FLEXIBLE SPACE CASE STUDY

Photos courtesy of NanaWall

Project: Convertible Office for Edmunds.com
Location: Santa Monica, California
Architect: M+M Creative Studio

The Project: It takes a lot of people to make up Edmunds.com, the automotive networking and shopping giant. In 2016, Edmunds moved all of these people into a new office in Santa Monica, California, to give them a better, more collaborative, and more enjoyable place to work. It chose an existing building to relocate into that was organized around outdoor courtyards. Architects M+M Creative Studio with principals Chris Mitchell and Sandra Mitchell note, “The biggest reason they took this space had to do with the indoor/outdoor possibilities.” Clearly the building had a lot of potential, and the expectations were high for the new design.

The Challenge: The architects were asked to address several needs of Edmunds. First was the desire for achieving a highly collaborative, highly flexible work space. At the same time, there was also the need for the appropriate level of acoustical control and privacy in many cases. Second was the appeal of linking that work space with the outdoor courtyards to fully take advantage of the California setting. Third was the interest in celebrating the culture of automobiles, the focus of the Edmunds business.

The Design Solution: The design team settled on an approach that addressed these challenges by creating a vast flowing space with a polished industrial aesthetic heavy on car culture and a wealth of collaborative spaces. To achieve a highly collaborative, highly flexible workspace, they first gutted both floors. The possibilities were maximized by eliminating most of the fixed glazing walls around the central courtyard on the ground floor, making it a contiguous part of the first floor, the light-filled, shining heart of the office. The space opens into the second floor with 26 conference rooms of various sizes, and an endless selection of seating areas in which to work, including couches, café tables, nooks, and booths, all bathed in the glow of the central courtyard.

The Role of Operable Walls: The architects integrated the outdoor courtyards inside by turning the auto-themed office into a “convertible” by using operable glass walls. The longest of these is a single-track system of 24 panels in two groups, more than 80 feet in length. Two other folding systems extend the atrium opening to more than 130 feet in all. The sliding panels go around corners, and the three systems together account for about 75 percent of the openings surrounding the atrium.

Edmunds Facilities Associate Manager Donald Lucid credits architect Chris Mitchell with the inspiration to include the operable walls. “To have that beautiful atrium right in the middle of our space, it just made sense,” he says. “In Santa Monica, we have beautiful weather all year. Sometimes you are indoors, sometimes you are outdoors. Having those operable walls gives you that open feel. Even though you are inside, you still have the outside feeling.”

Architect Chris Mitchell elaborates, saying, “To maximize flexibility for larger gatherings, operable glass walls are installed in two of the biggest conference rooms. They open into the central area, doubling or tripling the rooms’ effective size for larger groups. But when closed, they provide acoustical privacy.”

The Results: Edmunds’ new office has won numerous design awards, but the most significant, in Sandra Mitchell’s estimation, are the awards it gets year after year from Edmunds’ employees voting it as a great place to work. “For us,” she says “the biggest complement is that the people who work there are saying ‘This makes us work better and more efficiently. I enjoy coming to work.’”