INTERVIEW
Flexible Office Provider Knotel Finds Sleek Design for Its Varied Offices
NATALIE BEN ABA, MANAGER, DESIGN STRATEGY & GLOBAL FF&E SOURCING
The open office is crucial to Knotel’s business strategy, and ROOM delivers.
For Natalie Ben Aba, flexibility is key when it comes to designing unique spaces for Knotel’s clients.
Working as a designer at Knotel is unlike most other design jobs. Everything moves at such a fast pace. We’re now in 8 markets: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., London, Paris, Berlin and São Paolo. We provide fast, flexible office space to companies so they can grow and scale as needed without penalties or restrictive leases.
Yet at the same time, one of our design principles is to reject uniformity. We design for a wide variety of customers, so each office build-out must look unique and offer tailored branding for that specific company. The space must tell the client’s story, not Knotel’s story. It’s got to shout their name.
To do that, we bring in our team of interior designers and branded environments designers who uncover each client’s story and find creative ways to bring to life what would otherwise be just another cookie-cutter office space.
And we must do this fast; agility is another Knotel foundation. So you’ll have these intense, short periods of creativity where you knock out great ideas as quickly as possible. It’s a fun challenge because you can’t noodle on things for too long, and you don’t have these long approval processes. You just go. In the end, you might take more risks but you tend to come up with bold ideas.
Knotel’s team is always on the lookout for smart ways to improve office design, and it put ROOM booths inside its own offices, as well as those of its clients.
Knotel recognizes that no company is the same, and no office space should be the same, either.
Life before ROOM
Because we design on the fly, each open office project is like a blank canvas. Increasingly, we view furniture as interior architecture; we may use bookcases or modular partitions to divide a room, for example. Everything must be modular and adjustable, and in each office, it must look unique.
“We need everything to be efficient, flexible and modular, and ROOM delivers.”
Our design team is constantly on the lookout for the best new products to make the open office better — both for our own company and our customers’ workspaces. After deep research, we were fortunate to find ROOM. It’s a great fit for Knotel.
Sleek, Neutral Design that Fits Most Any Office
We have ROOM booths in our own offices and we regularly use them in our client spaces, too. In fact, we like them so much we stock them in our warehouses to ensure they’re available on-demand. We love the modern, sleek contemporary design and the neutral color palette, making them a good fit for a wide range of office spaces.
We use the booths strategically in office design, as a way to break up open spaces while adding needed privacy. It’s a great alternative to building multiple conference rooms that never get used.
Fast-growing companies that choose Knotel as an office space provider need furniture and design that can be altered and easily moved.
ROOM’s booths are simple and sleek, so they go with any office design, offering another space for quiet conversation.
Our flexible concept requires minimal build-out of offices, and modularity is key. We can build a ROOM booth in less than an hour. We can easily take it down, pick it up, move it to a new location. We need everything to be efficient, flexible and modular, and ROOM delivers.
Since the booths arrived, we’ve moved them to our New York headquarters and then again to multiple locations. They fit with any office, which is exactly what we needed.
A Phone Booth in a Coffee Shop?
We also installed the booths in our first Knotel Neighborhood, a nearby ancillary space that our clients share outside of their own offices. Commons, one of the Neighborhood spaces, is analogous to a coffee shop with library tables, comfortable seats and of course, plenty of coffee. It’s a great change of pace for people who just need to step out of the more controlled office environment.
We put two ROOM phone booths inside the Commons. We love the placement there as it’s very rare that you can go to a coffee shop and find a private, quiet space to take a call.
Knotel seeks out flexible partners that can adapt to fast-paced change as the company quickly expands beyond its eight international markets.
Speed Matters
ROOM has been really easy to work with. We had to reroute an order of booths on the fly to San Francisco from New York, and ROOM responded quickly, delivering the booths on time and fast. That was crucial, because things move fast here. I regularly recommend ROOM to our clients and to any company that’s looking for an easy, modular solution to the need for office privacy.
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