An honoree of Interior Design’s 2022 Best of the Year Award, the WELL Certified Platinum project is the synergistic effort of Gensler designers and Haworth/HWS, who have created an organic space that not only showcases furniture products and solutions, but also represents the real value by connecting all the elements in the space and expressing them through people’s daily activities.
Designed by Gensler, the Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre in Shanghai by The HWS Group is redefining brand showroom through a human-centric design approach linking people with nature, space, technology, and furniture.
Flexible “mix-and-match” to balance retail, work, and experience
The 1,100-square-meter Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre is designed to accentuate the dynamic interactions between nature and technology, furniture and space, business etiquette and human centricity.
Each showroom has a style of its own, and in achieving the differentiation, the Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre can bring an ‘urban backyard’ feeling that is approachable, natural, and harmonious. At the same time, the relationship between a variety of elements within the limited space can be balanced.
The original intention of the entrance is to create the first impression of stepping into an outdoor courtyard, a space that changes people’s mindset to feel the comfort, safety, and serenity. The design incorporates the abundant natural light and echoes the spatial design of the building to create a vibe with a sense of ceremony and affinity.
Gensler’s U.S. Workplace Survey 2022 has found that spaces for creative group work plus individual quiet work have the greatest impact on space effectiveness and experience. The office areas of the Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre are set in the two opposite wings of the space, so every department can improve productivity and maximize efficiency in a mutually connected environment with breathing room and minimum interference.
The material library is an interactive space, where samples of different colors and textures are lined over customized racks for visitors to explore while serving as smart partitions to divide the spaces.
What sets the Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre apart from conventional furniture showrooms is that it emphasizes “experience” as the core, which is reflected in the furniture, fixtures, and smart equipment. Within the limited space available, the Gensler team incorporated flexible, interactive, and diverse designs to balance the showroom, workplace, and destination attributes of the customer experience center, and adopted a creative “mix-and-match” strategy to feature as many material, color, function, and shape options as possible.
The designers have mixed and combined every furniture series from the catalogue in the way of building up a ‘Transformer,’ it may look obscure, but every corner of the space is designed with meticulous logic and ingenuity, and it’s a place where everyone can explore what they truly want.
Human-centric design to inspire and nurture
A collaborative space to elevate productivity and inspire innovation, the Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre has amplified HWS’s commitment to promoting health, wellbeing, and social connection. Flexible workstations, ergonomic furniture and smart technology allow the staff to be agile and choose the ideal setting for work, keeping the employees healthy while creating the synergies between people.
The Gensler team has created “Third Spaces” for the staff to deliver an experience that’s different from the office areas, while building up HWS’s collaborative, healthy, enterprising, and enjoyable team spirit. A variety of settings, including open bar, yoga room, reading corner, mothers’ room and more, are supporting the staff to relax the body and mind, and connect with others with comfort and flexibility.
The dynamic Haworth/HWS Customer Experience Centre transforms workplace and showroom to bring an unparalleled experience of retail and co-working, creating greater values for the employees, customers, and the community.
“The project celebrates the Haworth/HWS brand and its core value of putting people first. Gensler and HWS shares the vision of creating an experimental space to bring better experience to people that will also continue to grow and thrive alongside the end users through real-time data analysis, and we’re very honored that this project has been recognized by Interior Design’s 2022 Best of Year Awards,” said Freck Qin, Principal and Studio Director at Gensler Shanghai.