Selected work / Blackburn Young
Blackburn Young Office Solutions
At a glance
- Client
- Blackburn Young Office Solutions
- Location
- Vancouver, BC
- Sector
- Professional Services
- Scale
- 6,500 sq. ft.
- Completion
- 2021
- Design
- SSDG Interiors / Kenna Manley
The project
A workplace built around choice.
When the space next door became available, Blackburn Young had an opportunity to do more than expand our Vancouver office. We could rethink how our own workplace supported the people using it—and create a working example of the ideas we discuss with clients every day.
Working with Kenna Manley and SSDG Interiors, we expanded and renovated the office to create a 6,500-square-foot workplace designed around choice.
The idea was what we call an experience-based office: a workplace that blurs the traditional distinction between primary and secondary spaces and gives people the freedom to choose where and how they work based on what they need to accomplish that day.
The settings
Different settings. No prescribed way to use them.
Rather than treating the workstation as the place where work happens and everything else as supporting space, the office brings together settings for focused work, collaboration, meetings and informal interaction.
A café table can be a place to have lunch, meet with a colleague or spend an hour working independently. An enclosed room can support collaboration or focused work. Lounge settings can become places for conversation, individual work or an impromptu meeting.
The intention isn't to prescribe how each space should be used. It's to provide choice.
The experience
A showroom you actually work in.
The office also gives clients and design partners an opportunity to experience workplace ideas rather than simply look at furniture.
Since opening in 2021, it has become both our workplace and our testing ground—a place where our own team works with the same ideas around choice, flexibility and different work settings that we explore with our clients.
Visitors can sit, work, meet and experience products as part of a functioning workplace. For us, that's considerably more useful than simply seeing furniture on display.
Blackburn Young scope
From planning through installation.
Furniture
- Workstations
- Knoll
- Flexible settings
- Knoll
- Rockwell Unscripted
- Muuto
- Seating
- Knoll + Herman Miller
- Shared settings / throughout
- Ancillary furniture
Photography
Inside the workplace.
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