Healthcare Firm's New Office is a Modern, Dynamic Digital Space
Healthcare company 98point6 is anything but a generic medical practice — and its new office design reflects its modern approach to patient care. Infused with vibrant colors and greenery, the space on the 25th floor of Seattle’s Columbia Center building boasts sweeping views of downtown Seattle, Elliot Bay and Mount Rainier.
The primary care provider, which communicates with patients through on-demand messaging and secure texts to provide diagnoses and treatment plans, needed room to grow beyond its 13,000-square-foot, full-floor office suite on the building's 23rd floor. The company expanded to the 25th floor to double its workspace and brought on local architecture firm Best Practice Architecture to design the new 13,000-square-foot office.
The company needed an office that could accommodate diverse types of work throughout the day with both healthcare professionals and software developers working in the same area.
When not at their desks, employees and teams can utilize all kinds of workspaces — individual “quiet work” soft seating areas, open collaboration spaces available on a first-come, first-served basis, conference rooms and quiet focus spaces for groups, and lounges throughout the office, explains Kailin Gregga, partner at Best Practice Architecture. These types of spaces are equally distributed to be next to desk areas occupied by team members.
Gregga notes that phone rooms are heavily used by employees across the company and are some of the most-used spaces by developers and doctors alike.
“We concentrated on improving the phone rooms with tables, technology and fun ombre wallpaper,” she says, leaving some of the larger, less-frequented spaces more neutral to keep material costs low for paint, flooring and furniture.
The focal point of the office is a large library accessible to employees from both floors. The space offers private lounge pods for quiet individual work, as well as a large collaboration table for team meetings or group work.
“The library is very flexible and is meant to accommodate all types of work — individuals, quiet small groups, medium-sized groups and large teams. It can also be reconfigured into a team headquarters for all employees, if needed,” says Gregga.
As an expansion of an existing office, the design takes into account future changes to staff size and allows room for growth and reconfiguration.
“The space was designed with some room for growth and not all desks are filled yet. We built out all the conference rooms, lounges and amenity spaces with the understanding that it is important to equitably disperse these spaces for when [the] office is fully occupied,” says Gregga. She notes that in the library, the team used more furniture pieces than built-ins — which was also a cost-saving measure — to ensure that they could provide both density and variety while allowing for flexibility.
The dynamic space is elevated by large color blocks that challenge medical office stereotypes. “Coming from the medical field, many team members felt that traditional medical spaces (and even offices) are often generic and almost too neutral. Bright color was a must [for the team] in this project,” says the firm.
“We limited the scope of the lounges to small but saturated and impactful spaces that punctuate the more neutral zones,” Gregga adds, another effort that reduced material costs in the buildout.
The employees' medical knowledge also prompted an emphasis on wellness in the workplace. Biophilic elements were a key feature of the new office.
“As a healthcare provider themselves, the client was very interested to learn about simple measures we could employ to promote healthful workplaces,” says Gregga. “Plants are a flexible way to help people connect to nature and ease anxiety while at work. By using mostly plants that were in pots or suspended, we could easily move them around to maintain the level of flexibility the office needed.”
A carefully designed room for mothers elevates a necessary wellness space for the company’s diverse staff, which includes expectant parents and mothers with small children. “Full of comfortable furniture and hospitality-grade amenities, velvet privacy curtains and beautiful patterned wallpaper, this essential space was given an especially luxe feel,” says the firm.
Currently, employees at 98point6 are working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
