From the 41st floor of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, visitors to Teknion's showroom can see the Hollywood sign, and on a clear day, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The showroom also provides a front row seat to the rebirth of downtown Los Angeles.
You can see at least five cranes from the Teknion showroom, which is precisely why the office furniture maker is here. Downtown Los Angeles is back and attracting architecture and design firms. That means office furniture makers are returning as well.
And why not? DTLA, as it is being called, has rebounded from the days when few would venture into the downtown area after work hours. The rebirth of downtown Los Angeles happened like many other cities with artists and other early adopters streaming into the area in the 1990s for the cheap housing. Developers followed. The combination of the two created what Rolling Stone magazine called “a cultural hub of galleries, museums, fashion houses, tech companies, luxury lofts, and, arguably, the city's most compelling food scene.”
Teknion's downtown Los Angeles showroom opened earlier this year on the
LEED Platinum Certified Ernst & Young Plaza. Teknion received LEED Gold certification for the showroom from the USGBC.
The 8,650-square-foot showroom is designed to reflect Teknion's latest vision of the workplace. It also reinforces the Teknion brand, which the company describes as a design-focused vision that brings bold creative thinking and intelligent innovation to the international contract furniture market. Both the Los Angeles and Toronto showrooms were designed by Vanderbyl Design.
Teknion moved to the Ernst & Young Plaza from Santa Monica, once the hub for most of the major office furniture makers. Teknion, Knoll and Allsteel now are all in downtown Los Angeles.
“The feedback from the design community has been fantastic,” says Showroom Manager Jonathan Welch. “It is a favorite of our upper management, too. We moved from Santa Monica, where we were one of three tenants in the building. Now, we are in this high rise. It is quite a change for us.
“Downtown is going through this huge revitalization. If you would have come here 10 years ago, it would look totally different. You wouldn't recognize this area.”
The downtown location has easy access to Pasadena to the northeast and Hollywood. It is definitely more central than Santa Monica, which makes a difference because of the brutal Los Angeles traffic.
Los Angeles is very different when it comes to work, Welch says, noting people there work hard, but they work on their own terms. “They want the space they work in to feel like home," he says. "There are so many people here that work in entertainment and the arts, so they are constantly working. The office has to mold to how they are feeling at the time."
The showroom itself is very similar to Teknion's Toronto space. It begins with a “community table,” a long, custom table that acts as a workspace, meeting place and social hub. From there, the showroom is split into two sides. To the right, visitors will find a space dedicated to more focused work. This side includes a cluster of low District panels that gives visitors the feel of an office while still allowing for collaboration. The focused side of the showroom also features a private office that can easily be transformed into a meeting room.
Both sides include Teknion's Zones collection, used in a variety of settings.
The collaborative side of the showroom to the left of the entrance is much more open. It features Upstage, a deconstructed systems product that runs off a central spine, and a number of Studio TK pieces. It also includes Expansion Cityline, which has a beam infrastructure that maximizes office connectivity, serving as a structural spine and as an avenue for data and power to and through work and social zones across the space.
The collaborative side ends at a colorful Luum Textile fabric wall with new designs from Suzanne Tick coming into the space every few months.
It is a spectacular space, one that further defines Teknion's brand as an upscale, innovative office furniture maker. It is also a space that helps further solidify the importance of downtown Los Angeles.
“It feels great to know that we are taking part in the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles,” Welch says. “Being up here, you get to see downtown go up. It is really exciting.”
