July/August 2024

Canadian Interiors July-August 2024: Rejuvenating Space and Products in the Office Environment

Bay Street Village, Toronto

• We explore a group of spaces in nine downtown Toronto skyscrapers owned by Dream Unlimited called the “Bay Street Village,” and how over the past two years have seen drastic improvements to every lobby as well as a new outdoor laneway emphasising the pedestrian realm, all designed by Studio Paolo Ferrari.

Le 9e, Montréal

• An examination of the restoration of the Eaton’s 9th floor restaurant, led by EVOQ and reopened in May after being sealed off for 25 years. This Art Deco masterpiece designed by Carlu originally opened in 1931 with a design inspired by the Ile-de-France ocean liner.

Kraft-Heinz head office, Toronto

• How Syllable Design’s approach to the new Toronto headquarters for Kraft-Heinz and their collaboration with Envirotech highlights the importance of interior designers being honest about the problems of surplus office furniture, and how integrating “repurposed” furniture into design strategies is one major tool to help tackle that problem.

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT: Office Collections

• A spotlight on new office collections where the design is sustainable, made with fewer components and integrates post-consumer recycled content, all while solving new behavioural challenges in the evolving office typology.

SHOW COVERAGE: Salone del Mobile.Milano

• Highlights from this year’s edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano, which featured almost 2,000 exhibitors from around the world and saw a record turnout with over 361,000 attendees.

Editor’s Notes: You’re Sitting on a Problem

The data is commonly accepted: that the built environment is responsible for over 40 per cent of annual global CO2 emissions. This is bad. Really bad. But it is not all all doom and gloom. We are seeing Western governments almost stumble over each other with promises to address the problem. The U.K. government, for example, just announced a commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 78 per cent by 2035, and to become Net Zero Carbon by 2050, and will do so by leaning heavily on the construction industry to rapidly adopt more sustainable practices.

We are already seeing results from pre-existing policies and procedures: operational emissions of our building continue to get lower as we start to integrate things like solar panels, heat pumps, smart building technologies, and so on. Builders are opting for materials that have a lower environmental impact, such as recycled plastics, reclaimed wood, and biodegradable composites. It’s no longer simply theory that with enough state-of-the-art technologies we can power and run a building without consuming any gas or electricity.

But of course, there is bad news: many estimates say that global building floor area is expected to double by 2060. And while there is no shortage of standards and certifications for sustainability in the built environment — LEED, BREEAM, WELL and others — there are massive blind spots in other categories that are significant contributors to the carbon problem. Construction materials like concrete, wood, steel and glass may dominate the conversation, but furniture plays a big role when we are looking at the total emissions of a building over its lifetime.

First, a reminder: the carbon footprint of office furniture encompasses greenhouse gas emissions from its entire lifecycle: raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal. Chairs, desks, cabinets, and lighting all contribute, with materials, production energy and transportation emissions impacting their overall footprint. And what does this amount to? Office interiors and furniture from virgin resources can contribute up to 30 per cent of the carbon footprint of a commercial building over its lifetime and generate approximately 190 kg of CO2 and 77 kg of waste per square metre.

Then there are the consequences of shifting to a fast, flexible workspace model meant to accommodate evolving demands of workers, one of which being office leases shrinking to two or three years. Based on a building’s 50-year lifecycle, this can mean up to 20 interior fit-outs over the life of the building. Bad as that is, the situation is made worse by this unspoken truth: less than 10 per cent of furniture is used beyond the first office it inhabits. Think about it: whatever good was accomplished in sustainably building the core and shell has been completely undone by constantly re-fitting the interiors in new product. Taking the cyclical nature interiors and how often things get remodelled or replaced, the embodied carbon of interiors really begins to add up: one eye-watering stat says that if office towers were unable to dispose of waste from interior fit-outs they would become vertical landfills in under 30 years.

According to JLL’s new U.S. and Canada Design Trends and Cost Guide, sustainability will be one of the defining forces in office fit-outs in 2024. That sounds good, except when faced with major headwinds like a struggling commercial real estate sector doing backflips to attract tenants; companies competing to out-perk one another with fancy offices to attract talent; waiting until the last minute to deal with pre-existing furniture, increasing the odds it winds up in landfill; and those damn egg-timer leases.

It is nice that more companies are committing to net zero targets, but part of their strategies should be demanding eco-friendly practices in office fit-outs, with circular economy principles that maximize resources, minimize waste and reuse products and materials. The Big Names at NeoCon may be trumpeting green practice tags like ecodesign, zero waste management, carbon neutrality, adherence to industry certifications, and sustainable material selection in their new collections, but there is still an elephant in the room and it is rolling on castor wheels.

If we are serious about getting to carbon neutral by 20?? (the target keeps shifting every couple of years), every job title that touches a building – builder, owner, landlord, tenant and on – has to stop ignoring the role interiors play in getting us there, starting with and relying primarily on the A&D industry. When you are brought in for a fit-out, ask the client “What is wrong with the Aeron chair that is already there?”