Naturally, the walls in the conference room of “Blueberry Muffin” are painted blue. It's not just blue, it's a calming color that you might find in a baby's bedroom, and the paint is described as “sea shining from the sea.” Anchoring the room is a red, rectangular table decorated with faux succulents in purple pots.
Nearby is a “fruity” conference room with “dazzling” red walls and vintage chairs upholstered in a yellow pineapple pattern. Down the hall is the Maple Waffle, a room where the company holds more serious meetings with investors. The walls there are a muted brown color.
This is the office of the cereal brand Magic Spoon, which introduced it in 2019 and brought about 50 employees back to in-person work at least two days a week last year. Magic Spoon's SoHo space was designed to align with the company's return-to-office push, with meeting rooms designed to feel like a cereal box.
“One of our core company values is 'Let's be Froot Loops in a world of Cheerios,'” said Magic Spoon co-founder Greg Sewitz. “We wanted the office to emphasize that.”
Their space is not entirely new to designers, executives, and employees, but it has now become a go-to among certain startups, tech companies, and other cash-rich employers competing for young talent. It reflects what we describe as emerging trends. It's called the Office of Envy. What happens when companies try to combine the comfort of the living room with the glamor of a vacation? These spaces often feature colorful walls, upholstered furniture, and a selection of coffee table books, and offer plenty of opportunities to fill your social feed with photos taken at work, giving workers Fascinating.
“We're taking cues from home, hospitality and Pinterest,” says Jordan Goldstein, co-managing principal at Gensler, one of the world's largest architecture firms. Lately, clients have been asking for greenery and soft chairs. As an example, he cited Marriott's new headquarters, which Gensler redesigned to include a banquette, a corner of the library, and a tree that stretches through the center of the lobby. Mr. Gensler also recently renovated the offices of Barclays, Pinterest, and LinkedIn in this style.
But for some employees, all the faux plants, accent walls, and stylish dog beds are the perfect solution to space-saving arrangements, such as hot desks where employees no longer have a dedicated workspace assigned to them. Sometimes it seems designed to hide the inconvenience.
Before the rise of remote work, Magic Spoon office designers Leticia Gola, 41, and Sarah Needleman, 33, were designers at The Wing, a women's social club. The club is a typical millennial palace with pink cushions and colors. An encrypted bookshelf that was closed last year. In 2020, Golla founded the design company Roark, which was managed by Needleman. These two girls help executives understand what the office should be like at a time when many employees aren't convinced they need to go to the office.
“Our pitch is focused on employee retention,” Gora said. “We came from wearing yoga pants and working from the couch. How do we make our employees want to come back to the office?”
This is a cycle that American workers have experienced before. As labor standards change, office design changes accordingly. In fact, in a Gensler survey of nearly 14,000 workers around the world last year, nearly 40% said their employer had changed the design of their office during the pandemic.
“When you're looking at the history of the office, you're looking at a history of changing attitudes about what work is and what workers should be,” says media historian and author of Filing Cabinet. says Craig Robertson, author of “Office design is shaped by dominant social values.”
With this latest trend, as well as previous workplace aesthetics, many managers are trying to achieve a simpler goal: getting employees to spend time in the office.
From cubicle farm to open table
Just over half a century ago, the brightest new feature of office life was the cubicle.
In the years following World War II, America's white-collar workforce grew, driven by a booming economy and the influx of women into the workplace. Efficiency-minded management “scientists” like Frederick Winslow Taylor had previously urged companies to treat white-collar jobs like factory labor. Join the Action Office. Modular office furniture comes in cubes that pack people tightly together.
According to office historians like Nikhil Saval, cubicle farms reminded people of their place in the power structure, and upper echelons were usually allotted more space.
“You were surrounded by hundreds of people just like you,” says Sheila Riming, an associate professor at Champlain College and author of the design history book The Office. “You have this idea that you are replicable.”
After Bill Gates and Paul Allen mythologized Microsoft's beginnings in a garage, we look at cubicle farms and imagine they inspired the unconventional ideas that companies craved in the 1990s technology industry. It's difficult. The tech startup wanted its employees to break out of their sterile cubes and feel a sense of ownership in their work and a sense of limitless growth potential.
It was, in part, a concept that gave rise to a new phase in office design: a technological utopia. Sociologist Carolyn Chen, who has spent years studying life at Bay Area tech companies, noted some of the physical elements that characterize their campuses. There were free snacks (peanut butter cups, potato chips, dried mango) and sometimes alcohol (beer, frosé). There were also nap pods and massage chairs.
Chen saw a company spend a portion of its design budget on making the office look dirtier. The company paid to expose bricks and pipes, sending a message to workers that they should adopt a startup mentality and work overtime.
And the high-tech offices of the early 2000s were social spaces with happy hours and video games, which meant that for some employees there was no need to go home to find leisure and community. .
“When you think about how Google revolutionized the office, it was about always inviting employees to not only work, but to spend their free time there,” Limin said. “The word campus really works.”
But if there's anything more appealing than a campus, it's working from your bed. So when the pandemic arrived and the office became a literal home rather than a figurative one, managers had to rethink what it meant to make the office an attractive destination.
“Live from the headquarters”
When the Magic Spoon team moved into new offices earlier this year, Sarah Bourlakas, 26, who was a senior social and community manager, snapped a photo and posted it on her personal Instagram Story with the text “Live from HQ.” I posted it.
Its Instagram profile is no coincidence. Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University, said employers can offer traditional perks like cold brew and less traditional perks like Google's Lizzo concerts for employees. It claims to be leveraging social media aesthetics in the same way it deploys perks. It's all about creating a corporate image. Companies now want their office designs to be seen by everyone on social media, not just their employees, and Duffy says it's a great way to “promote this fun, fun, highly sociable workplace.” “This is how we retain our employees.”
Ms Duffy pointed out that Hollywood and television were once the main venues for promoting the appeal of office life to young people. These included “The Devil Wears Prada,'' “Mad Men,'' “The Internship,'' “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,'' and “The Social Network.''
Social media is now increasingly a place for people to romanticize office life, especially on TikTok, where content creators like “Corporate Natalie” are showing that many young people who started their careers during the pandemic are still I'm satirizing professional antics I've never experienced. A consistent finding in Gallup polls from 1989 to 2014 is that more than half of workers say they feel a sense of identity in their work. It's no wonder, then, that young people want to include the core of their work on their social media profiles. their self-consciousness. And the trendier an office is, the easier it is for employees to communicate that their careers are more thrilling than the cubicle doldrums chronicled in Office Space.
When Bourlakas snapped a photo of Magic Spoon's new Soho space, her Instagram followers were dazzled.
“So many people made comments like, 'Oh my God, I feel so bad,'” said Bourlakas, who recently left Magic Spoon for another job. “'It's encoded like a magic spoon.'”
Dreaming of a cubicle life
When you tour some of these new Envy offices, where employees are hunched over long desks wearing noise-cancelling headphones, there's a disconnect between what employees are getting and what they want. There is a gap. There are also wall stickers and a carefully selected collection of books. Some say what they actually need is privacy.
The offices of communications agency M&C Saatchi Sports & Entertainment, a 10-minute walk from Magic Spoon, were also redesigned by Rourke in 2021. Employees sit at communal long wooden tables in front of exposed brick, surrounded by a jungle of artificial greenery. A bunch of fake grapes sits on top of Keith Haring's coffee table book.
Maddy Franklin, 27, the office's senior art director, said there are aspects of the new office that she likes, including its dog-friendliness. However, due to the hot-desking system, there is no place to store personal items.
It can also be difficult to get a spot on the monitor. When Franklin is working on a big project, she said, “I try to get to the office a little early” to get a coveted seat.
Robin Clark, 58, a marketing director at a health care nonprofit, looks forward to the days before offices transitioned to open floor plans. When her company underwent a complete redesign in 2018, her executives sought to create an inviting space, creating a lounge area with sofas in bright colors such as orange, teal, and lime. I did. But with no barriers between desks, Clark's workday is subject to constant noise, from crunching apples to her colleagues sneezing. When she started working from home during the pandemic, she realized that what she wanted was peace and quiet.
She said: “Having a cubicle wall gives you the perception that you have at least some privacy.”
Ironically, other employees are also nostalgic for the days of private rooms. Take Jerry Gala, 56, a senior engineering manager based in Winchester, Massachusetts. He started his career in 1989, when cubicles were the norm. For years, he worked in offices with open floor plans and hot-desking systems, and he missed being able to customize his own desk without the help of a design firm.
Mr. Gala was a fan of the TV show “The Expanse,'' and had a model of the ship that appeared on the show in his workplace. “Someone might walk by and realize you're a fan,” he recalled. “So you start a conversation and meet someone new.”
For Gulla, the ideal office is simple. “It’s just a place to help get the job done.”