With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1515520
30 Illu s t r a t i o n : i S t o c k /g r i v i n a ; B a r k P a r k : B e n t all C e n t r e / S h a n e G all a g h e r ; P u b li c D i s c o : B e n t all C e n t r e / G a b r i e l M a r t i n s B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 Office life has been regularly recalibrated now for 30 years and... things look different. Trend # 4 REAL ESTATE SIX HUNDRED PEOPLE were out last December 12 for the "jingle and mingle" party on the plaza in front of the cluster of Bentall Centre towers at Dunsmuir and Burrard in Downtown Vancouver. During the summer, another 600 showed up for a weekend party to celebrate dogs at Ben- tall's "bark park"—parking garage turned dog park—a few months earlier. The area also has food trucks regularly parked in front of the office buildings, musicians playing on the plaza and outfits like Lee's Donuts coming in for pop-up sales (and eventually turning into a tenant). The complex has partnered with Public Disco and the Vancouver Mural Festival. That's all the result of intensive work by Hudson Pacific Properties, a West Coast-focused real- estate group that runs places like the Ferry Building in San Fran- cisco and Sunset Las Palmas Studios in Hollywood. The company's goal: make office life desirable again by creat- ing a sense of fun, interesting activity around it, as well as creating new spaces that serve some not-strictly-office needs like cool rentable party/meeting spaces or wellness centres. "The office sector is going to learn a lot from what happened in retail," says Chuck We, Hudson Pacific's executive vice-president in Vancouver. He doesn't think this is a short-term trend just to get employees back to the office after the height of the pandemic. "We feel like it's a permanent change. It's now a piece of running an office building and making an environment that is better for everyone." Bentall is 90-percent leased in the cur- rent tough office situation as a result. Not everyone is putting that level of effort into activations, but it's evident with many new work buildings that it's not good enough anymore just to provide big empty floors of office space and make sure the elevators and toilets are running okay. At The Post (Vancouver's former central post office, now slated to become the major Amazon hub), there's a grocery store, a food hall, a gym. At smaller new offices, there's invariably a restaurant and/or cool café. "Those would have been banks a generation ago," says We. Even suburban business parks are put- ting in coffee shops or advertising walk- ing trails on their properties. This new thinking extends to office interiors. At Heritage Office Furnishings BLOCK PARTY Last December, Hudson Pacifi Pro perties threw a party to draw people back to office