Plus company campus & cossette offices

27 Sep 2024

Strategic design as an accelerator for back-to-the-office

Arrival sequence in reception area Photo credit: Raphael Thibodeau

Following a temporary lease at WeWork during the pandemic, leading Canadian ad agency Cossette and its parent corporation Plus Company formulated an ambitious agenda for change: to reunite its Montreal workforce in a single downtown campus and attract remote workers back to the office. The opportunity arose when Shopify vacated one of its floors at 525 Viger Ouest, near Old Montreal. Cossette invited LAAB architecture to reboot its workplace to go beyond hip design features and the ubiquitous foosball.

The keenest insight came from their shared focus on UX design. Their common goal became to model the new workplace around the staff experience and the shared culture, rather than strictly from upper management’s perspective. The new layout flowed naturally from this stance.

The result is a workplace environment crafted around the agency’s work culture and ethos. As such, the spaces were then organized around the requisites of their creative vocation, and the thrust was to provide a superior level of functionality to enhance the creative flow of the teams.

To deliver on this promise, one of the prerequisites became to provide each team with a workplace customized to its business model, working habits, and creative practices: some preferred open spaces, others required more closed rooms, and some sought more hybrid configurations. To propel the wider Plus Company ecosystem and promote synergies between business units, the previously siloed workplace pods were opened along the exterior wall to promote informal travel between the teams, and to provide greater access to views and light. Another driver was to propose a wide selection of meeting room configurations, from 2 to 20 seats, in a dizzying array of configurations for quiet conversations, focused work, brainstorming sessions, and collaborative work.

Beyond profiling the business model in the layout, the team also wanted to create a work environment that would avoid a "home-like" look or rehash the ubiquitous playful office tropes like swings; the challenge became to create a deeper overarching design signature that would celebrate Plus Company’s various business units, while also embodying Cossette’s brand promise around the concepts of “creative sheen” and “inclusive diversity”.

To break with the typical corporate office look, the design brief drew inspiration from hospitality and wellness destinations; to materialize the vision, LAAB proposed a surprisingly hushed lighting scheme with a dramatic and darker palette that channels a distinctive lounge vibe. The hotel-like circulations provide a variety of lounges, nooks, and meeting spaces to service an infinite range of tasks and interactions.

Upon arrival, the reception desk is a true signature piece, wrapped with a mysterious dichroic and mirror envelope, lending it a mutable colouration shifting with the viewer’s position; in true brandscaping form, it is a subtle nod to Plus Company’s multicoloured logo, its inclusive culture, and its nuances of creative services.

At the south corner of the floor, the bistro emerged as the hub of workplace culture: a social condenser, meeting place, and relaxed work area. It was given the choicest location with a breathtaking view of downtown Square Victoria; it was aptly renamed the Bistro-Park for this reason. Situated at the crossroads of circulations, the recording studio hub emerged as a must-see destination for clients, with its varied hues of studios ranging from white to charcoal, and its brightly lit portals (to signal On-Air status). Lastly, the award-winning Club Cossette office pop-up installation was relocated along the visual axis of McGill, its curved mirrors magnifying the city’s kinetic movement and evoking the Silo no5 in the background.

Despite modelling multiple back-to-work scenarios with occupancy predictions, the business outcome is wildly beyond expectations, as staff returned to the office in droves and turnout has skyrocketed. The results have been so astounding that the main operational issue has become meeting room overbooking and a lack of seating in the Bistro-Park.

As for the design itself, the result is a mesmerizing space that almost inebriates its visitors with a rich promenade, visual stimulation, and a tangible creative ambience. The office design and its signature have created a rare consensus among visitors, staff, management, and clients; they just love it and can’t get enough of it.

LAAB's strategic design mission was to bring together a mix of ingredients that would stimulate and accelerate a return to office momentum. The Plus Company Campus is proof of concept that great office design can create great business outcomes and defy most back-to-the-office trends.