The Lagunitas Lounge is made up of approximately 33 percent recycled content and approximately 85 percent recyclable content.

You’re designing an office lounge space that looks more like a residential living room than anything “corporate.” But there’s one big difference between a room at home and a room at work: traffic.

Ancillary spaces are in high demand in the workplace, and they see heavy traffic—hour after hour, group after group, person after person. Not even “The Brady Bunch” household gave their family room that kind of constant use.

And, let’s be honest—the type of use an office lounge, for example, endures is rougher than anything a residential sofa sees. People simply don’t treat public furniture as kindly as they treat their furniture at home.

So the informal public areas you design—the high-traffic ancillary spaces—need durable furniture that stands up to wear and tear, and meets rigorous performance and safety standards. The items to choose are not consumer-grade, residential products (as pretty as they may look online) but well-designed contract furniture.

Because what client wants to invest in furniture that breaks down after a year—where’s the return on investment in that scenario? And where’s your environmental stewardship when last year’s purchase is this year’s scrap for the landfill?

Which leads to the broader issue of sustainability, something we take seriously at Coalesse and Steelcase. As our corporate sustainability report puts it, we’re working “to create the economic, environmental and social conditions that allow people and communities to thrive.”