. Combine together the ever-increasing love of biophilia with the need for more flexible and stimulating spaces, and you get the case for planted furniture.
This year’s Workspace Design Show was another eclectic mix of thought-provoking talks exploring future trends. We were there as usual, welcoming visitors to our stand and sharing our expertise and insights into the power that planting has to help create workspaces of the future. The continued evolution and enhancement of the workplace, in order to keep it relevant and productive in the face of hybrid working, was an obvious talking point, and one theme which kept popping up was something called ‘hotelification’.
For many of us, the office is now somewhere where we only spend part of our time, and this has enabled some employers to reduce the amount of space that they devote to banks of desks. However, what employers don’t want to lose, is the face-to-face interaction and collaboration that takes place in the office. Creating an inviting space that facilitates this happening is essential to building a strong company culture and maintaining a sense of ‘team’.
We live and breathe planting at Vantage, and love nothing more than seeing a project come together – biophilia can really make a workspace fit-out or redesign ‘pop’. This month, we’ve interviewed Hollie Kneeshaw, and Rachael Crampsey, members of our creative team at Vantage, to give a flavour of how one of our workspace designs develops from concept to fully-fledged reality.
In recent years, we have all become increasingly aware of the impact that buildings can have on the environment and on the people working inside them. This has led to the development of green building standards and rating systems, such as SKA and WELL, which seek to promote and reward best practice in building design.
We’re passionate about planting design here at Vantage and its power to create spaces where people love to be. We all have our favourite projects – we asked our team to talk about their memorable projects and what stood out for them most.
Humans have an innate connection with nature, and we know that incorporating planting into the built environment can promote health and wellbeing and productivity. We also care deeply about our impact on the planet, and we take steps wherever we can to ensure that our practices are as sustainable as they can be.
An increasing body of scientific research into the effect that being in nature has on the brain shows that nature could be used in a more prescriptive way, to counteract the sensory overload of modern life. How can we better harness the power of nature in the world we live in today?
Even though many of us work in a bricks and mortar setting from Monday to Friday, we still enjoy the opportunity to be close to nature, so having planting around us in the office makes it a much more pleasant place to be.
In this article, we look at why hydroculture is gradually replacing soil-based indoor cultivation within offices and public buildings.
Air quality is now something many employers are very conscious of in office environments, and aspirational building standards which actively promote occupant wellbeing (Fitwel, WELL, SKA), all include air quality on the list of features that should be continually measured and monitored.
Sample includes small sprays of replica and preserved foliages and mixed mosses in a library shelf box
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