Interior Design magazine has featured HOK’s design of Co-operators’s new headquarters in Guelph, Ontario.
The new building brings together 1,200 employees while pursuing ambitious environmental certifications.
The 225,000-sq.-ft. headquarters reflects the insurance and financial services cooperative’s deep commitment to sustainability and its 60-year connection to the Guelph community. The design team drew inspiration from Co-operators cofounder Albert Savage’s vision of the company as “an acorn that will grow into one of the greatest oak trees of the cooperative movement.”
“Co-operators’s values, culture, and mission are different from those of traditional organizations, and that really inspired us,” says Caitlin Turner, senior principal and director of design, interiors, at HOK’s Toronto studio.
Excerpted from Interior Design:
By pursuing zero-carbon, WELL Platinum, and LEED Gold certifications, the headquarters would become “the first of its kind in Canada,” says Shawn Fitzgerald, vice president of real estate and workplace at Co-operators. “The vision was to be a catalyst for sustainable construction and design.”
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Set within a campus of meadow gardens, walking trails, and outdoor exercise stations, the three-story building features an atrium around which the spaces are organized—many embodying the “acorn-to-oak” metaphor. On the ground floor, curved, walnut-paneled walls physically represent the tree’s roots. Nearby, a hallway displays a series of framed historical advertisements as a timeline symbolizing the company’s organic growth. And on the top floor, the ceiling of a collaborative area, clad in rippling stainless-steel panels and dotted with circular recessed downlights, recreates the dappled effect of a leafy canopy.
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Employee health and wellness, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, was another primary driver. Circulation through the building is intentionally conceived to promote activity, ensuring that, along with the outdoor trails and an on-site gym, staffers can easily meet their daily exercise goals. Workspaces designed for neurodiverse individuals feature specially tailored flexible lighting, quiet areas, muted colors, and sensory-friendly textures—just some of the many accessibility and inclusion elements that go beyond standard code requirements.
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As a social and cultural hub for the company, the layout of the headquarters encourages what Turner describes as “serendipitous collisions” between employees from different departments… Connecting the library to the top level, a cantilevered steel staircase with warm wood treads provides another site for chance encounters while also serving as a striking sculptural focal point in the atrium. “It’s a path of travel,” Turner continues, “but also a beacon of place where people come to congregate and socialize.”
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Co-operators’s distinctive chevron logo, applied throughout as a wayfinding tool, reaches its apotheosis in the library, where it is replicated using 3,000 plants in a green wall (above) measuring more than 34 feet wide and 17 tall.
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Co-operators aims to achieve full net-zero status by 2040, and this building represents a significant milestone on that path. It prioritizes environmental targets by specifying Canadian-made, low-carbon materials, intelligent LED lighting, automatic-tinting windows, and furniture made of sustainable materials.
Read the entire Interior Design article.