About Retail Design Collaborative:

Retail Design Collaborative is an award-winning leader in retail design and a full-service architectural firm dedicated to making everyday places extraordinary and celebrating the retail realm as one of the focal points of human interaction. With more than 37 years of experience designing the retail realm, Retail Design Collaborative is at the forefront of the new era of retail, examining changing trends and drawing upon its experience to be a true retail thought leader.

Studio One Eleven:

Studio One Eleven is an integrated practice of architecture, urbanism and landscape design dedicated to creating vibrant communities. Studio One Eleven finds ways to make cities more environmentally responsible, resilient, prosperous and joyful while addressing livability and equity for all residents. From community planning to streetscape improvements, mixed-use infill developments to small and impactful urban interventions, Studio One Eleven operates at a variety of scales with the ultimate goal of enhancing the urban condition that sustains each project.

The Story

When we began the design process of our new space at the corner of 3rd and Long Beach Blvd, we knew we’d pursue LEED Platinum certification. The question was “how can we take this further to improve the physical and physiological attributes of our most valuable asset, our people?”

Enter The WELL Building Standard. Throughout the process we’ve studied the quality of our air, water, acoustics, comfort, and light as a means of ensuring optimal spatial quality. We’ve expanded our Health and Wellness Program to include yoga, meditation, cross training, a running group, strength training, biking and team sports including beach volleyball over the summer and softball in the fall. Our staff receives healthy, low sugar food options daily. Workstations are adjustable to suit the needs of everyone. We’ve also embraced a beautiful new product, Fluidstance to promote standing, proper posture and eliminate chronic back pain.

Our space is unique in that our building is almost entirely surrounded by retail and our layout is deep, limiting the amount of opportunity for daylight fenestration. Despite our given conditions, the studio is consistently flooded with natural light through 20 new skylights hovering 25’ above the 25,000+ sf footprint.

From a community perspective, our staff gets out, a lot! Of course, it helps that downtown Long Beach boasts a Walkscore of 97, and now that the studio offers employees annual Long Beach Bike Share memberships, staff now has access to explore even more of what Long Beach has to offer, with 150 minutes of ride time per day, per person!

Now all of these initiatives are great, however let’s be sure to avoid forgoing the data. One of the most exciting new extensions of our new space is our in-house Living Lab. Our Sustainability Department continuously examines and communicates the quality of our air, water, light, acoustics, comfort, utility consumption, and alternative transportation initiatives.

This process is providing tools to architects in order to help them take design to a whole new level, one that goes beyond function and aesthetics, and forces us to look keep into the quality of the space we too often overlook. This process forces us to quantify the qualitative benefits defined by our space, inevitably contributing to productivity, talent retention and brand recognition.

Smart companies care about their employees, they care about productivity, and they care about the business case. Today’s competitive marketplace understands that these three components are tightly bound and driven by talent recruitment and retention. Our quest was to test out the WELL Standard for ourselves, and now that we’ve completed the bulk of the work, we’re seeing results. It’s clear that these initiatives make business sense, because it makes people sense.