Hartford Business Journal

18 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | June 20, 2022 Overabove CEO John Visgilio (left photo) outside his company's new Chester office building at 91 Main St., which has adopted a resimercial office design. The home-like features include (shown right) a kitchen island with bar stools and a TV room. PHOTOS | CONTRIBUTED Home At Work Employers adopt resimercial office design — making workplace feel like home — to lure back workers By Harriet Jones Hartford Business Journal Contributor W hen Chelsea Norton returned to the office in February, after an almost two-year stretch of working from home, she was blown away by her new surroundings. "I've honestly never really been in an environment quite like it," said Norton, a senior copywriter at marketing firm Overabove. The company had spent time during the pandemic securing a new space in Chester, and fitting it out to look – well, not too much like an office. "There's so much natural light," Norton said. "We have a couple of outdoor spaces and we have this big kitchen island in the center of things. It's definitely not your typical office. It's just more comfortable. But it's maybe a little more elevated than home." Overabove's new concept as it welcomes staff back to the office is not work from home, but rather "home at work." CEO John Visgilio said the extended period of remote work for his more than 30 employees during the height of the pandemic taught him a couple of things. First – he didn't need the sheer square footage he had in his old, leased building in Essex. The other realization? "The last thing I wanted was to go back into a corporate environment," he said. And so the new Chester office at 91 Main St. that he bought in 2021 for $420,000 and refitted – originally "just a really ugly building," said Visgilio, "architecturally disgusting, but a great location" – now has a makeover with plenty of soft seating, generous houseplants, hardwood floors, and yes, a kitchen island where you can pull up a barstool and open your laptop. Resimercial design The trend toward home comforts in office interiors predates the pandemic. In some ways it began with the big tech campuses in Silicon Valley – Google, Facebook and the like – which wanted to differentiate their workspaces with amenities like pingpong tables, beanbag chairs, Lego play areas and even ball pits for their young, work-all-hours employees. The more recent version of the trend is a little more grown up. And it has a name; resimercial – a combination of residential and commercial. Debra Seay, a senior project manager for Hartford architecture and interior design firm Amenta Emma, said she first noticed it on a visit to the commercial design industry showcase NeoCon in Chicago, back in 2017. Then it was something of a niche trend, but now, she said, even her most conservative clients are looking to incorporate some element of the look. "I think it's everybody now," said Seay. "It really blew up because of COVID and because so many people were able to work from home." That means companies have to cater to employees who got pretty comfortable with remote work. "They've been working from the couch at home for two years, so why don't we bring the couch to the office?" said Laura Tremko of Hartford office design firm Infinity Group, which has incorporated the resimercial design in its own downtown Hartford offices, at 20 Church St. Tremko said for employers it's about changing the image of the boring cubicle farm, but also acknowledging that the trend toward hybrid work – partly remote and partly in-office – is here to stay. "Maybe the role of the office is going to be different," said Tremko. "So if people want to do focus work, they can go and focus at home. And the reason why they want to come to the office is to have that collaboration, to have human contact." That has a lot of implications for not just design, but use of space in commercial premises too, maximizing areas that promote connection and collaboration. "It's more of a buzz space if you will, to really get people interacting again, because so many people have Debra Seay Laura Tremko

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