Saje Natural Wellness Headquarters

Category Workspaces
Year 2018
Location Vancouver, BC Canada
Size 20,000 s.f.
Awards
2019 AWMAC Award of Excellence

Saje Natural Wellness is a Canadian retail brand that experienced explosive growth over the last 5 years. One of their biggest differentiators in the crowded wellness market is their focus on smart and beautiful design. When it was time to find a new headquarters which would allow the company to expand five-fold, finding a design agency that would understand and express the connection between design and wellness was imperative. This is what led them to us after an extensive international search.

Since the building they were moving into was essentially a glass cube, revealing breathtaking views of Vancouver and the North Shore Mountains beyond from most locations, the plan layout was essential to leveraging this special asset. In response to this challenge, we arranged the “dark spaces” around a center pod, keeping the perimeter open with workstations, open lounges, and glass-enclosed offices. The center pod was intentionally designed as a continuous curve to lead one around the space, maximizing views and light, and softening the acoustics of the concrete and glass wrapper.

Photography by Andrew Latreille

It was clear that their beloved in-house chef and her plant-based food program was the beating heart of their office culture. To address and celebrate this we created a front and center open kitchen with a casual, residential feel. This would be the crossroads and welcoming gathering point that was intended to draw employees from other floors.

Their highly collaborative work culture was supported by a balanced mixture of open workstation space, casual, open meeting lounges, the now requisite informal meeting booths, private phone booths, and strategically spread out meeting rooms of variant sizes. Rather than enforcing openness, we created a space that is about choice that caters to different modes of work.

As with all our multiple stakeholder projects, we invited representatives from each department to participate in our strategically designed and highly interactive discovery sessions. From these immersive sessions we were able to distill out the final brief for the project.