Celebrating Dads!
DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of choice. If a renovation or relocation of your office space is in your plans, please contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. By the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
The Evolution of Meeting Space Designs
It is amazing to see how vastly different meeting spaces are these days compared to what they were years ago. There was a time when business meetings took place in an enclosed rectangular-shaped room with one rectangular-shaped window to the outside world, a long solid rectangular-shaped table and several hi-backed rectangular-shaped office chairs. Now, with emphasis on encouraging collaboration, innovation, and creativity in an open-spaced environment, and incorporating the cafe or home decor themes into office spaces, meeting spaces have gone through several phases to take on entirely new forms. A few of those phases are listed below:
Phase 1: No Longer Rectangular
Enclosed meeting spaces designed to maintain an element of confidentiality are no longer restricted to the four walls of a rectangular-shaped room. With the introduction of office pods, meeting spaces have taken on dome, beehive, cylinder, egg and other interesting geometric shapes. Add in the home-decor theme and you’ve got the greenhouse, living room and large kitchen-inspired meeting spaces within the office space.
Phase 2: No longer Enclosed
Then there are meeting spaces that are relatively open or semi-private spaces. Designed more for encouraging collaboration, these meeting spaces typically have partial walls or partitions, and are open at least on two sides. Some of these collaborative meeting spaces take on the form of a booth, similar to what you would see at a restaurant. Others adopt more of a picture-framed look. More recent designs combine the booth with the framed looked by extending the back rest of the booth to form a roof frame over its potential users.
Phase 3: No more walls
Finally, there are those meeting spaces that are just out in the open. Identified by the furniture placement and possibly an area rug, these types of meeting spaces aim to promote collaboration without tainting the open space office design in any way.
The most unique meeting space gaining popularity is the amphitheatre-designed meeting space. Unlike any other meeting space design, the amphitheatre meeting space is literally the large and wide staircase found in the prominent area of an office space. Why is this design gaining popularity? Because it is familiar for the younger workforce and recent graduates entering the workforce. (By the way, designers are now looking to schools to see how those designs and layouts could be incorporated into the office space design).
The future phases of meeting spaces may incorporate more geometric shapes or adopt nature’s most common meeting spaces. Regardless, meeting spaces will always play an integral role in facilitating the future success of businesses.
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of choice. If a renovation or relocation of your office space is in your plans, please contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. By the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Top 6 Ways Designers Create Nature-like Environments in an Office Space
In my last blog, I listed five elements designers use to bring nature into an office space. In this blog, I want to review the top six ways office space designers combine those elements to create a nature-like environment in the office.
- Spot the Plants – Small office? Low budget? Then adding a few potted plants in and around the office space, including work areas and meeting areas, is just one of the easiest most economical ways to establish a nature-like environment in an office space. How few or how many would depend on the size of your office, the size of your budget and the “stage” you want set for your employees.
- Nature Theme in Non-Nature Items – In addition to adding potted plants, some office space designers would recommend adding nature-themed artwork along with furniture, floor, wall or window treatments with floral, leaf or wood designs in their respective materials as a way of incorporating nature into the office space.
- Central Indoor Office Garden – With office spaces adopting more of the warehouse or open concept, some office space designers would recommend having a garden with a variety of live plants, stones or even a fountain or pond somewhere in the centre of that space so that it is visible to a majority of the office staff sitting at their desks or meeting areas as a great way to incorporate nature into the office space.
- Indoor Botanical Garden/Sanctuary – Even with the push for collaboration in many offices, smart businesses and office space designers recognize the need for staff to take a break and have time on their own in order to rejuvenate. Having a live garden within the office space that is separated from the rest of the work area either by glass walls or taller shrubs and climbing plants is one way to incorporate nature in the office space and still provide a “get-away” for staff. This application can include small wildlife such as birds or fish along with the flowing water as an added touch to this garden sanctuary.
- Indoor Garden Walkway – Nature does not have to be limited to one select area in the office area. With the use of wooden and/or “golf green” pathways spotted with plants along the way, getting from one area of the office to the other could seem like a “walk in the park” for your staff.
- Living Walls – The latest and most unique and innovative way of incorporating nature into the office space is by applying vertical gardens or “living walls” into the office space design. These walls are made up of a variety of plants whose roots lie in and are fed and watered by a vertical structural support which can be fastened to a traditional wall. It is a great application that takes up minimal space and poses as living artwork depending on the layout of the plants.
Nature adds many benefits to an office space. It improves air quality, can improve acoustics, and encourages well-being among people, just to name a few. It is for these benefits that office space designers will continually strive to find new and innovative ways to incorporate nature into the office space design.
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of choice. If a renovation or relocation of your office space is in your plans, please contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. By the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Reference:
Green Over Grey Living Walls and Designs, http://www.greenovergrey.com/living-walls/what-are-living-walls.php
Celebrating Victoria Day!
DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of Choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Celebrating Moms!
DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of Choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
5 Elements That Help Bring Nature Into Your Office Space
April 22nd was Earth Day, a day in which people were reminded to protect, value and maintain the environment. For some, it meant planting a tree or two. For others, it was a reminder to go green by consuming less energy, utilizing renewable energy or choosing less pollution-inducing ways to travel from one location to another. For the office space design world, however, it is an ever developing trend to find different ways to bring nature into the immediate work environment.
Here are just five elements of nature that have inspired office space design specialists to incorporate the outdoors into an office space design:
- Living plants – From potted plants to entire gardens, living plants have been the most common used elements in bringing the outdoors into an office space design.
- Moving Water – The movement or flow of water is said to have tranquil calming effect on people who need to take time to clear their minds and prepare for new tasks. Hence, water in the form of small pools, fountains and/or waterfalls has been another element commonly used to bring both the sights and sounds of nature into an office space design.
- Wood and/or stone materials – Whether it is in the panelling, the floor, the furniture, the accessories, or a major part of the architecture, natural wood or stone finishes are becoming more and more popular in office space designs.
- Patterns and textures of nature even in the non-nature items – Sometimes fabrics or artwork with pictures or patterns from nature, or the use of “golf green” in certain areas of an office space has been used as an effective way to incorporate nature into an office space design.
- Life itself – Though not for every office, creating an enclosed area where small birds can fly and sing freely or fish can swim has been used to effectively create an outdoor nature experience within an office space design.
Companies and design specialists recognize the invaluable relationship between nature and people. Humans are more productive, creative and innovative when exposed to a natural environment, maybe because of the increased oxygen levels or the calmness and tranquility it imposes on the mind. Nature comes alive when humans recognize and take care of it. Hence, bringing this “eco-system” into an office space design makes sense, especially for companies wanting to have the cutting edge within their industries.
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of choice. If a renovation or relocation of your office space is in your plans, please contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. By the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
5 Objectives Colours and Textures Fulfill in an Office Space Design
Throughout the history of office space design, the use of colours and textures have helped companies strive towards the image and business goals they aimed to achieve. Below are just a few objectives colour and texture can fulfill within an office space design:
- To Establish or Reinforce Corporate Identity – the colours within a company’s logo, for example, can be applied throughout the decor of the office space in order to further emphasized corporate identity to both staff and visitors
- Promote a Positive Mood – it has been said time and time again that a positive environment promotes positive mood, which in a corporate environment promotes productivity. Choosing the right colour and texture combination in an office space design to bring about a positive environment can in turn help increase productivity.
- Inspire Creativity and Innovation – I believe that similar to promoting a positive mood, the right colour scheme mixed in conjunction with a variety of textures sends an unconscious or subconscious message to its onlookers that “anything goes”. As a result, employees, though consciously unaware, are spurred on to “think outside the box”, and come up with creative and innovative solutions to whatever challenges the company faces.
- Differentiate workspaces and meeting areas – There was a time when walls and doors defined a workspace. Over time, walls became shorter or more transparent in order to promote a more collaborative open office space design. Today, walls, for the most part, have disappeared but both colour and texture are used in conjunction with one another to help differentiate workspaces and meeting areas.
- Help organize individual workspaces – Files are not the only thing that get colour coordinated within an office environment. Companies are now “splashing” individual workspaces with specially coloured desk trays, filing cabinets, pen holders and other workspace related items in order to help the users of those workspaces remain organized while working in those areas.
Over time trends in office space design have changed, but colour and texture, though re-purposed, have been two of the primary tools used to ultimately create the ideal office space.
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management company of choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Happy Earth Day!
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management company of choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Oil & Office Real Estate– Is There Hope For Recovery?
At the risk of stating the obvious, the plummeting oil prices in our economy today has had quite an effect in the office real estate industry. Many industrial companies across Canada that are highly dependant on oil have contracted their operations in efforts to slash their costs, giving up valuable assets, including office space. This has led to increased office space vacancies across the country which owners are fighting to not sell or lease out below their market value. Meanwhile, some trust companies are selling off their assets in order to have more liquid funds. Their goal– to purchase properties that they foresee being quite profitable once the market changes. But with all this fluctuation and activity, I dare ask, is there a light at the end of the tunnel for the current office space market?
Well, market history dictates that what goes down eventually goes back up again. In 2008, a global recession caused oil prices to drop to $40 per barrel after being peaked at over $150 per barrel between 2000-2008. Then economic recovery efforts between 2009 and 2014 brought the oil prices back up to $125 per barrel1. Oil prices have steadily gone downwards since 2014 but fluctuating world demand and supply could change that in the foreseeable future. In direct relation, the office vacancy rates have increased from 8% in 2012 to over 18% in 2016, but could go down again once demand and thus pricing for oil goes back on the rise.
In the meantime, there is the possibility of foreign interest. With the low oil prices and lower Canadian dollar value, foreign investors, particularly from Asia, are showing interest in Canada’s available office space. In fact, four of the past five purchases of major downtown office space in Canada have been to foreign buyers who have been flocking to the relative safety of the country’s hottest real estate markets, Toronto and Vancouver2.
So, is there hope for the office space market? With oil prices slowly on the rise and with increased foreign interest in Canada’s available office spaces, I would say that there is.
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DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of Choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
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References:
1Peresio, Greg, Investopedia, “Why did Oil Prices Drop so Much in 2014?”, http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030315/why-did-oil-prices-drop-so-much-2014.asp
McLean, Steve, Property Biz Canada, 2016-02-28, “Firm Capital Property Trust Ready to Buy”, http://renx.ca/firm-capital-property-trust-ready-to-buy/
2McMahon, Tasmin, Report on Business, 2016 02 23, “Office Real Estate Sectors Settling in for a Tough 2016”, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/housing/the-real-estate-beat/office-retail-real-estate-sectors-settling-in-for-tough-2016/article28858197/
TD Economics, Special Report, July 12, 2012, “Canada’s Commercial Real Estate Markets Primed for Growth”, https://www.td.com/document/PDF/economics/special/sg0712_commercial.pdf
It’s the Easter Season. Let’s Celebrate!
DJ Mcgauley and Associates Inc. is your Office Space Planning, Renovations and Relocation Project Management Company of Choice for the Toronto, GTA and surrounding areas. If a renovation or relocation of your 2,000 – 25,000 sq.ft. office space is in your plans, contact us to arrange a no-obligation site meeting. We guarantee that by the end of that meeting, you will know all that would be required to make your office renovation/relocation project a successful reality.
Call 416-239-1931, email [email protected] or visit our website for more information and to complete our contact form.
Corporate Space Planning & Relocation Advice 