A RECEPTION WITH A POND

This is about a reception area belong to an office in a tenancy office building tower. The tenant, an IT Company just want their appear like traditional housing compund within its meander small roads and gangways surrounding it. Just like a kind of small village.

Not just houses, roads and gangways, but pond and bridge are also found in this place. When the lift car doors are opened, everybody can directly see this reception area within a timber bridge crossing over a pond that leads somebody to a discrete lounge near the office main entrance door.

EXECUTIVE WORKING SUITE

An executive working suite, commonly associated with enclosed working space where top managerial executive of a company are worked. The rooms are bigger than typical office rooms and also are furnished better than typical office rooms. An executive room not just a space that accomodating functional needs for an executive to work comfortably, but also reflecting corporate culture.

When client, guest, or employee entering an executive office, they must find the balance of professionalism with comfortability that offer a great first impression as well as a productive work space. 

It could be happened in an executive office, a very busy situation where a serious business meeting is conducted from morning time till late night. Or maybe it just remain as an empty room  because the executive person are on business duty abroad.

Amenities should be provided for an executive working rooms can vary widely depend on particular personal needs. It could be a wardrobe, safe deposit box, business machine cabinet, small library corner, small meeting corner, coffee maker or minibar cabinet, memorabilia wall and other personal things may be required.

Many confidential things must be kept securely. Not every un-authorized person can entering the room easily. Electronic door access control shall be applied. 

Room enclosure shall meet with particular level of sound-proof requirement. There should be no sound leakages. Private and confidential conversations are commonly undertaken in an executive room, and these should not be transmitted out. Partition detailing and A/C ducting treatments should be well executed to meet with sound-proof room requirements.

Selection of furnishing materials should be carefuly done. Of course, a top executive person require high grade furniture items to support their daily working activities. Floor, ceiling and wall treatments shall also carefuly treated to provide optimum comfortability. 

Smart office automation system is another important aspect should be well considered. An advance smart automation system can provide the user with a green and energy saving environment. Lighting control could be scheduled automatically, the user can do checking to see if any light were left on and want to schedule lights to turn on and off certain days in a week or just turn off anything that is plugged in. Smart office system can also programmable thermostat and lighting dimmer controls to increase energy management.

An advance smart office system also offers a complete line of sensors and security devices as well as camera and surveillance system.to protect an executive office room. This system can provide door lock and access controllers, communicating smoke detectors and wireless sensors to provide necessary protection fron inside and outside of the working rooms.

MEETING ROOMS

First aspect that is directly affecting the design of a meeting room, is number of seat should be accomodated. A meeting room for a small number of seats most likely will require one-pice table that placed in the middle of the room to become center part of meeting activities. If number of seats become numerous, there will be 2 (two) options of meeting table could be provided. First option, use one-piece long fixed table. And second option, to use modular small tables that could be dinamically re-arranged based on particular layout configuration.

If a fixed meeting table scheme is already determined, it could be basic reference to determine further functional audio-visual system that be required to support specific meeting activities. When fixed meeting table is chosen, there will be a lot floor cabling works should be routed out to centralised area underneath meeting table top. Then this cabling works are distributed and connected to individual surface-mounted electronic and electrical ports. These ports could be also installed inside a centralised concealed and covered linear gutter that is place in the middle of large and long meeting table.And when a meeting attendee need to plug in his notebook, he can easly reach power or data ports in the middle of meeting table top.

When small modular meeting tables are used, placement of electrical and electronic outlets shall anticipate the flexibilty of meeting tables arrangement. Commonly there are several pop-up power and data outlet sare provided on meeting floor surface.

Selection of audio-visual equipments also affecting meeting room arrangement. Nowadays, audio-visual technology provide us with many possibilities that affecting the way how we make a meeting activity with somebody or with other group of persons

Visual projection and display system is commonly identified as important aspect in associated with meeting activities. Table and chair arrangement are generated based on how these visual projection and display system are applied in a meeting room. The using of high-density projection system and flat screen technologies signicantly affecting the way we shall have a meeting today.

An advance audio-visual system also provide us with a smart meeting technology that is integrated with how we control lighting illumination in meeting room. This system enable an automatic control to internal lighting illumination level in related with visual display brightness and also natural daylight intensity that come from window opening around a meeting room. Of course, this system provide us with optimum visual comfort that we need for a meeting activities.

Not just visual comfort, another aspect in related with audio matters are also important and should be carefully managed. The acoustic indoor climate has become an important factor when contructing a new meeting room or renovating an old existing meeting room. Several aspects such as room layout size, room height and material selection should be carefully and correctly determined. The using of soft materials which are commonly absorb sound transmission will relatively useful to avoid and eliminate acoustical defects such as echoes, flutter echoes and sound reverberation time problems.

Another acoustical issue need to be carefully identified when we designing and constructing a meeting room is related sound transmission leakage. It should be avoided a condition when a meeting is happened in a meeting room, its noise getting out to another rooms and vice versa.

It could be happened if partition system is not built to comply with sound-proof requirements. Sound leakage also may happened from in-correct A/C ducting design and its installation details.

Meeting room amenities are another aspect need to be well-accommodated in the design. A meeting group that spend hours discussing serious matters need to be supported with a refreshment corner. It could be a small place in meeting room corner where a coffee maker and water dispenser are provided. This corner could also be equipped with centralized counter where meeting attendees can charging their personal cellular phones.

Anyway, a virtual meeting activity, most likely is becoming common practice today where a large number of people don't need a physical gathering in a 'real' meeting room. Technology now enabling them to be connected virtually and remotely without room or even country borders. Maybe an international corporate office do not need anymore to built too many meeting rooms in their premises. 

Corridors Through Working Spaces

If a question is raised:"What is corridor function in a working space environment ?"

Maybe, most common answer is space where circulation of a person and/or a group of persons from a place to another different place could be easily and safely enabled. Most probably this flow of circulation not merely involving a person but also including particular good that a person carry along with. 

An easy circulation movement could be associated with comfortable movement when a person or two persons (or maybe more than two persons) are passing this corridor without distracting each other.

Corridor should be well planned based on health and safety requlations. In case of emergency situations, corridor shall provide safe route of esape that enabling large number of people could be evacuated as quickly and safely as possible.

Corridor in an office environment is also closely related with how people are interacting and interfacing between each other based on particular working organizational structure and culture. Not merely interaction between a person to other person, maybe it also related with interaction between a person with a particular equipment.

Good corridor scheme in an office environment could help to provide better relationship between employee behavior and job satisfaction. Good corridor scheme as an integral part of an working environment, can also encourage working productivity.

Corridor should not appear as just a long boring space that separating a room to another room and/or separating one enclosed room to another open working space. It could be visually appear in more interesting appearances. 

By the using of particular treatment on a corridor wall for example, we can use this wall feature as visual sign to identify and differentiate a particular space zone in a large open space, to avoid an employee losing his or their spatial orientation.

We can also can explore different treatment on corridor to differentiate one office department to another office department. And it also commonly found that specific treatment to corridor as part of executive area to be differentiate to other corridor at general office area.

Specific interior treatment in corridor could be achieved by the using specific material on its floor, wall and ceiling. Specific lighting treatment is also have an important role to define specific function of a corridor.

Sometime, corridor shall provide a certain level of visual privacy. In this case, level of illumination and placement of lighting fixtures are become very critical. Maybe, lighting treatment should be provided in such a way to make somebodys face not directly received lighting hotspot. 

Acoustical consideration is also important. Long corridor should not provided within hard flooring materials since it will make disturbing noise that might be potentially come from somebody walking on their shoes.

Red-Green-Yellow Color Scheme for a Working Space Environment

This is a design overview for a corporate office in approximately 4500 sqm tenancy floor. Tenancy floor are divided into 3 (three) floor levels. The first two lower floor levels are accomodated for general office area and the remaining one upper floor is dedicated for executive office space and function room.

The office belong to a plantation company. The nature of company business is simply elaborated to become a main design inspiration. There is a combination of three different split complementary colors: red, green and yellow; which are combined together as a corporate design theme. Green is excerpted from the color of leaf, red is excerpted from the color of fruit and yellow is the color of oily liquid that is extracted from the fruit.

Red and green colors are used to differed carpet flooring at general office area. Red color carpet tiles with round geometrical patterns are applied through main circulation corridor at open plan office area, meanwhile green color carpet tiles with similar patterns are applied to main circulation corridor at other open plan office at other level of floor. New connecting stair with wooden treads is built to unify these office areas which are situated and split-off into two different floor level.

These strong color accent on carpet tiles are spread-out to workstation screen pads and also to graphic posters within floral pictures that are applied to door panels belong to enclosed rooms at perimeter areas. Visually, this color composition creates a dynamic ambiance throughout the working space area.

Break-out area is loosely generated by the using some 'natural-look' materials such as lime stone on columns and wooden resilient floor. It combined with strong accent color on particular wall. A row of long high table is provided adjacent to the wall within rich treatment of artificial green leaves that creates an impression of a vertical garden.

There is an executive floor which is situated at dedicated floor level and completely seperated from general office area at lower floors. The executive floor is accessible from a dedicated executive reception area. Executive floor areas are appear in different look and feel. Wooden joinery, marble floor and soft axminster carpet flooring with warm, calm and soft colors are become major material and color appearance. Rich detailing is found on ceiling where wooden ceiling panels are combined with luminous floral patterns. This is a design effort to create continuation of theme that already created at office area at lower floors.

STACKING PLAN, a guideline to generate office space planning

Space planning is an important part of interior design process. Particularly, in a design process of an office spaces with multi-level occupancies, space planning is important process should be properly done. The output of space planning process are general layout plans where designer can describe to the user about the office occupancy mapping including information of ‘who sitting where’, various type of rooms, affinity of each room to other rooms and how certain office activities are well-grouped and organized to achieve certain level of working environment that meet user needs.

In case of multi level office space occupancy, say an office space with 5 to 10 floors in a tenancy building, further space planning analysis must be carefully considered. Before each floor layout plan are generated in several details, an Interior Designer must demonstrate to all user that the office stacking plan is meet and fit with the user expectations.

Stacking plan is a kind of chart and/or scheme that simply demonstrate occupancy mapping per floor. Basic data that need to be generated a stacking plan are following:

1. Headcount data for each departments and sections
2. Data of particular room that need to place in certain floor (there are specific requirements)
3. User guideline in related with how corporate activities should be accommodated and provided.
4. User guideline for affinities of each working group to other working groups and each work group to specific facilities.


A stacking plan chart could be simply initiated by the using of common spreadsheet software. This process is most likely a quantitative analysis process, where headcount data is initially be included into the spreadsheet. Describe the name of department and insert related headcount data. Add data of nett floor space area into the spreadsheet this will control occupancy density. Normally, open plan office space with minimum enclosed rooms could achieve density of 10 square meter (sqm) per person including workstation, circulation area, filing rooms, meeting rooms and other standard office room facilities. But in case of office with different scenery, say 50% open office area and 50% enclosed rooms, density could be approximately 25 sqm per person including workstation, circulation area, filing rooms, meeting rooms and other standard office room facilities. That is the reason, why an Interior Designer shall carefully ask to the user their preference in related with the type of office scenery.

Specific room such as Data Center, centralized meeting room, canteen or banking hall should be excluded and separately added into the above calculation of 10 sqm density or 25 sqm density. We can categorize these types of room as non-standard facilities. It will be useful should potential growth for the next years could be taken into account. Accordingly, occupancy density at ‘day one’ need to be improved to give adequate space for future expansion. Space for potential growth could be defined as swing space and at ‘day one’ occupancy it could be implemented as meeting rooms or interactive areas that are collapsible when working spaces getting bigger.


If user have already determined such room or facility should be placed in certain floor, this will be useful for Interior Designer to initiate stacking plan exercise. In most cases, user also have preference about where some departments should be placed in. Department with potential growth bigger than other, it should be placed near swing floor area such as centralized meeting room, common sharing facilities or other vacant floor if available.

Sometime office building have already prepared with strengthened floor area, this will be useful as starting point to determine placement of room that accommodate heavy equipment such as communication room, compactor room or maybe a strong room. Transition area of high zone lift and low zone lift is also another important consideration to determine the placement of centralized meeting rooms and or other common sharing facilities.

A space planning optimization should be carefully done, because maybe the placement of one department in a floor is not meet with another department expectation. In this case, main Interior Designer task is to demonstrate that occupancy density is approximately well distributed and affinity to each department are as close as possible with all user expectations. It will be a great and ideal situation where a department is not split-off into different floor level.

Sometime there is situation where a department should be splitting-off into different floor to avoid any situation where office occupancy becoming too dense and not comply with health and safety regulations. Number of fire escape doors and stairs in an office tenancy building are already calculated in line with optimum occupancy capacity. Number of male and female toilets are also provided and calculated in line with optimum occupancy capacity.

Successful space planning process should be initiated with correct and careful step-by-step processes where user needs are well identified, well managed, well optimized and finally well accommodated. An ability to drive users in persuasive manners will be very useful to achieve optimum stacking plan and minimize potential user conflicts could be minimized. If stacking plan for office occupancy could be well initiated, an Interior Designer could jump to next step of design process: to generate layout schemes in every floor level in more easy and smooth process.