Designers are being tasked with creating unique and elevated workspaces that create beauty and cater to individual employees and teams. 

When it comes to designing workplaces, a general theme has emerged in the past six years: creating a variety of settings for people to work. Yet for many company leaders, this means creating genuinely unique workspaces that are far from boring —and cater to the unique needs of employees.

No one space is the same.

In the case of a large corporate headquarters recently designed by JPC Architects, that meant differentiating each floor of a workspace that in any other case would have looked very similar.

“It’s easier when you have several floors to just take one as a template and repeat as much as you can because of the feasibility of plumbing, restrooms and things like that,” says Sara Rezaeian, a senior designer at Bellevue, Washington-based JPC. “As much as we were mindful of those stacking alignments where needed, we moved things around where it mattered for that user experience.”

This undisclosed client wanted to make each floor more interesting so as to encourage people to meet employees from other teams. People would feel compelled to visit other floors to compare the various spaces designed for each team, strike up conversations and choose different places from which to work. The breakroom on the second floor may change location. The materials on the third floor may change based on theme. The finishes on the fourth floor might be different from all the others.

Says Rezaeian: “It’s not cookie cutter.”

Various areas of the office are tailored to different kinds of work—and the feel of those spaces is also dramatically different. On one floor, a circular area, for instance, offers a campfire feeling for community and collaboration. As you move away from that center, you’ll find a variety of meeting rooms and conference rooms. The individual work areas and smaller two-to-three person rooms offer a different mood with dimmer lighting and softer acoustics.

“Materiality was intentional to create two- to three-person gathering spaces,” she says. “Everything has a texture and perspective.”

Phone booths offer space for individual heads-down work, while the wellness room and quiet rooms  offer zero visual contact to the outside. Space planning gives options to every individual, every personality, and every neurodiverse worker.

JPC created a hierarchy of space on each floor to give options to every individual, based on personality or neurodiversity. “You always have the option on your floor to pick one of these kinds of spaces,” Rezaeian says. “We wanted to create a place where everybody feels they belong; inviting them to spend time, explore and fully experience it.”

Ricardo Nabholz, studio creative director at TPG Architecture in New York, has seen a similar focus by clients. They want to create unique spaces that cater to individual employees and teams. In the past, company leaders may have used benchmarking as part of their space planning— “What is everyone else in our field doing? What is their square foot per person? How much are they spending?”

Today, clients are less interested in comparing themselves. “Clients are asking how their workplace can differentiate them from competitors by reinforcing what makes their organization unique and creating a place employees are genuinely excited to come to,” he says. “It has reinvigorated design.”

For instance, TPG enlisted Brooklyn artisans Kamp Studios to create a three-story, hand-sculpted and polished plaster feature wall for the Madison Avenue office of two recently merged merchant banking intuitions. The high level of craft and subtle texture spoke to the new shared culture created by the merger, he says.

“Historically, there was a preference for tried-and-true materials—choices that would last for the life of the lease, stay out of the trend cycle, and stand the test of time,” says Nabholz. “Now, people are more interested in creating spaces that elicit more emotion and feeling. That feeling is not about longevity and maintenance. It’s about poetry.”