Designer：Alcove Design Consultants

Location：Kamala Mills Compound, Lower Parel, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India; | ;

Project Year：2017

Category：Offices

Millennials today are extremely particular about their health and wellbeing. Providing a work-life balance is key to retaining these talents, and that is how the management team at IIFL along with Alcove focused on providing a space that communicates the company’s focus on the wellbeing of their employees. A Health Café and Gym on the same floor were born out of this ideology. 

A full-fledged gym with modern equipment’s, well designed changing and shower area including a personal trainer, ensures that taking care of individual’s health while working at the organization and reaching at work or leaving from work at any hour is no more of a concern for the end users anymore. Such approach breaks the boundaries or stereotypes of how an office gets used and engages the end users of the office with the premise in a way that they start correlating to it beyond a single purpose of using it only to sit on a workstation and deliver. It is ‘AN OFFICE NO MORE’

Similarly, the main concept for the café is to design a kitchen-living space as a kind of special 'third place', between public and intimate, where everyone is welcome. And a designated gym on the same floor further emphasized on the idea of the company’s concern on providing a healthy work-life balance for their staff.  

While designing a public and yet an intimate space, it was important that the design took care of circulation such that people and material movement have less or no interaction as far as possible. Emphasis was given on the corridor widths and overall planning. Apart from that, it was important to understand the culture of people while using the premise. Indians by nature use this space to break open into loud laughs and casual conversations which are not meant for the work floor. In such a scenario acoustical treatments were of utmost importance. Hence, an anutone board and acoustically treated ceiling along with baffles which would absorb sound worked as a great solution.

Variety of seating arrangements from a coffee table lounge seating, to bar stool style seating and dining table or bench style seating takes care of ergonomic requirements, allows various scale and nature of gatherings to occur within the space. Confectionary counters, buffet’s and health corner’s provide variety of options of food choices for the end users. 

Thus the cafe as a whole performs as this dynamic space that connects people with colleagues, their work, and their organization. It transforms traditional corporate cafeteria real estate into destinations for connection, collaboration, focus and innovation.

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