Commercial organisations are increasingly demanding domestic-style furniture in the workplace, according to speeches given at Clerkenwell Design Week.
Dutch furniture manufacturer Arco’s Creative Director, Jorre Van Ast, spoke at length on the subject of workplace domestication as part of a design week panel.
Van Ast said that due to a rising demand from commercial companies to have domestic-style furniture, his family-run business have ventured into the commercial sector over the last few years.
He revealed that his company was recently successful in securing a sizeable contract to supply Apple with domestic-style furniture.
He said that there is rapid growth in the area which now accounts for about half of Arco’s business and that his organisation now been split up into commercial contracts and domestic contracts having recognised the opportunity.
The founder of design consultancy firm PearsonLloyd, Luke Pearson, was on the panel too and said that there is an increasing blend between office workspaces and homes.
Pearson said that the trend is reflecting the cottage industry era, in which people’s homes were used as both living and work spaces. He added that there is no longer a need for everyone to work in one fixed space due to the wireless internet era.
Pearson believes that the modern worker is less accepting of austere industrial landscapes compared to previous generations and that as a result, companies are meeting their requirements of their flexible new workforce.
Also discussed by the panel at design week was the ever-growing number of female designers entering the profession of what was typically a male-orientated world of architecture and design.
However, editor-in-chief of design journal Disegno, Johanna Agerman Ross, insisted that the industry should not be trying to ‘feminise’ the workplace. Rather, she argued that businesses should try to ‘humanitise’ the workplace and reject the binary view of masculine or feminine.